#018 Stop Alaskan Trawler Bycatch - David Bayes

In this episode, Manny sits down with David Bayes, a lifelong Alaskan fisherman, charter captain, and one of the most visible leaders in the movement to reform Alaska’s trawl bycatch system. David grew up in Homer, spent more than two decades working on the water, and now helps lead the statewide conversation through the rapidly growing Stop Alaskan Trawler Bycatch Facebook group.

Manny and David break down what trawling actually is, how it differs from other commercial fishing methods, and why bycatch has become one of the most urgent fisheries issues in Alaska. David explains the staggering scale of what is pulled from Alaska’s waters every year, the loopholes and regulatory structures that allow it, and why many Alaskans initially don’t believe the numbers—until they see the data themselves.

They dive into the impacts on subsistence families, sport fishermen, charter operators, coastal communities, and even trawl crew members who have quietly come forward to say the same thing: something has to change. The conversation also explores the politics of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, the role of Alaska’s governor, federal oversight, and the influence of major seafood corporations.

At its core, this episode is about stewardship, transparency, and protecting the future of Alaska’s fisheries. Manny and David discuss what meaningful change could look like, how everyday Alaskans can get involved, and why awareness is the key to shifting policy.

If you care about Alaska’s fish, its communities, or its future, this is an episode you won’t want to miss.

Join the movement on Facebook: 

STOP Alaskan Trawler Bycatch

Transcript

The State I Am In 
Hello and welcome to the state I'm in where every conversation points north. Here we discuss topics that Alaskans and perhaps everyone should care about. I'm your host, Manny Coelho a fellow Alaskan and your guide to the conversations that Alaskans want to hear from the individuals who are leading the way.

My guest today is David Bayes. David is a lifelong Alaskan. He grew up in Homer. He's a longtime fishing charter captain, commercial fisherman, and for me, one of the most visible and active voices in the fight to reform Alaska's trawl bycatch system. Like a lot of Alaskans, he grew up on the water, started deck handing in grade school, bought his own charter boat in college, and has spent more than two decades working in and around the fisheries that shape coastal Alaska.

In today's episode, we talk about how this local fisherman became the accidental leader of a statewide movement. We get into the basics of what trawling actually is, how it's different from other methods of commercial fishing, and why bycatch matters.

Of course, we jump into the staggering scale of what's pulled from Alaska's waters every year. And David really jumps into the weeds and I let him break down the data, the loopholes and the regulatory system that allows this to continue. We discussed the impact on Alaskan communities, subsistence families, the charter operators and even the trawl crew members themselves who have quietly come forward saying the same thing. Something has to change.

We discussed David's involvement with the origins and the growth of the Stop Alaskan Trawler Bycatch Facebook group, which at the time of this recording is just under 50,000 followers and has become a hub for fishermen, everyday Alaskans, and those really just trying to understand what's happening beneath the surface of our oceans.

So from the politics of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council to the role of Alaska's governor, which is vitally important, to the millions of pounds of fish discarded every single year,

David paints a picture of both the complexity and the simplicity of this issue. The system is broken, Alaskans are overwhelmingly in agreement and want it fixed, and we have to do something about it. This conversation is about stewardship and transparency, the future of our fisheries. It's backed by fishermen and the fishing community and the desperate need for us to find a way to continue doing so responsibly. And now my conversation with David Bayes

The State I Am In (02:43)
David Bayes I am so happy that we finally got to do this. Reached out to you last year about the Alaskan trawling bycatch issue, because when I started this, I knew this was a topic I wanted to get out on the airwaves. It's something that Alaskans are talking about. It's something that comes in in conversation, whether you're out fishing, out exploring the outdoors. Like most Alaskans are...

pretty like naturalist type people and have a good relationship with the outdoors. And we see it in the news and the Facebook page that you have, the Stop Alaskan Trawler Bycatch caught my attention years ago and I've been following it ever since. And it's an issue that I had no awareness of before. And I've learned so much just in the last two years about what's going on and kind of the

David Bayes (03:26)
Mm-hmm.

The State I Am In (03:32)
the need for action that I think many Alaskans would be on board for taking addressing this issue. And so to say that I'm excited to finally sit down and talk with you is an understatement. So thanks for spending your afternoon, sorry, your morning with me today.

David Bayes (03:40)
Thanks.

Yeah, for sure. I appreciate it. The, yeah, it's been a, I guess I never imagined it would get to this point, but it's like simultaneously the super complex, multi-level issue, but at the same time, super cut and dry. Most people, if you give them like a 10 minute talk on what trawling is, they're against it ⁓ unless they make money from it personally. So they did a poll.

Last year, guess, said 74 % of Alaskans were opposed to it, which for a statewide poll is a huge percentage to be on board.

The State I Am In (04:23)
Yeah, totally.

So we're gonna get into trawling and bycatch and kind of defining all that for sure in this conversation. But before we get into that, I always like to just start with where someone's story in Alaska starts. Because for everyone, it's a little bit different. Some people are transplants, some people grew up or raised here. Everyone kind of brings a unique background history into this beautiful place where we

I kind of want to talk about just where you grew up, what you were involved in, and then how this issue started to creep into your life and kind of encouraged you to get involved maybe more so than the average Alaskan.

David Bayes (05:02)
Yeah, so I was born and raised in Homer. I'd done a little bit of commercial fishing stuff, like in grade school, helping out my dad. But charter was the first one I got into as a full-time job when was a sophomore in high school. And then in college, I bought a boat and started a business. And I had that for about 22 years. I just sold the business side of it, but I still run a charter boat for another person. So that's my full-time job.

you know that I'd gone to college and did biology and teaching as my degree. But yeah, used to specifically we'd get into allocation issues with halibut. The charter halibut limits have been dropping down pretty rapidly over last 10 years. But a lot of times the limits for trawl bycatch haven't. So now we have the scenario where trawl is kind of rubber stamp pre-approved to catch, you know, four or five times as many pounds of halibut each year as the whole charter fleet is allowed to.

catch and keep and the trawl halibut average about five pounds per fish so when you hear about them dumping five million pounds of halibut if they're all five pounds each that's a million fish gone you know which is starting to compare to the number of fish that the entire halibut fleet on the other side gets to catch and keep so when there were more fish around and limits weren't being impacted on the sport side it was kind of like this elephant in the room that nobody talked about because nobody wanted to stick their head out or stick their neck out

The State I Am In (06:11)
Right.

David Bayes (06:27)
But as limits have become tighter and tighter for everybody else, necessitated essentially this risk or this concern.

The State I Am In (06:34)
And so, born and raised here, obviously part of the fishing industry is part of your life. At what point did you kind of feel that desire to maybe do more and start bringing awareness to trawling and the bycatch issues?

