It’s Time to Ban Gill Nets

About a year and a half ago, the Legislature, responding to the mounting deaths of sea mammals and marine birds caught in the narrowly woven plastic gill nets used by commercial fishermen, banned the use of the deadly nets along the Central California coast. They had already been banned in Northern California waters.

It is now time to extend that ban and eliminate gill-net fishing along the entire California coastline.

A bill (AB 1) introduced by Assemblywoman Doris Allen (R-Cypress) would do that by creating a Marine Resource Protection Zone from the shoreline 3 miles out to sea in an area running from Point Arguello above Santa Barbara down coast to the Mexican Border. It would also include some waters around the Channel Islands.

The measure, scheduled for a hearing Tuesday before the Assembly’s Water, Parks and Wildlife Committee, should be passed by the Legislature and signed into law by the governor.

The problems caused by the use of gill nets by commercial fishermen is no different off the Orange County coastline than it is anywhere else along the western United States and Canada, where similar bans are now in force protecting sea life.

Several months ago, scores of sea lions, some badly mutilated from their horrible ordeal of struggling to free themselves from the deadly nets, washed ashore on the Orange County shoreline between Seal Beach and Huntington Beach. Three more dead sea lions turned up at Sunset Beach last Wednesday. That raises the toll to more than 70 this year in that short stretch of county coastline.

The state reports that in the 1986-87 fishing year, more than 6,500 sea lions, harbor seals and porpoises were killed in the nets that also pose a deadly hazard to whales, dolphins and fish that are caught and die needlessly because more than 70% of what the nets trap and kill are of no use to the commercial fishermen.

Allen’s bill is a fair one that will save valuable marine life from unnecessary and painful death and provide commercial fishermen with capital investment to purchase alternate fishing gear that is less destructive to the ocean’s environment and life chain. The money will come from the sale of a $3 stamp to saltwater fishermen.

Economically and environmentally, AB 1 makes good sense. The state policy has been a conservative one that dealt with gill-net bans case by case and area by area whenever specific sea mammal and bird species were threatened.

It is time that sea life and the sportfishing industry in Southern California were given the same protection from gill nets that the Legislature has provided for the rest of the California coastline.