The possibility of an expanded Mexican longline fleet could affect west coast anglers so much that we are beginning in this
issue to present a series of articles explaining its ramifications. A proposal for more longliners and the removal of the 50-mile limit, now before a governing body in Mexico City, is a plan which would have a direct effect on the number of marlin and other species which reach US waters on their annual migration route. It could mean the end of Los Cabos' superb marlin fishing, and we believe that ultimately it would have a profound effect on US/Mexico relations.

Mexico has every right to run its country as it sees fit. But at this particular time, during its emergence from third world status and with growing global responsibilities, it is more than ever important for Mexico to demonstrate an added measure of governmental maturity and statesmanship, to repudiate the corruption which has already invaded it's commercial fishing industry.

The expansion of longlining into one of the last bastions of great sportfishing in the world seems to us to be irresponsible
and reckless, and we are certain it will be judged as such by both American tourists and American legislators. The granting of
more permits would sacrifice an enormous source of "clean" revenue (the multi-million-dollar sportfishing industry), in
order to put money in the hands of a few powerful individuals. Mexico can not have it both ways.

Certainly, we would have no right to criticize the new Mexican policy if the new plan were to be accepted. The truth is
that we have mismanaged our own fishing resource pathetically, despite the high hopes and serious intentions of the Magnuson-
Stevens Act. In international waters, we currently have about 90 longliners laying a monofilament spiderweb across the Pacific,
and now our politicians seem intent on allowing them to begin fishing inside our own 200-mile EEZ. In addition, Cabo's Marco
Ehrenberg points out that we are a major consumer of the Mexican swordfish and we sell the monofilament lines used to catch them.

But two wrongs do not make a right. Mexico has a great opportunity to learn from our mistakes.

There is a great difference between Alta California and Baja California which Mexico's legislators should consider: The health
of the California economy does not hinge on sportfishing tourists from outside. Our sportfishing fleets rely mainly on Californians who will keep patronizing the fleets no matter what. Mexico's fleets rely on foreigners. Mostly US citizens. Alienate US sportfishermen, who detest longlining, and you jeopardize Mexico's entire sportfishing industry.

Is longlining truly dangerous to the fishery? Scientists say so. A good indicator of its very real danger in Mexico is that some of Mexico's commercial longliner owners themselves are now worried about the prospect of too many longliners. A few visionaries among them are even beginning to think about banning shark permits in Baja water entirely. They are interested in developing the skills to fish mostly outside the 200-mile mark as the US fleet does, targeting swordfish, with tuna and shark as bycatch. In desperation, they are even beginning to show signs of regulating themselves.

Well, we have seen the futility of self regulation among our own fishermen. We have seen that game played before. It is our opinion that the longliners will learn to regulate themselves at just about the same time the fish run out.

For Mexico, the possibility of expanding longlining could not come at a worse time. While crime is going down in the US, the growing corruption and lawlessness in Baja has been perceived by Californians, rightfully or wrongfully, as a good reason not to visit Mexico. It is hard to "feel the warmth of Mexico" when 80 people have been gunned down in Tijuana since January 1. It is hard to continue to patronize Mexico when Baja tourists seem to be treated worse than ever, tourist prices are through the roof and corruption is rampant. It is hard to visit Mexico when stories like the loss of American homes at Punta Banda, a
typically murky legal situation, keep turning up on the telly. It will not take much more to bring Baja tourism to a screeching halt. The granting of excessive longline permits in Baja, which will have a deleterious effect on our own fisheries, could be a final blow.

Oh, yes. One more thing. The cavalier act of continuing and even increasing longlining, threatening the welfare of tens of thousands of Mexico's own workers who make a living in tourism-related jobs, is also incomprehensible to the well- ordered mind.

We hope that Mexico will do the sensible, mature and proper thing.

The oceanic longliner Mar Flota II was put into service shortly after 12 foreign longliners, mostly Japanese, were expelled from Mexican waters in 1986. From then until now, at least 32 more Mexican vessels have been given longline permits. Not so surprisingly, the owner of this same vessel received only a slap on the wrist when the boat was detained at San Carlos in Magdalena Bay last month, caught off-loading 22 tons of swordfish and 5 tons of illegal striped marlin, an unacceptable bycatch rate. Without penalty, the boat was immediately sent back to sea with two observers aboard.