David Bayes (06:57)
Well, so the hypocrisy got to a certain point. So think it was 2020. was like in early 2020, January-ish. They'd come out with this new set of halibut regulations for the charter boats. It was the most restrictive we'd seen. There was an annual limit, size limit on the second fish. Two days of the week were cut out, which is about 30 % of our entire season. But again, the trawl numbers that year were untouched. And so a few different charter guys started to, you know, kind of bring up this.

hypocrisy of it. And I was posting along on that, but really the interesting thing that snowballed it was as we started to post bycatch numbers, there was this rebuttal from the general public of like, that's impossible. Like, no, we know the government controls this. We know they regulate it. We trust ADFG. They would never let this happen essentially. And so then it was like, well, yeah, they do. And like, here's the proof, you know, and

Then you just kept like stepping up, there'd be this like, that's impossible rebuttal, that's impossible rebuttal. And that's like, no, it's not. Here's the data they give us. It's all happening. It's all documented. We just don't understand it because it's all under the sea essentially. And so that was what really grew it. And then a big driver has been to the crews from the trawl boats now and previous crews that come forward and say, my God, you know, I made a lot of money from this, but it.

it needs to stop. so then there becomes this whistleblower component. They don't want their names out there. They don't feel safe or confident that they can go to a regulatory meeting and testify because they think there'll be this like blacklisting from the greater commercial fishing fleet. Um, but a lot of times they'll talk to me and kind of feed me information. But then I get in this weird balance of, how do you know that? And it's like, well, cause the trawler told me, but he doesn't want to stick his own neck out there, you know? Um, so, uh, it's snowballed, guess.

The State I Am In (08:41)
Yeah.

Yeah, a lot of reached out, not reached out, but just commented after I spoke with Salmon State earlier this summer, people that said they were observers. And there were some people that were saying that like not, like there was one person that commented they just were out on a Black Cod trip or something like that. And the amount of...

David Bayes (08:54)
Mm-hmm. ⁓

The State I Am In (09:08)
know, by catch the gut was pretty minimal. And she was saying that it's like, it's not always that bad. But then she was like, it can also be that bad. And there's a lot of people that were just flat out saying that like, yeah, the numbers are ridiculous. They'd seen it firsthand. And yeah, I bet you there is some hesitation there when it's like a multimillion dollar industry and then you're kind of blowing the whistle on it. And

David Bayes (09:13)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

The State I Am In (09:31)
I think you're right. A lot of Alaskans, when they first hear about it, they're like, there's no way that can be true. And then you find out that all of this stuff is reported and there's some pretty hard data behind it and it's mind blowing. And yet the trawling industry would minimize it and say, it's just a small percentage. But it still seems like it's still massive when you're talking about millions of pounds or tons.

David Bayes (09:36)
Mm-mm.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

The State I Am In (09:56)
per year. And it's yeah, it's mind blowing.

David Bayes (10:01)
Yeah. And, ⁓ you know, to expand on that. So the published average, so they say they trawl over the last 10 years on average has dumped 141 million pounds of observed bycatch mortality per year. So that's 1.4 billion pounds per decade. Works out to about 16,000 pounds of waste per hour. but that's just the observed mortality rate. So they on a fish like halibut.

they, if they're participating in this deck sorting program, if they pull up 100 pounds of halibut and release it all, they assume about 50 % of those halibut survive, which if they've just been towed for six hours and stepped on and in this net with 100,000 pounds of other fish, a sport fisherman that releases this trout so perfectly in the water has a hard time believing that half those halibut survive, but that's what the NOAA number is. Anyway, so that's factored in. So when we see 141 million pounds,

Bycatch mortality they've already taken these assumptions out of some of these fish might have survived But these are also only the fish that come up to the surface. So if you've got these nets on Bottom they say the biggest trawlers can tell about six square miles of seafloor per boat per day So all the coral that gets mowed over a sea pens crab everything that might get killed or wounded or injured that doesn't make it up to the seafloor or to the deck of the boat is unobserved by catch

And they have no number on that. They don't estimate it. They don't say, they, you know, they don't put it into this chart of, what if the unobserved bycatch is this much? Like maybe that explains these fisheries crashing. just say it's unquantifiable. And so we're going to pretend it doesn't exist essentially. And that's a, you know, a huge black mark to the scientific community, but trawl pushes for that. If they see a scientist trying to quantify this unobserved bycatch, you know, that's grounds for a lawsuit. They don't want that in there because

it's really harmful but yeah so when we see the numbers those are probably a minimum you know and maybe a huge minimum

The State I Am In (11:58)
Yeah, and it's wild. And let's go ahead at this point, just kind of define some of the terms that we talked about trawling. Trawling fits into commercial fishing, but it's just one method in various methods of commercial fishing. That is one thing that came up in the last conversation with Salmon State  some people had pointed out that there are commercial fishermen out there that are not trawlers. So it's not synonymous. It is one method amongst many.

saners, longliners, gillinets, trolling, which also can be confused with trawling. So there are all these different methods. Go ahead and if you don't mind just defining the bare bones definition of what trawling is and then bycatch as well. Because I think sometimes people get confused with the numbers, like what are bycatch numbers versus what are the numbers of species that people are targeting. I think people get upset honestly about both sometimes.

David Bayes (12:52)
Hmm.

The State I Am In (12:53)
But

if you just want to kind of give us a definition on those terms.

David Bayes (12:58)
Yeah, so this has been a pretty cool Alaskan issue because so many people in Alaska are connected commercial fisheries, they're commercial fishermen themselves, people in the group as well. And so there's kind of this whistleblower component that you don't see very often is that the biggest pushback to trawling as a specific gear type is coming from other fishermen themselves. They're saying, hey, we don't want to throw ourselves under the bus. We want to kill.

fish too, we want to use our gear types, but this one has to go or this one has to at least be reined in for the survival of the entire ocean or the future of the habitat. So that's really cool to have as a driver. But yeah, at the same time, there's been this big fear that Greenpeace or Sea Shepherd or somebody would come in and say, hey, we hate all fishing. We don't think it's ethical to catch or kill a fish. And Alaskans don't want that at all. We want to work with a

fine tipped brush and say that this is the big ecological disaster, let's remove that and leave the sustainable artisanal fisheries. So the reason trawl gets so much heat is in part the magnitude of, you know, the size of the gear they use. So they say a big trawl net can hold like four 747s plus the Eiffel Tower inside. multiple football fields. Yeah, the cable at the front of it that drags

The State I Am In (14:13)
Yeah, in norm.

David Bayes (14:18)
The bottom is about a quarter mile wide, so this quarter mile swath every time it moves. But it's also the reason that corporations like it, or the reason it's effective, is that it's super indiscriminate. So you just take this huge net and you essentially sieve the water. It would be like if you were going through a bowl of chicken noodle soup with a slotted spoon and you only want the chicken. Can't really do that. You just dip everything out.

put it on a plate and you take the chicken out and throw everything else away and that's essentially what trawl is and it does benefit them to focus just on the target species but because the net's so big, because you can't really see what's down there the most effective way to do it is you just drag it, pull it up keep what you want or keep what's valuable a lot of times it's a regulatory discard they call it where the fishing regs say you can't keep it so they have to throw it away

But those regs were built to essentially disincentivize trawlers from catching or keeping the wrong type of fish. One of the issues with pollock are, well, all the species that trawl focus on, which are essentially pollock and flounder in Alaska, are super low value. So they might be like three to nine cents per pound fish.

for somebody to make money off that or somebody to make a bunch of money off that, they have to catch ton of it and they have to catch it quick. But when you're catching a ton of fish quickly, you can't pick and choose. And so that's the issue with trawl. And there again, when there was a lot of fish around, nobody was constrained, nobody was running out of halibut, Yukon wasn't running out of salmon. We didn't like these bycatch numbers, we didn't like the catch numbers, but it wasn't taking food off everybody else's plate essentially.

