Swordfish Concerns Recognised

Commercial Tuna boats of plague portions have invaded the East Coast ports of Northland chasing Bigeye Tuna, following the closure of the Bluefin fishery for three months. This has given cause for irate charter boats skippers to contact the council and vent their ire. Tuna boats only mean one thing to them, more Swordfish being illegally targeted from their preferred fishing grounds.

They have good reason to be angry, at a recent pelagic working group meeting hosted by the ministry, we witnessed a new twist in the message of denial from Tuna operators. Company operators openly accusing others of Swordfish targeting. A breakdown of the normal solid line we normally encounter.

More evidence of illegal targeting was flashed before us on a table presented on an overhead slide by a ministry contract representative. The table strangely was missing from our individual handouts. In the mass of numbers lay a telling statistic. The catch per unit effort of Swordfish had gone up 10 fold in the last three years. Basically commercial tuna fishermen now find 10 times more swordfish on their line for on the same numbers of sets, than they did 3 years ago! Hard to swallow? You bet, and acknowleged by the ministry representative as the result of probable swordfish targeting.

But help and a word of small comfort to the charter boat captains is at hand. Following our last approach to the Minister of Fisheries some action is imminent. He states “Given the rapid rise in swordfish landings, I acknowledge that there is a need to determine stock status, and to develop a management strategy for swordfish as soon as possible. Indeed, this would be consistent with the precautionary approach as espoused by the Information Principles from section 10 of the Fisheries Act 1996”

With the minister now acknowledging the problem the first step in the right direction has been taken. While he talks of stock assessments in conjunction with Australian researchers and reviewing sustainability measures, we are calling for better observer coverage of the fleet and interim control measures until that research is completed.