Part I - The Search For The Truth

On January 12 of this year, a notice was published in the Mexico's Diario, an official government organ much like our own Congressional Record, suggesting that a new "Experimental Shark Fishery Research Program" was being considered by SEMARNAP, that country's resource-and-ecology watchdog agency.

The proposal would grant 25 to 30 new permits to longliners ("buques palangreros") for targeting shark within Mexico's 50- mile limit, from one end of the country to the other and on both coasts. Shark fishing inside of 50 miles has always been permitted to Mexico's smaller boats, but supposedly not to large, high-production, freezer-equipped oceanic vessels which have a reputation for badly hitting billfish stocks no matter what they happen to be targeting.

"It is crazy," said Luis Bulnes, owner of the Solmar Hotel and the Solmar Sportfishing Fleet at Cabo San Lucas, second largest sportfishing fleet in Mexico. "Mexico's longliners have had permission to fish for shark outside of the 50-mile range all along. The new ruling would now give them permission to fish anywhere they please, inside or out. They could run roughshod over the marlin stocks, with nothing to hold them back."

Most conservationists do not believe the longline owners really want to target shark. It is more likely they are using shark permits to fish for marlin, they say.

Said Jorge Romano, the Ensenada owner of two swordfish longliners, "Makos are caught mainly by coastal pangas in Mexico. They are not much of a fishery for us. Threshers are seldom caught in our longline fishery either. Blue shark are the most important shark caught by our longliners."

It is important to note that blue shark is sold for machaca in Mexico for only 5 pesos a kilo (roughly 25 cents a pound). There is not much incentive to fish for it.

"There is no way to economically keep a longliner in operation by relying on shark," Romano said, adding that he personally would like to see the marlin bycatch brought down to 5 percent or less.

Bulnes, who led a conservation coalition against longlining in the '80s, (dubbed Marlin War II), has jumped into the latest controversy with both feet. One of his immediate plans is to form a Mexican Billfish Foundation similar to our own. According to Bulnes, it would allow Mexican sportfishing interests to contribute to a war chest and at least get a tax write-off on the donations.

Bulnes expects the foundation to be operational "very soon," but first he will have to get agreement from other factions in
the sportfishing coalition. Some disagree with his proposal to ally the coalition with the Ensenada owners of 22 longliners. He said that the Ensenada longliner owners were willing to make a deal to retain their existing permits and get new ones in exchange for increased self regulation.

How much damage has the longlining already done, and what is the state of the fishery? These questions have stirred a controversy on their own, not just among Baja' sportfishing and commercial interests, but between two factions within each group.

The evidence of the exact condition of the resource has been only anecdotal because no major study has been done since 1986
when marlin expert Jim Squire retired from the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) in La Jolla."

Opinions about the resource vary widely. "Our data indicates that the number of marlin has not declined substantially in the last 10 years," said Larry Edwards at Cortes Yacht Charters, the booking agent for the Gaviota Fleet, one of the leading fleets at Cabo. But according to Mike McGettigan, the maverick operator of a conservation operation called "SeaWatch," it is his feeling that the marlin populations are down as much as 70% since the late '70s.

"Any way you look at it, the marlin are in big trouble even before you bring the longlines in and put them in the path of the
migrating marlin," McGettigan wrote in a widely circulated letter on the internet last month.

In the letter, he quoted Tony Berkowitz, a Cabo fleet operator, as saying that in 1990 his fleet's "average boat catch was over 3.2 marlin per fishing day, and it is now under 1.5 marlin per fishing day," yet curiously, according to information from the NMFS, in 1990 the average number of marlin per angler per day, strung over the course of a year, was .32 not 3.2. Neither Berkowitz nor McGettigan was available for comment.

"My goodness, an average of 3.2 fish per angler?" Jim Squire laughed. "That would be a bonanza!" Squire also noted that according to an unofficial NMFS survey, in 1999 the number per angler was .4, even better than it was in 1990. "Obviously it goes up and down from year to year and with increased or decreased longlining," he said. "As soon as the longlining starts we see the marlin fishing declining."

Norm Bartoo, a planning official in the Director's office at NMFS, points to the Billfish Newsletter which contains the survey and which he says has been put out by NMFS since 1963. It shows the results each year of the condition of the fishery based on angler reports only.

"We found that these reports were fairly accurate in reflecting fish quantities during periods of longlining and when the longlining stopped," Bartoo said. "If you draw a straight line through the middle of the peaks and valleys, it shows that the number of fish has been almost constant for the last 15 years."