But now it is, and it's happened really across the world. see these trawl bans over time because it just hasn't been sustainable.

The State I Am In (16:07)
Yeah, and it's crazy to think that this is what is happening while we have a fishery in our state that we absolute, it's like our prized possession with our salmon returns. And we have this industry kind of playing around in our neighborhood to where, like you were saying, it may be at one point we didn't like the numbers, but it wasn't taking food off the table. And now you have the issue of communities on the Yukon that because of the number of chum salmon

David Bayes (16:17)
you

The State I Am In (16:35)
for example, is not, there is no real number on that by catch limit. They're just able to kind of play as much as they want, the trawlers are, and discard as much as they want or catch and not really care so much. now you don't have, now communities aren't getting the return of chum salmon that they once relied on. And it is affecting people in a greater way. And...

David Bayes (16:39)
Thank

Thank

The State I Am In (16:59)
I think that's what has most Alaskans concerned when they hear about this, because we don't want to be one of those places where the amazing salmon runs are just a distant memory. That would be a tragedy. And I think that's why I will always take an opportunity to talk to someone about this. And I think for the same reason for you as well.

David Bayes (17:10)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

you

The State I Am In (17:24)
How did the Facebook group come around? I mentioned Salmon State earlier. That's a nonprofit organization. You're, from my understanding, not really a part of an organization. You've kind of started this Facebook I don't know if you started the Facebook group or if you took it over. Do you want to kind of talk about that and just the momentum and community that has been built there?

David Bayes (17:47)
Yeah. So Jody Mason is a, he's a charter guy at a Whittier. He'd started it originally and done a lot of the original posts. And I added, onto it essentially. like, like we said, as the questions came in, then it like gave an avenue to give an answer and it sort of snowballed. But another really interesting part of it was that there have been these people in the

fishing industries that have been going to the meetings where trawlers regulated. They've been looking at these bycatch numbers. They've been looking at the impact of, you know, this perceived impact of like we're losing habitat on the fishing grounds every year after the trawlers have been here and the fishing gets worse and worse. And they had been ranting within these regulatory meetings for decades about it, but it's kind of this closed system where trawl is essentially the majority in the regulatory system. So

They'll totally accept you ranting and complaining and saying the trawl is bad. And they say, boy, we'd love to hear more about that. But then when it comes down to a vote, it's, well, we can't shut these trawlers down. They just make too much money. And so we had a lot of those people pop out of the woodwork initially with the group with a ton of good history and perspective who had always been focused on these numbers, always been against it, but they essentially didn't have social media.

⁓ to spread the word outside of these regulatory walls. You just had to get it past this. It's like the hen testifying to all the foxes about why foxes shouldn't eat hens. They might listen and smile, you know, but when the vote comes down, we know how they're going to vote. So you have to get out and talk to the greater public about it. And turned out that Facebook was really good way to do that.

The State I Am In (19:22)
And now just shy of 50,000 followers on there, is that right?

David Bayes (19:28)
Yeah, we've been adding about 10,000 people a year, so it's growing pretty good.

The State I Am In (19:35)
Yeah, that's great. And that's Alaskan, stop Alaskan trawler bycatch on Facebook. One thing that came to mind from just from the previous question was that another, so one of the biggest reasons why we care so much with trawling is because the bycatch that is occurring is Alaskan salmon, is halibut, which are huge concerns for Alaskans because if you're a sports fisherman,

David Bayes (19:42)
Mm.

The State I Am In (20:04)
It's frustrating when maybe you, so you grew up here, you probably have memories of what the King Salmon return was back in the day and it's not that way anymore. And yet the regulations get laid on pretty thick for the sports fishermen The trawlers that they do face regulations from the US, but

It feels like the hammer or at least the ramifications seem to come down pretty hard on the sports fisherman comparatively. Do you have anything to say about that aspect?

David Bayes (20:32)
Thanks

Yeah, and that's kind of where it steps away from just the raw bycatch numbers and gets into the impact of fishing at this level, essentially. So if you look at like, last year, think trawl had 44,000 Kings recorded as bycatch. Some of those fish were from Canada, some were from Oregon, some were from Washington, some were from Alaska. But Alaska rivers were missing, who knows how many, millions of Kings, you know, didn't come back in the way they should have. And so

Raw bycatch numbers don't necessarily explain, like, hey, we took 50,000 kings, but Alaska was 500,000 short, so you can't blame it on us. But that's where you step into this bigger impact of, know, pollock is at the absolute center of every food web model in the Bering Sea and the North Pacific. And those are the target fish, so they're not bycatch, but they catch around 3 billion pounds per year.

You get into these climate change conversations, changing oceans, whatever you want to call it. It's getting tougher at sea for fish to survive. And at the same time, we're taking three billion pounds of forage fish out of the center of this. know, Pollock hasn't been classified as a forage fish in the past, but it is the center of these food webs. And when you get into that and you also get into these habitat concerns, so like what towing six square miles of seafloor per boat per day does,

then you get into these bigger explanations of, yeah, that could explain why salmon aren't coming back to these West Coast rivers like they had, or why gray whales are starving to death in the Bering Sea, fur seals are starving to death, seabirds are starving to death, crab are starving to death, salmon are starving to death. And at the same time, these regulatory agencies say, well, yeah, that's terrible. I wish we could do something about it, but we're still going to rubber stamp these 3 billion pounds of pollock right out of the middle of this.

ecosystem or food web. And that's where you get into this hypocrisy there again of, that just doesn't make sense. We can't control if the ocean's getting warmer or colder. We can't control tomorrow if it's getting more or less acidic. But what we can do is we could reduce some of the fishing pressure on it. And like you're saying, when it's a sports fisherman or a long liner or a drifter, any of these other commercial fisheries, immediately the regulators are like, fish stocks are low, you guys can't fish this year. We've got to protect them.

But with trawl we're just not seeing that.

The State I Am In (22:58)
Yeah, yeah. I'd mentioned that with Sam and State, they're a nonprofit. can't endorse or, I mean, just out of being a nonprofit, they're not gonna outwardly criticize people in government. And I'm not asking you to criticize them. I am asking for your opinion though on our elected leaders and maybe the...

I guess the word that comes to my mind is a letdown. I feel like it's a topic that many Alaskans are bringing up. And I feel like, you know, our senators, our representatives, our governor are aware of what is going on and the concern that Alaskans have. But where is the tangible change? Have you seen it? you know, is there any wind of that happening? Like just from your seat?

