Fishing Expeditions

Why fishermen who used to welcome the Coast Guard have started to dread it.

Mick Kronman from the December 1996 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

"For the most part, boarding crews have been arrogant, treated us like dirt, hazed us, and responded callously to our inquiries and objections regarding their behavior," noted Mary Wergeland, spokeswoman for a group of 40 Washington, Oregon, and California fishermen, in a September 1993 letter to the executive secretary of the Coast Guard's Marine Safety Council. "Unfortunately, it's human nature," notes Rod Moore, head of the West Coast Seafood Processors Association. "For years, the Coast Guard was virtually on a wartime footing, engaged primarily in drug and alien interdiction. They faced considerable danger when stopping vessels, since there were cases where innocent-appearing boats were loaded with drugs and high-caliber weapons. That experience, however, bled over into more mundane activity, like safety and fisheries inspections."

"In addition, boarding crews are all different," confides a Coast Guard training officer who asked to remain anonymous. "Some check big-ticket items like life rafts. Others check for charts that are rarely, if ever, used. Attitudes vary, too, as does knowledge about fishermen and their operations. And if fishermen give boarding officers any crap, things just get worse, like a motorist jawing at a traffic cop."

Complicating matters, Coast Guard crews rotate around the country, so a young officer who has, say, been on white-knuckle duty off the Florida coast may not carry the right knowledge or attitude when boarding a trawler in Alaska's Bering Sea.

"I've seen the Coast Guard detain the entire 80-man crew of a 200-foot factory ship (which harvests and processes fish at sea) in the Bering Sea for six hours while they searched the vessel like Gestapo, looking for safety or fisheries violations," says Joe Easley, head of the Oregon Trawl Commission, a seafood promotion and lobbying group. "Can you imagine how much that costs, in terms of lost production? And then there's the humiliation of being herded around the deck like a bunch of cattle."

A Fed-up Fleet

That's why, when California salmon fisherman Jim Blaes held off a Coast Guard boarding party for two days last May, few fishermen were surprised. In July, Blaes pleaded "not guilty" to a charge that he "knowingly and forcibly resisted, opposed, impeded, intimidated and interfered with Coast Guard officers engaged in their official duties." At press time, the trial was set for late October.

Following the Blaes incident, fishermen rushed to defend the man they consider a lightning rod for a fed-up fleet of harvesters. "Jim Blaes is no wacko or anti-government kook," says Pietro Parravano, president of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations, a lobbying group for several California fishermen's organizations. "He did what a lot of other fishermen would like to do."

An angry Zeke Grader, PCFFA's executive director, likens the Coast Guard's at-sea safety boardings to "firemen, brandishing weapons, knocking on your door at 2 a.m., demanding to inspect your fire alarms and, in the course of inspections, sifting through the rest of your house, even your bedroom drawers. It really doesn't matter whether they're courteous or whether fire prevention is a laudable goal. Fact is, you've been awakened, there are intruders in your home, and your privacy has been violated, all for the sake of, perhaps, citing you for a weak battery in your smoke detector. It's time the government established new procedures for boarding fishing boats."

Federal law grants the Coast Guard authority to board any vessel operating in U.S. waters or any U.S. boat operating anywhere in the world to review documents, conduct safety inspections, or search for drugs, illegal aliens, fisheries violations, or whatever else they choose. The applicable statute dates to June 1878. But its antecedents date to 1790, when the Coast Guard's predecessor--the Revenue Cutter Service--was granted equally broad authority to board vessels at sea.

"Back then, the idea was to ensure that cargo ships landing at East Coast ports paid import taxes and tariffs levied by our new country," explains Lt. Fred Myer. Intercepting gun runners who might arm a counterrevolution was also a high priority. "Certainly, our mission has broadened considerably since then, to include search-and-rescue, maintenance of aids to navigation, environmental protection, and enforcement of fisheries and safety laws," Myer says. "But our authority to conduct searches remains the same."

Despite Jim Blaes's and other fishermen's respect for the Constitution, they may have trouble defending themselves with it. The courts have repeatedly upheld the Coast Guard's right to search vessels at sea, dancing gingerly around seamen's legal expectation of a "reasonable right of privacy" and general Fourth Amendment protections. Justices typically lean toward the side of government, citing the dangerous, near-overwhelming task of keeping drug runners, illegal aliens, fisheries violators, and unsafe vessels off U.S. waterways.

Stilling the Waters?

Remarkably, no fishermen or Coasties have been killed or seriously injured during boardings in recent memory (25,000 are conducted per year on all types of vessels). Coast Guard officials also report that in the past two years, only 13 fishermen have had to be subdued, handcuffed, or arrested, either for verbal or physical assaults on boarding officers ("mostly when they flex beer muscles," says one boarding officer).

Still, there is potential for disaster. "Somebody's going to get killed unless boarding policies change; it's inevitable," predicts one Florida shrimper. "It'll probably happen at night, when these guys storm onto a boat unannounced with pistols, automatic weapons and mace, startling a fisherman from a sound sleep. And believe me, plenty of fishermen sleep with guns beneath their pillows. Coast Guardsmen know it, too, and that makes them edgy and fearful as well. The whole thing is a formula for disaster and will only get better when boarding policies are changed." To reduce the chances of a disaster, the Coast Guard has established training schools for its officers, as well as industry/agency working groups in several districts. It has also developed a program by which fishermen can volunteer for dockside safety inspections, with no fear of citations, just a "fix it" list of items to purchase or repair. Once a fisherman has fully complied, he receives a decal, which he affixes to the boat's cabin window.

Despite its good intentions, the dockside program has created confusion and helped aggravate ill-will over at-sea boardings. Bob Jones of the Southeast Fisheries Association argues that "the safety decal should indicate that a fisherman has demonstrated compliance and should tell the Coast Guard 'hands off.' A lot of fishermen believe that's the case, and are alarmed and angered when they're subsequently boarded at sea for safety inspections."

But "regardless of what fishermen believe, the safety decal doesn't guarantee they won't be boarded," cautions Cmdr. Steve Austin, who works with a Coast Guard/Commercial Fishing Law Enforcement Group in New England, a forum through which the two sides exchange ideas. "[Fishing boats] may look fine at the dock, but if they're not up to par at sea, people die." Most fishermen agree that continued training programs, workshops, and friendly dockside inspections that exempt them from repeated at-sea boardings would promote safety and help ease relations with the Guard. Given the Guard's broad authority, Congress should ban inspections of vessels with dockside safety decals. Although Coast Guard Commandant Robert Kramek has mandated that such boardings be "cursory," fishermen complain that the directive is not being followed.

At least one Coast Guard officer who works in Bob Jones's region believes friendly, dockside boardings promote safety better than tense, adversarial encounters at sea. "We've seen fewer emergency cases since full implementation of the dockside safety program," notes Lt. Rich Gonzales, fishing vessel safety coordinator for the infamous 7th District. "When fishermen are tied to the pier for an inspection, they don't lose money, weather isn't a factor, and we have the time to relax, talk, and educate," says Gonzales. "As a result, we get compliance without having to intrude on their fishing operations. This is how the program is supposed to work and how it should be implemented."