The newsletter charts are available from NMFS or can be found on the internet at http://swfsc.ucsd.edu, Bartoo said.

Despite what the study shows, Marco Ehrenberg of Pisces steadfastly insists that marlin fishing at Cabo has worsened considerably in the last 10 years, and others agree with him.

"We took the time to go back in our records and check the actual numbers," Ehrenberg said. "We selected the same day each week, checked the quantity and weight of each marlin taken, including releases. The average weights have dropped of by 22 percent.

Many think that sportfishing for marlin may have especially suffered in the vicinity of Cabo in the last decade because of the number of boats fishing in the area. "Fifteen years ago, there were only 25 boats out every day," said Luis Bulnes. "Now there are 200 out fishing every day. There are just so many fish in a given area."

"That is true," Ehrenberg said, "but it would not affect the weights of the fish that are taken."

Bulnes is pragmatic. He believes that the Cabo coalition should align itself with the Ensenada fleet of smaller swordfish boats in the belief that in the end such an arrangement will afford the most control over longlining, which he seems to regard as inevitable. In that respect he could be right. There seems to be no move in government circles to shrink the number of existing longliners, of which we know there are at least 33. (No one seems to know the full number, exactly, and efforts to find out have
failed.)

Bulnes believes that the Ensenada group will follow through on a tentative agreement to 1) fish only north of the 23-degree, 30' parallel, 2) stay out of the marlin "core zone," (the mid-ocean area far to the southwest of Cabo where the largest population of stripers is located), 3) voluntarily carry observers, and 4) install satellite tracking equipment known as
VMS', or Vessel Monitoring Systems. These safeguards would be in exchange for the coalition's help in fighting off 11 of the bigger transoceanic boats from Manzanillo and Colima and the issuance of any additional permits.

(The 23-degree, 30' limit would include the marlin-rich Lusitania Bank and the waters adjacent to 100 miles of shoreline below Bahia Magdalena. The area is the autumn staging ground for the marlin's migration southward to Cabo's Jaime and Golden Gate Banks.)

To a large extent, spotter planes would be unnecessary if all vessels were forced to carry the VMS equipment, as it would emit
an alarm signal whenever a vessel strayed out of its permitte zone. On Friday, Mar 4, at Ensenada, some of the boat owners were introduced to new VMS units manufactured by the Argos company of Europe. According to a fleet spokesman, the fleet will begin testing a few as soon as they can be installed.

Marco Ehrenberg is firmly opposed to making any deals.

"Cooperating with any longlining project will be the beginning of the end not only for Baja's marlin but for marlin in
California waters," Ehrenberg said. "The proposal would allow the longliners to fish all the way up to the US border, but even of they stay south, remember that marlin are migratory. Certainly the longliners could put an end to Cabo sportfishing, and if you kill the marlin here, you kill them for California."

Ehrenberg thinks the new proposal is a trial balloon sent up by the government, or something even more nefarious, to find out how much pressure there really is against longlining before deciding whether to expand the Mexican longline fleet.

"They are tossing out the rabbit," he said, borrowing a European expression akin to throwing out a "red herring."

"You know what that is? Tossing out the rabbit? They toss out the rabbit and watch who chases it. Then they shoot you in the back."

Part II - The Terrifying Danger of Longlining

In the last months of 1995, there were severe earthquakes on Mexico's west coast. Dogs barked. Mangoes swayed on the bough. Adobes crumbled. Whole families fled from their homes in terror. There was also an earthquake of sorts brewing at sea.

Two 150-foot longliners, Transoceanico I and II, each with a 250-ton fish hold, were moored in the harbor at Manzanillo. Their owners, Navieros y Consignaciones, S.A. de C.V., asked PESCA (Mexico's Department of Fisheries) for permission to temporarily move the boats, supposedly to get out of harm's way. Though it was a ridiculous premise on the face of it, the permission was given, and a temporary shark and swordfish permits were granted, presumably to make up for the inconvenience.

Acting on an inside tip, a welcoming committee from PROFEPA, the enforcement arm of PESCA, met the boats at the docks when they returned in mid February, 1996. Both had a preponderance of marlin aboard, but the Transoceanico I carried an unconscionable 220 tons of marlin and only 20 tons of swordfish.

According to Ricardo Garcia Soto, former Director of Tourism in La Paz, one kilo of marlin has been determined to produce 500 tourist dollars. That would mean that the marlin catch of that single boat took $110 million away from the Mexican tourism industry.