David Bayes (23:29)
Yeah.

The State I Am In (23:52)
What have you seen since you've been involved with this issue?

David Bayes (23:56)
Yeah. So I mean, the, the politicians have been great, maybe not intentionally, but, it has really raised awareness in the state and even nationwide when our political reps in Alaska start to butt heads. Like when they get in this scenario where they say, I got a better plan for bycatch No, I do. No, I do. that brings it to a statewide and national stage. So that has definitely helped. But yeah, as far as policy actually changing.

We haven't really seen much of that. Mary Peltola had used it as a big campaign boost. She'd actually been involved with it before she ever ran for Congress. That was her job on the Yukon River. And she had a couple angles that she tried with NOAA fisheries, but it didn't work. And she had a couple kind of Hail Mary bills at the end of when she was in Congress. I think the Democrats had lost the majority in the House and Senate by then.

It didn't go anywhere. Dunleavy before his last election had started this like bycatch task force. That started out pretty good. They came up with a bunch of recommendations for what the state of Alaska could do. But as far as I know, none of those have been implemented at all. So there's been this responsiveness to the voters say, we want XYZ. The politicians say, ⁓ we'd love to do it, but the needle hasn't moved very much.

Coming up, in 2026, Senator Dan Sullivan's up for reelection, Congressman Nick Begich is up for reelection, and then Governor Mike Dunleavy has termed out. He's done his eight years max. So we're going to get a new governor, but it can't be him. So I think there's 10 people that have entered into that race now, and we are hearing them talk about it. And really the governor of Alaska is kind of the greatest linchpin in all of this. So the feds technically regulate.

Most of these trawl fisheries, they happen outside of state waters, so more than three miles offshore of Alaska. There's an 11 person federal council that regulates them, and the state of Alaska governor is allowed to choose six of those representatives. So if we could come up with a governor that said, hey, these are the six people I'm going to put on here, they're not trawlers, or at least they're not all trawlers. It'd be great to have a couple, but not all of them.

⁓ then it could really change the face of how these federal regulations get built. But the first step in that is just having the governor candidates be aware of it. The feedback we got with Dunleavy was, I didn't, I didn't really understand that I had that much influence, you know? So, it's been an interesting evolution, but it also, I don't think it can ever end at this point. I think there's too much awareness and too much concern. so I think it's really self progressing.

and we'll always move up. I don't know if that's going to end up in regulatory results, but I don't think Alaskans are going to let it drop at this point.

The State I Am In (26:41)
Yeah, yeah, I can't imagine that either. where you said the governor is like the linchpin? Is that the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council?

David Bayes (26:48)
Yeah,

there's 11 seats on there. And the state of Alaska governor chooses six, state of Washington governor chooses three, state of Oregon chooses one, and then there's one federal representative on there. But it's a majority rule system. So if Alaska chooses six people who want change on trawl, it doesn't really matter what the Seattle and Oregon and federal rep want They can pass votes on there and that could obviously trigger.

The State I Am In (26:51)
Yeah.

David Bayes (27:14)
regulatory review from Congress or a lawsuit or whatever it may be, at least it would be a first step. That's really how the Alaska governor flexes on that federal council and says this is what Alaska wants.

The State I Am In (27:25)
How much change do you think could happen from the executive branch? Presidents in the past have really leveraged the executive order to change things. I don't think it's the best way to do things because things can just be changed by executive order again in four years or whatever. your opinion on that?

that level of change. Like if you had, you know, five minutes, Donald Trump got a hold of your phone number, you know, what is your pitch to him on this issue?

David Bayes (28:02)
Yeah. So we don't tell anybody, but we get to a lot of people, the idea of banning trawl like tomorrow is just the simplest way to deal with it. And I could see benefits from that, but I'm a fisherman myself. So I'm not that wild about that. We just run around and do executive orders that ban fishery, ban fishery, ban fishery. but I also want like equity and ethics in it. So my take is that.

there are enough regulations out there already that were intended to control trawl in specific ways that just aren't being enforced or interpreted as they were intended that if those, so if I had the presidency ear I would say, hey, these are the regulations that were meant to prevent XYZ, those were known issues, but they're not being regulated or they're not being enforced in that way, we just need to have them enforced as intended. And then if trawl could still continue to function under those

regs as interpreted, then would open up this whole new conversation about, well, maybe there could be a place for them with less catch or whatever it is. But right now they're just running wild because they've got this political leverage, you know, and they've got this control of that NPFMC and the NPFMC essentially says, you know, one big example has been these midwater nets being on bottom. So there's a category of net they call midwater. They're allowed to trawl in these sensitive

seafloor habitat areas because the name says midwater. Theoretically, they are not on bottom. But now the regulators are saying that those midwater nets are actually on bottom 40 to 100 % of the time, and they might be fishing in a spot that's closed to trolling on the bottom. And we have pollock captains testifying that one guy said, hey, if we're not allowed to drag these midwater nets on bottom, we couldn't have a fishery anymore. We'd go out of business. And if that's the case, then sorry.

The State I Am In (29:46)
Yeah.

David Bayes (29:47)
Maybe that's what puts you guys out of business. We don't need a band tomorrow. We just need to enforce those regulations as they were intended and then restart the conversation about where the state wants to go. And I think any politician from the president on down should be totally in favor of that. It doesn't benefit anybody to have these regs that aren't being enforced, essentially.

The State I Am In (30:08)
Yeah, one of the interesting things that I had seen on the Facebook page was when the government was shut down, there was no, was there no reporting that was happening during that time or no observers? what was the impact

David Bayes (30:23)
So my understanding is that the observers were probably still on the boats, but the website itself wasn't being updated, like the public access update to look at numbers. But I think they were being recorded. I'm not sure if that goes for COVID though. So that had been a question then was if the COVID prevented some of the normal observer coverage and sent these boats who had always had somebody watching over their shoulder just went out freewheeling, you know, so.

The State I Am In (30:38)
Hmm.

So trawling in the news, recently there was the report out of Kodiak of a federal investigation, which when I first saw that headline, my knee-jerk reaction was like, there's probably some shenanigans going on with reporting or numbers being skewed intentionally or something like that. But it was actually not that. was that the bycatch that they were getting, they were using, and it violated some

David Bayes (31:04)
Mm-hmm.

The State I Am In (31:16)
some federal rule, do you want to talk about that story at all? you know, does that build momentum or bring awareness or any benefit to, you know, addressing this issue?

David Bayes (31:25)
Well, gets, you know, it kind of like brings up more questions that it answers. So there's these certain categories of bycatch they call prohibited species. Catch. So PSC is the abbreviation and those are like the real high dollar fish and crab that everybody else wants. Like maybe it's all allocated out. gets like halibut, you get these fishing shares. So it belongs to a long liner. So a trawler catches it. It's taking away from this other pie very directly.

