> Kent, Thanks for answering my question :-)
> I will be very interested to hear back, at a later date, how this latest
> legislation (with Congress) goes. If that makes it through successfully,
> without any watering down to appease folk, it will be a lot easier to
> petition for something similar here.

I'll try to keep the list posted.  In my job I usually hear about this kind
of thing as it happens.

> I felt really sick when I read how the male pollocks were dumped coz they
> were the wrong sex, the females stripped off their roe .. and all
> this done
> in less than 2 weeks due to huge factory trawlers. Even more shocking
> hearing how thousands of tons of dead pollock carcasses started to wash up
> on the shores of Kodiak Island. Saying the fisherman throughout
> Alaska were
> completely enraged is obviously the polite version. Good to hear something
> positive has come about to ensure the pollock is fully utilised in one way
> or another as food now :-)

Yes, those were pretty tense days in Kodiak.  The town of Kodiak is laid out
along a long stretch of shoreline on the NE corner of Kodiak Island (the 2nd
largest Island in the United States after the Big Island of Hawaii by the
way).  Most of the fish processors and small boat harbors are in St Paul
Harbor next to "downtown" Kodiak.  That's the center of the fishing
industry.  There are also big container terminals and large ship docks
further out of town where factory trawlers would frequently dock for
resupply and to transfer product to freighters.  I was actually working as a
NMFS observer in Kodiak ten years ago when the fight over roe stripping was
happening.  Things were so hot that when the first factory trawler of the
season docked in Kodiak some of it's crews were assaulted and beat when they
were wandering around the downtown bars.  These were mostly just young kids
working on their first job at sea so they had no clue of the situation.  But
they were walking around town with jackets and hats with the name of their
boat embroidered on so they were targets.  After several such incidents the
factory trawler companies stopped giving their crews shore leave in Kodiak
and they had armed guards at some of the boats when docked in Kodiak.  It
was a very tense time.  Kodiak is a very rough town in good times.  It's not
a place where you want to get crosswise of the local fishermen.