At 120 pounds apiece, the catch was estimated at 3666 marlin -- about half the number killed by all Cabo sportfishing-fleet boats combined in the course of an entire year. The catch was confiscated and quietly auctioned off.

The incident is just one example of how disastrous longline fishing can be for billfish stocks in general. For billfish at least, longlining is by far the most efficient way to fish -- three times more effective than gillnetting. If enough longliners replace gillnetters quickly in a fishery, the catch can conceivably be tripled almost overnight.

Most of the Mexican longliners are operating on shark and swordfish permits, but nearly all are taking large numbers of marlin as bycatch. According to the National Audubon Society, which recently produced a thumbnail report on the state of world fisheries, "...swordfish and marlin have been over fished and severely depleted in the Atlantic." No one really knows the exact condition of swordfish stocks in the Pacific, but there are literally hundreds of longliners fishing for them without the controls needed to safeguard the resource.

Some biologists, refusing to stick their necks out, are saying privately that extensive longlining, combined with massive uncontrolled gillnetting, has the potential of bringing an end to sportfishing in Mexico, severely impacting billfishing in
California waters, putting tens of thousands of Mexican fishermen out of work, harming tourism, and collapsing a major segment of the Mexican economy before a decade is out.

"I am afraid," said scientist Julio Berdegue, owner of the sprawling, high-ticket El Cid Resort and Marina in Mazatlan,
"that before this is over, they will wipe out everything, including the billfish."

Berdegue should know what he is talking about. He is not only a marine biologist, but a protege of the famous Carl Hubbs at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and the former president of a major division of the commercial fisheries in Mexico. His credentials are impressive anywhere in the world.

Berdegue is intensely worried about the 50-plus longliners and 7000-plus pangas he says are now fishing on Mexico's west coast. (In 1991 the number of pangas was estimated at 1200 to 1500.)

Both large and small boats are operating on a variety of questionable government permits and for virtually all species of fish. Exact numbers and types of permits have not been made available to the public, yet a new program is now under
consideration which would allow even more longliners, including larger oceanic vessels, to fish ostensibly for shark inside the 50-mile mark where most sportfishing is done.

"They have already killed the Cortes and now they will take everything else," Berdegue said. "Most of the longliners have swordfish permits, but they do not know anything about the swordfish, and their methods are non-selective. They take
everything -- males and females, spawners and non-spawners, all sizes, with no idea of what they can safely fish, and their justification is "If we don't get them, the Americans will."

Berdegue seemed baffled by his government's stance on longlining.

"Because of the superior value-per-pound of fish caught in sportfishing, as opposed to commercial revenues, we had a
referendum before the house of delegates last year to disallow the commercial taking of marlin under any circumstances and it passed in the Chamber of Deputies by a vote of 498 to 2." Berdegue said. "Then it got to the Senate and has been stalled there ever since. (Power brokers) like Maria de Los Angeles Moreno (a former director of Mexico's fisheries, once thought to be a conservationist) are lobbying to keep the longlining permits coming. Carlos Camacho Gaos, head of PESCA, has been giving out permits like tickets to the fights, and there seems no end to it."

Moreno, Gaos and the Mexican fisheries representative in San Diego, Santiago Gomez, were all unavailable for comment last week.

Longliner owners at Ensenada were on the defensive.

"My boats are equipped with the latest gear -- 30 to 50 miles of line, beeper buoys, color sounders and video plotters," said Ensenada longline-owner Jorge Romano. "We fish the cooler temperature breaks from 60 to 90 miles out, which makes us extremely selective. Each of our boats takes only about five marlin per trip (75 marlin a year), but we are working hard to learn the ways to get the bycatch down below five percent. In the long run it is in our best interests to keep the fishery healthy."

The Ensenada fleet has been gillnetting or longlining swordfish off Magdalena Bay since 1987 and is now frantically converting all 22 of its boats to medium-range longliners.

Berdegue said that while all longlining permits are destructive in one way or another, some of the most dangerous permits in the last 15 years went to a group of large longliners built in Korea and owned by the Spanish.

"The boats, which were expelled by Guatemala, have been given Mexican-flag status to circumvent a no-foreign-longliners law, and have been put in service under a variety of permits issued to Mexicans," Berdegue said. "These boats appear to be operating with no regard for the fishery and with little attention to laws for the protection of sportfishing species."