But they're also super valuable fish as a food fish. So like we talked about, flounder and pollock might be worth three to nine cents per pound. But a halibut at first sale might be worth eight or $9 per pound. So when the federal regulators set up these fisheries, they realized that they couldn't allow trawl to accidentally catch 10 million pounds of halibut that would be worth way, way more than the fish they were supposed to be targeting.

to disincentivize that, they called it prohibited species catch and said that this fish, like we understand that your net is big and you're gonna accidentally catch some fish, but it can never enter into commerce because their concern was they would start to intentionally fish for the bycatch because it would work more. So a few species are listed that way, king salmon, halibut, herring, crab, and the Bering Sea. But what they found out with trawl is that they were bringing these prohibited species back to shore.

sorting it out of their catch and instead of like taking it back to sea to dump it or using their donation programs, donate it to people, they were instead sending it to like the fertilizer bio-dry plant. So then it was entering commerce and it wasn't necessarily making them, nobody was getting rich off sending those fertilizer, but for an Alaskan perspective, we keep hearing all this hype from the...

Trawl Corporation is about, we have this donation program. Don't worry about the bycatch, guys. It's going to feed the needy and on and on. And then you get down to the nuts and bolts of it. And it's like, well, yeah, actually, we sent these king salmon and halibut to the fertilizer plant for $0.01 per pound or whatever they get paid. So from a legal perspective, I don't know what will come of it. But again, it's like another nail in the coffin of, are you guys really supporting Alaskans? Are you guys serious about these programs?

The State I Am In (33:23)
Yeah, thanks.

Yeah.

David Bayes (33:36)
what you tell us or is that just what we hear and then when it's easier just dump it essentially. That's what you guys do.

The State I Am In (33:44)
Yeah. And I think that is an angle that they take because they have a ton of money. There is some like impact on the, positive impact that they like to talk about with some of the Western native communities. Is that right?

David Bayes (34:00)
Mm-hmm. Yes.

The State I Am In (34:01)
Like they put money

back into those communities in some way through trawl. you know, blurry on how that works, but that was another common thing that kind of came out of the last conversation was that, you know, some change had to be, addressed there as well because there is some financial impact on native communities through trawl.

David Bayes (34:20)
There is, and so it's not, it's because of where the community set-asides are, happens to be natives in those communities primarily, but it's not affiliated with any like blood type. So we'll get this conversation all the time of like, the natives make money off of this, why aren't they fighting about it? But that's not quite how it is. So we're to get in the weeds. Hold on. So when they first set up these trawl fisheries in the Bering Sea, Senator Ted Stevens had created a lot of those regs.

And he did this set aside essentially, he had concerns that Seattle corporations would be coming up, taking all the fish, sending them out of here and they'd never touch ground in Alaska or Alaskans would never get financial benefit from them. So he made this community development quota system, which said that if you lived in a community within 50 miles of the Bering Sea, it didn't matter if the people there were all black, white, brown, purple, just you live in this community within 50 miles, then you would receive 10 % of the total

fisheries quota in the Bering Sea and that was for all fish so crab, halibut, salmon, pollock, flounder, whatever. And so different communities and regions have

evolved with that in different ways. some of them have this quota and they lease it out to an existing boat to be fish. And then that money comes back in, they use it for programs within the community. But others have really doubled down on us. They bought their own big trawlers. They bought, you know, dock frontage in Seattle on and on. And they're trying to make that like their cornerstone income for these remote communities, which in a way is fine. You know, if

But we're still running into these issues. We're running out of fish and we're running out of, we don't know if there's enough pollock out there to feed everything else. We don't know what it's doing to the seafloor habitat. And so that kind of embroils these communities in that conversation of is, do we as Alaskans want to be part of this system, you know, where this ecological impact? But all that said, there's a recent news article out that says about 75 % of the

the troll profits go out of state. So yeah, remaining 25 % kicks around in a lot of places and can do benefit. But when you really look at the big picture, other states, other places, other corporations are the big money makers off of all of

The State I Am In (36:32)
⁓ Speaking of the money making aspect of it, know, a lot of people speculate and I don't even know if it's speculation. I think it's, there is documented giving towards various political campaigns as well, right? So, you know, I guess it would be up to, you know, the politician themselves to say, this influence my policy making or not, or my, you know, how motivated I am to see change in this industry when you're receiving, you know, a check for your campaign.

from these trawlers. Do you want to speak to that at all and what you've seen or what's been at least publicly, what's publicly available?

David Bayes (37:08)
Yeah, so we've talked about that a fair amount. Like, so if you go to OpenSecrets, they have all these campaign finance reports on politicians across the nation. Dan Sullivan's number one campaign contributor currently is Trident Seafoods, which is one of the, they work with multiple fisheries and types of fish, but essentially the biggest part of their portfolio in Alaska is trawl. I think Trident Seafoods is the number five contributor for Lisa Murkowski.

And they had quite a bit of money into previous governor races. We've seen some of the gubernatorial candidates coming up for 2026 have had like fundraising dinners with the owner of Trident there as a named sponsor. So we definitely see those corporations inserting themselves into that. And now we're into all the PAC money and it gets tougher to trace. So yeah, it's a concern and bigger than just fishing in Alaska is to have

like these out of state monies in campaigns or corporate money in campaigns and it gets just tougher and tougher to track.

The State I Am In (38:05)
Yeah, I think it would be really interesting to sit down with any of those representatives and just talk about this issue. I think that would be really beneficial for Alaskans. It would be interesting to hear. It's hard to say that you're going to get a honest or, you know, what am I trying to say, a down to earth.

David Bayes (38:14)
Mm-hmm.

The State I Am In (38:28)
path forward with anything sometimes. It's a lot of lip service with these things a lot of times, because you're trying to please a variety of people. But I think the beautiful thing about this issue is it's a very nonpartisan issue. I think it kind of crosses party lines. And like you said earlier, there's been surveys done where most Alaskans are in agreement. So it does beg the question, why don't we see any forward progress?

David Bayes (38:30)
Mm. Mm-hmm.

The State I Am In (38:54)
and tanglible policy changes within the state and then federally as well. And it would also be interesting for these candidates running for governor as well, I think to really hear, knowing that they're in a position of making some type of meaningful impact by these people that they appoint to the North Pacific Fisheries Council.

our management council that, you know, what kind of people do they have in mind? or what background do they have? Like, are they, do they have a history in biology? Are they scientists? Are they trawlers? Are they fishermen? You know, what kind of...

background do these people take generally? guess that's kind of a bad question. that unless you know them individually or their backgrounds, but what typically do you see in those appointments?

David Bayes (39:41)
Well, so that's interesting. It's another one that kind of takes us into the weeds. in prior to the Magnuson Stevens Act, which happened, I think in 1976, the we used to have foreign trawlers. We'd have like Russian and Japanese trawlers fishing right off the shoreline of Alaska. But this Magnuson Stevens Act realized that was a problem. And so they pushed our international fishing line out to 200 miles offshore. Inside of 200 miles, USA boats were the only ones that can fish.

And that essentially created the new era of federal fishing laws that we're still under. So when they did that, they also created these, I believe, eight regional councils around the US and said, hey, we're going to set you guys up. You're supposed to represent all the fisheries in this area, and you're essentially going to regulate yourselves. We're going to have the Department of Commerce sign off on the end, but kind of what these councils vote on and say is going to go. But when they did that, they realized that if

you have a regional council of fishermen regulating fishermen, you can't have a classic conflict of interest clause in there. It's going to be inevitably these guys are going to be voting on things which benefit or hurt themselves. So for a blessing or a curse, the Magnuson Stevens Act wrote out a bunch of the common governmental conflict of interest laws and said, yeah, you can, you can work for a trawl company and vote on trawl issues or, whatever it may be, but

At the same time, I don't think they imagined it would get to this point. When that was created, the thought was all these fishermen would come off the fishing grounds, they'd come into this room together, they'd hammer it out, say, hey, I saw this while I was fishing, I saw this while was fishing, I want my kids to have this. And they'd do the best thing for the fisheries because that was what they needed to fish the next year. But what we've seen is that that hasn't really happened over time. So now we have, the majority of these NPFMC members have never relied upon fishing.

as their primary source of income. Most of them have never had, they might have had a tour through a trawler on a dock or rode along with them for a week, but they never trawled in effect. And so we seeing like lawyers, vice presidents of the trawl companies, CEOs of the trawl companies are now voting members on the NPFMC. And when they do that, they're not going off what they saw on the fishing grounds last year. They're going off.

the spreadsheet that says there's this many fish and our business costs this much to run each year. And here are the profits we need and we got to make all these match up, you know, and that's how they regulate fish. So it's really gotten crazy. Plus campaign donations. There's all this incentive that each trawl company or each gear type wants the governor wants the governor of Alaska to pick their representative to be on this council. So they're making these campaign contributions with this.

you know, insinuated kickback of, if I give you this money now and you get elected, maybe you could put my guy on the council. ⁓ and just other fishing groups really can't compete in that arena. we're not seeing like subsistence representatives on there. We're not, there's one sport fish representative on the whole council. and so that's been a big frustration for people too, especially as we get farther and farther into it and the details and

The State I Am In (42:32)
Hmm.

David Bayes (42:48)
this question of is the governor picking people to represent all Alaskans or is he picking people to represent his campaign contributor?

The State I Am In (42:57)
Yeah, it seems like there's a conflict of interest kind of built into that. Like you said, the Magnuson Stevens Act, there was some good with it with getting these international parties out of it, but kind of created this whole other problem. Is there any, kind of ignorant to how you'd make that kind of change or amendment to that, to where that maybe wouldn't be allowed? Is there a fix in that aspect of it?

David Bayes (43:05)
Thank

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. So, you know, conflict of interest is going to have to there again, if you have fishermen regulating fishermen, you're going to have to have this degree of conflict of interest. Um, but there could be some tightening of like, you know, right now I'm like, like I said, there's one sport fishing representative on there now. Like what if there was only one trawler representative on there and there was nine sport fishing reps, you know, it would totally rewrite the rules that came out of this. So, uh, the,

composition of the council could be toyed with in that way. But another big driving factor of it is this Magnuson-Stevens Act has what they call the national standards, which are essentially, it's like the 10 commandments of every fishing law. So when they come up with this regulation, they have this idea of what they're going to do, but then they have to compare it to these national standards and make sure that, we're hitting all 10 of these bullet points before it can become law.

But those have really become twisted. So there's like considerations in there for equity, like that, we don't necessarily want one fleet catching all the fish. There's considerations in there for communities. Like if somebody in the Bering Sea lives right next to this fishery, maybe they should have the maximum benefit from it, but we're not necessarily seeing that happen. There's one in there that says that bycatch has to be reduced to the extent practicable.

and trawl has sued in the past to define what the word practicable means. So there are options for what our federal representatives could do in tightening up that language. Or there again, just coming back to what the intent of those laws were when they were written and compare that to how they're being enforced now. And there's these complaints of all these loopholes which trawl has exploited. But they have the money to sling lawsuits essentially, so they've been really successful at it.

The State I Am In (45:03)
Yeah.

So this, I mean, this issue is kind of taking up a big part of your life now is my guess. ⁓ You know, I saw a mutual Facebook friend, I've actually never met him in person, Caleb Martin, couple of years, I think actually was last year. He shared you winning the Samick, is it Sam McDowell Award? Yeah, the Outdoor Council awarded that to you just for your work and raising this type of awareness.

David Bayes (45:11)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

The State I Am In (45:30)
which is really cool. And that's actually the first time that I heard of your name specifically and then connected it with the Facebook group. And I was like, ⁓ it all makes sense now. But how much does this take up of your mental energy effort, like, you know, on a daily basis, you know, since you kind of started going down this path?

David Bayes (45:34)
Mm-hmm.

Hell yeah.

You

Yeah, it's don't make me tell you. It probably bumps into 40 hours a week. It's nice that I can do it on my phone and at lunch or whatever. We're awake 16 hours a day and I'll go in and out of it five or 10 minutes at a time. But yeah, there's definitely days if something big's going on that I'll wake up first thing in the morning and start answering questions. And that's what I'm when I go to bed 12 hours later type thing.

my vision and view of this is that I see the underwater habitat and the sea as the equivalent to what we call public lands. You know, there's all these public lands debates on how that should be regulated. It was made to be for everyone. One corporation or person should own all of it. And that's how I see the sea and the sea floor. and that's hard for people to understand cause we don't interact in it in the same way. ⁓ but I just think.

that all, everyone in should know about this. think everybody in the USA should know about it. And if we get to that point and those people decide that they don't want to do anything about it, or they, you know, support the Trawl argument and decide it's fine and in the best interest of the nation, then that's fine with me. You know, it's not the outcome I necessarily want, but as I say that, I don't think that's going to happen. I think the more people that know about this, the more people are going to start leaning on their legislators.

And that's going to change government regulations and fix it essentially. But I just think it's kind of, I don't like that more people don't know about it essentially. And I don't like that NOAA Fisheries and the NPFMC seems to work to kind of minimize or to cover it up in a way and say, ⁓ don't worry about that because a lot of people make a lot of money. A lot of people eat this food. So we shouldn't worry about all these other big issues.

⁓ I think the public should know those issues and then make that decision on their own.

The State I Am In (47:35)
Yeah. Yeah. And I'm definitely rooting for you in that work, in that effort. And I appreciate the time that you put into that. For myself, mean, just personally, you've done a lot in educating me on the issue. Just over the years, looking at this Facebook group, I know that takes time, that takes ⁓ mental energy and sifting through a lot of messages and comments, I'm sure, and trying to, you know, kind of...

David Bayes (47:40)
Yeah, I appreciate it.

No.

The State I Am In (48:01)
be on the fact checking side of things. And I appreciate that a lot. One of the things that I did appreciate recently was that National Geographic, I think it was National Geographic came out with that Oceam documentary with David Attenborough. I had the opportunity to go and watch that at Main Street Tap and Grill in Kenai last month, I believe it was. Salmon State was.