Berdegue regards the panga threat to be as serious as the longliner threats. He said that 150 permits had been issued out of Manzanillo alone for 25- to 30-foot pangas, many with powerful inboard engines. "They fish for shark by longline, taking whatever else they can catch in their gillnets," he said, "and they are not held accountable."

How do they get away with bringing in huge quantities of marlin and swordfish when their permits only cover shark?

"They cut the head, tail and fins off in the boat and declare it at the docks as shark," Berdegue said. "We have got to get legislation to forbid cleaning of fish at sea. And we have got to put fines on anyone transporting such fish. Take their trucks away. Fine them. It is the only way we will stop the panga slaughter."

Roving bands of the pangas, sometimes with as many as 100 boats, and often with longlines, are now fishing in sportfishing areas all over Mexico, often taking sportfishing species supposedly reserved for anglers.

According to Bruce Overson of San Diego, a band of 45 pangas from Guaymas is now gillnetting at Willard Bay, south of San Felipe. Eric Brictson of Gordo Banks Sportfishing said that a dozen-or-so pangas come and go in the area just north of San Jose del Cabo, decimating the grouper and other bottom fish. Berdegue says he was cruising in his boat at San Blas below Mazatlan last week when he encountered 75 large pangas with inboard engines gillnetting the entire area and taking everything "...marlin, pargo, turtles, table fish, everything."

The pangas with longlines pose the more serious threat because they are more efficient.
Brian Wilson at Z-Pesca Fleet in Barra de Navidad said "there are 30 to 40 small (and some not so small) longliner
pangas operating out of Barra de Navidad and south down the coast from us -- more longliners than ever before. It's a real problem, and PROFEPA is doing nothing about it here."

At Ixtapa, sportfishing-fleet operator Ed Kunze said of the pangas, "The significance is the 4-mile long 'simbra' (long line) being able to be used in a small boat with a 48-hp engine and random killing of game fish close to shore," Kunze said. "There are a couple pangeros who fish these things here in Barra. If you have a few in every coastal town, it would not take many pangas to surpass a large boat with a 60-mile-long line. Just yesterday (March 4) I was out 18 miles with clients and fished alongside a line that was 4-miles long (per my GPS chart plotter). We saw one sailfish caught and flopping on the line as we trolled past. My captain said he had worked lines like this before and they average 5 to 10 sailfish a day, a few dorado, and (if they get lucky) a blue marlin."

The owners of large longliners like the Mar Flota II, which was caught with illegal marlin last month at San Carlos in Magdalena Bay, and the Yumano, which has been reported by local observers as unloading up to 12 tons of billfish a week, are displaying the same lawlessness on a grander scale by taking excessive numbers of marlin in known sportfishing areas and claiming them as bycatch. These boats often fish areas unlikely to produce swordfish, but more likely to hold marlin.

The Norwegian captain of the Yumano told IGFA representative Gary Graham at Magdalena Bay last month that he had been fishing near the Lusitania bank about 50 miles offshore. According to angler reports from the area, marlin were still plentiful there at the time, but swordfish were rare.

Part III - Big Stick

We can not tell Mexico how to handle its fisheries, but with all this crazy longliner business they are not only threatening their own tourism industry, they are especially short-stopping migrating marlin coming into US waters, a source of significant sportfishing revenues in California. That is not nice.

Because Mexico's new "Shark Research" program so profoundly affects the marlin fishery in general, it may also cause our National Marine Fisheries Service to take another look at our own marlin policy. If we were to go back to taking large numbers of marlin, our efforts, along with Mexico's efforts, would undoubtedly make short work of what marlin are left in the Pacific. Our pertinent government agencies are now aware of the developments. Added to some other recent problems, the longline issue could even spur a little screw tightening of the NAFTA agreement.

As Mexico's senate stews about how many and what kind of longline permits to issue, the boom is about to be lowered by the US press, six major conservation groups in the US, Mexican newspapers and national television, and 52 conservation groups in Mexico. It will be interesting to see how Mexican legislators handle themselves under this sudden glare of international light. They have so far been successful in keeping the issue under the rug, which is all the more reason that it will receive wide coverage in the press now.

The whole thing is a scandal which will be in the spotlight for months to come, and prosecutions will probably come out of it. Mexican laws have clearly been subverted and I predict that investigation will expose criminal acts in high places. It is corruption at its worst, at a time when Mexico is supposed to be getting its act together.