David Bayes (48:16)
Mm-hmm.

The State I Am In (48:27)
And I believe they're still doing it. They're kind of going around the state airing, playing this video. And that movie, that documentary, if you're listening and you haven't watched it yet, and you want to get a good idea of the topic that we're addressing today, go and watch that documentary just for the mind blowing scale that trawl poses on our oceans and our ocean floors.

David Bayes (48:30)
Yeah.

The State I Am In (48:54)
It was really impactful. And I already knew about, I already had an awareness and it just deepened my understanding of it. And if anything, dug my heels in the sand a little bit more, that this isn't a great idea. There's gotta be another way to fish. I know the demand is there and that this is like the biggest way to do that, but it's devastating for many reasons.

David Bayes (49:01)
Mm-hmm.

There.

The State I Am In (49:23)
is there anything else that's out in the public, either organizations or resources or places where people can go in addition to keeping up with your Facebook page to just be informed and have more awareness on what's going on.

David Bayes (49:38)
Well, the Facebook page is kind of neat because it's constant. know, that's for better or for worse. That's like the barrage of social media. It keeps it in everybody's mind. And I try and break it down. It's like I said at the start, it could either reconsider this huge issue that no one could ever understand or else it could be this real cut and dried. It's bad. We got to do something about it. But I try and get into the big, huge part that nobody can understand and do it just sort of one bullet point at a time, you know, to help work through it in that way.

⁓ but people also shouldn't take it all from me. So, especially when we first started the page and there was huge pushbacks, one of the most common posts I did was, Google, you know, effects of bottom trawl and see what comes up. And I still think people should do that. And AI and chat GPT helps with that. Like, Hey, is this a real problem? Like what issues have other parts of the world had with that on and on? ⁓ all this data is here. and it's still.

blows everybody's mind that it's happening in Alaska under this USA regulatory system. But it is. So yeah, people should definitely take that on as their own. Like I'm going to look into this, see what other nations have banned it or what controls they've done, and then start asking these questions of, well, if Spain just banned all this, why isn't the USA? know, it's the same gear type and the same problems. And then start conveying those questions to the people that you want to vote for in the next election.

The State I Am In (51:00)
Yeah. What are some of the common arguments that are, I guess the pushback, the pro-trawling argument that maybe people come at you with, maybe the most common and your response to those?

David Bayes (51:18)
Yeah, mean, so the best argument they have is that they make a lot of money from it, you know, and we've touched on it a couple of times, but so the regulatory agency that regulates trawls is NPFMC, which falls under NOAA Fisheries. But then what a lot of people don't realize is that NOAA Fisheries is under the umbrella of the Department of Commerce. We think of NOAA as kind of like save the whales, protect the habitat, here's the weather, and they are, most of the time.

but they also live under the department of commerce so if NOAA starts making these rules and regulations which cut back on profits for the trawl corporations then we get this risk that the secretary of commerce isn't gonna sign off on it because secretary of commerce is looking at like worldwide trade how much money the u.s. bringing in versus going out and trawl is pretty good at that it makes about two billion dollars per year for the the owners but as we said before

Most of those owners aren't in Alaska. there's kind of this like, you could say, pebble mine analogy of all the profits go out and we get stuck with this big open pit essentially. And that's what we've seen with trawl fisheries and other places. So Grand Banks Cod on the East Coast, Nova Scotia was a big example of that in the nineties. That got trawled so hard that the cod finally crashed and then that triggered like this ecosystem collapse where it wasn't just the cod that disappeared. It was like,

all East Coast fisheries and the factory trawlers could pick up and leave because they have this essentially remote business model. The people don't live where they fish. They fly in and out of the boat. So that boat could be anywhere in the world. They don't care. They fly in and out. They fish. They make the money and the boat moves around and follows fish. And so I'm, have concerns that Alaska is just the stepping stone. We got a bunch of fish right now, but the people catching them aren't necessarily from here. So they have.

not much incentive to protect it when it's gone. They move the boat somewhere else. They keep fishing and all of us clean up the mess for decades, essentially.

The State I Am In (53:19)
Yeah. You know, this is just an anecdotal story, but I was in a Seward this past summer fishing with some friends and there was a lady at a different campsite next to us and just came by to say hi and then kind of hung out by the fire. And she was, I want to say she was from Norway. I'm blanking specifically, but I think she was from Norway and she just kept saying how alive Alaska felt.

David Bayes (53:43)
Mm-hmm.

The State I Am In (53:44)
the ocean, the environment, and just, you know, she's like, everything just feels like it's so alive. And she's like, where I'm from, it feels dead. It's similar, but it's, it's kind of seems dead. And she talked about, you know, overfishing ⁓ in Norway's history, which I had no idea. And I had to like, just in preparation for this conversation went and looked back and Norway did have a big overfishing population. I think ⁓ overfishing

David Bayes (54:00)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

The State I Am In (54:13)
issue and the government did get involved with that and they had to change some policies and stuff like that. It would be such a shame for Alaska to mismanage these wonderful resources that we have and to end up that way when we don't have returning runs of salmon anymore, our halibut

David Bayes (54:33)
Thanks

The State I Am In (54:40)
populations have dwindled so much, it would be a shame. And I hope that doesn't happen. Had you heard of that at all in as far as like Norway specifically goes with a trawling issue or overfishing or anything like that?

David Bayes (54:54)
No, I hadn't looked into the Norway example, but one we see quite a bit is, so we talked about like the Grand Banks Cod and when those crashed, a lot of the boats fishing there picked up and left, but some of those came to Alaska. Correct. Yeah. So some of those boats that participated in that crash in the nineties, when those fish ran out, same owners, same captains, whatever came to Alaska and they're fishing again, like nothing ever happened, you know, whereas the people that live there.

The State I Am In (55:06)
That was in the East Coast, right? Okay.

David Bayes (55:23)
are totally crushed still. And we've seen the same thing with West Coast trawlers. Oregon, Washington had a pretty big crash of their trawl species in the 90s. A lot of those boats kind of translocated up to Alaska for the majority of the year. And so they were getting the same owners, same crew, but this pretty stunning hypocrisy of, when we see this conversation come up lot on the Facebook page, somebody that trawls will get on there and say, well,

The State I Am In (55:25)
Yeah.

David Bayes (55:50)
federal fisheries, federal waters, you Alaskans can't say it's your fish because it's everybody's fish. And somebody will pipe up and say, why don't you go back to Oregon where you used to fish? Or why don't you go back to the Grand Banks where you used to trawl? And nobody ever answers because the answer to that is, well, we crashed that. We had to leave because the fish were gone. And now there's this kind of disconnected expectation. But it could never happen in Alaska. But the rebuttal of that is maybe it's happening right now.

The State I Am In (56:20)
Totally. One of the things that came up from that documentary that I hadn't considered or was aware of were these like sanctuary, know, sanctuaries that were, you know, kind of popping up. Are you familiar with that at all? It sounds like it seems like a good idea as far as allowing, you know, an area to be protected so that, you know, areas that were devastated, the ocean floor was devastated, do have a chance to revive and rejuvenate and, you know, for those fisheries.

David Bayes (56:28)
Mmm, that's pretty good.

Yeah.

The State I Am In (56:49)
to kind of come alive again. Do you want to speak to that at all? Is that a good idea? Is it something that's practical for Alaska? Or do we already have something like that?

David Bayes (56:57)
Yeah, mean, it could be.

Well, yes and no. So there again, it's a, that's kind of the neat thing about what we're doing with sort of a fisherman led movement, because there is pressure from like some of these outside, like super green organizations of like, Hey, we should shut down all Alaskan fisheries, know, are all fisheries everywhere because it's not ethical to eat meat essentially. but Alaskans really don't want that. So we want.

protections that make sense. want to take the worst players out of the room, but people still want to make money off the fisheries and we still want to eat fish. And if there's an abundance of fish, then catching them and selling them to foreign markets is great. But we can't be taking food off our own table or the table of our kids essentially to feed somewhere else right now. There's just not enough surplus of fish. And an interesting thing that's happened in Alaska.

And we, I'd kind of talked before about it, feels like NOAA's kind of, NOAA Fisheries is sort of covering up or minimizing the impacts, is they'll widely advertise that there have been a lot of areas in Alaska and the West Coast banned to trawling. But a lot of times when they do that, they ban essentially everywhere except to where the trawlers actually fish. So if you fish in ocean, we see like these shelves or these sea mounts or these flats or these big geographical areas.

where the fish, everything's not built equally there. It's like this oasis in the desert where there could be almost no fish for 500 miles, but you get to the shelf or the seamount and that's where all the fish are. And so we're seeing NOAA protect all these areas where they aren't and saying, well, yeah, but you guys can still trawl on the seamount or the shelf or whatever where the fish are. And so that's there again, something that has to be looked at is protecting.

Some of these areas are at least preventing all this bottom contact or all the dragging on bottom. It's just a big difference to go from catching fish off the seafloor to wiping out six miles per day of ocean habitat.

The State I Am In (58:57)
Yeah.

hypocrisy there as well as far as showing, you know, saying we're doing, having some measures of protection and then allowing it where the actual fish are. And just for our listeners, NOAA, if you're not familiar, that's the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, if you wanted to look into that specifically. You said something that I think is really important for people to understand is that this is, know, fishermen are the ones leading this issue. And like you said, you want to be able to fish, you want to be able to eat fish.

David Bayes (59:02)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

in

the field.

The State I Am In (59:26)
You want this to be a sustainable practice forever. And I love what you said. You're just trying to get the bad players out of the room. The ones that are kind of, you're just kind of here to make money, get what they want and then move on because there is no investment in the community. And I think that's a real important thing for people to understand is that it's not that we hate fishing. It's not, you're against trawling, it's not that you hate fishing

David Bayes (59:36)
Hmm.

The State I Am In (59:48)
or that you want to ban all fishing altogether, that's not the point at all. It's just approaching it in a sustainable way. And the thing that always comes to my mind when I see the trawling bycatch numbers is that it's unsustainable. I can't imagine it lasting forever like they think that it will. ⁓

David Bayes (1:00:05)
Mmm.

Yeah.

The State I Am In (1:00:11)
You know, your Facebook does a great job of, you know, talking about this stuff on a regular basis. And if you're not a part of the Stop Alaskan Trawler Bycatch Facebook page and you're on Facebook, you should definitely go follow, invite your friends. And I want to kind of give you the floor to, you know, say what Alaskans should be concerned about, you know, kind of the bottom line on this issue and what they

should take away from this conversation and then share with others.

David Bayes (1:00:38)
Yeah, so I think from the start, we have this NPFMC, it's this federal fisheries board that's got a lot of trawlers on it. Trawl has a super heavy influence in it. They've got a ton of money that they could dump into it. And sort of the old school thinking used to be that, hey, if we want this change, we have to go there. We testify for three minutes. We listen to the meeting. We listen to the reports and common sense will prevail. If we just point out to them what the problems are, then these are smart, pragmatic people.

They'll fix everything. And that was even what the government would encourage us to. So it used to be, if we went and talked to our state representatives, they'd say, you have to go to an NPFMC meeting and tell them that and they'll listen, you know. But what we've found is we've got close to 50 years of that failing. People have been talking about Troll and its impacts ever since the Magnuson Stevens Act was created. But there again, Fox and the Hen House or Fox listening to this chicken testify.

they're not going to stop eating chicken. And we have to acknowledge that. And I'm not saying that people shouldn't participate in that process or testify or write in letters, but we just can't go all in on that because it's failed over and over. But I think the big change is that, so right now, if ⁓ say a candidate for governor takes in a hundred thousand dollars from Troll, they can use that money to buy political ad time. Political ad time equates to votes, whether it should or not.

⁓ and that's how they can win elections. So if they, there's just this big, emphasis by candidates on, I can build up my coffers, the guy with the most campaign money is probably going to win. but now we're reaching this tipping point where we're seeing some of these candidates who say, Hey, I'm not going to take any trawl money because I don't want this conflict of interest stigma. they're the ones starting to get the most votes. So I think there's this going to be this in mass realization that.

hey, myself as a politician can get more votes by not taking trawl money than I can by taking a ton of trawl money and using it to buy political ads. And when that happens, I think that really releases the floodgates. And I think we're close to that, but that's why awareness to me is so important. That's why I'm constantly asking people to invite more friends to the group. There's about 260,000 Alaskans that voted in the last election. This group's got about 50,000 people in it.

They're not all Alaskans, but it's becoming this big block with the ability to influence elections. So the bigger that grows and the faster it grows, the more I think we'll see change and common sense change.

The State I Am In (1:03:11)
Do you point people to any petitions? know, Salmon State has their own petition set up through their website. Is there any value in doing that?

David Bayes (1:03:24)
I don't know. It's, ⁓ you know, a of times Salmon State it'll do some pretty cool stuff where they'll have like a sign on letter that they send to a representative. think they've sent some to Begich and passed, Nick Begich when he got elected, said he was going to listen to the group and he wanted to support the will of the people is going to hit the ground running. pretty big promises, but once he got elected, it kind of came down to this feedback of like, well, we don't understand what the group wants or we don't really understand what the people want.

And we've done these polls on the group that say, you know, in just in the group setting, like 99 % of the people want all trawl banned. But they've also done those statewide polls that have said 74 % of people want to ban them. say, this is what the people want. Um, and we just don't get much feedback from that. So it is good to, I think, participate with those organizations, do the sign on letters. Cause when they send it in, it's like, Hey, here's 5,000 people that have taken the time to sign on and say, this is what we want. Here's the answer to your question.

Now the ball is in your court to do something.

The State I Am In (1:04:23)
Anything that we missed, anything you wanna touch on that maybe I looked over. I did think it was interesting you said that, look at some of those complex issues and try to like synthesize them to be able to put them in like digestible, you know, chunks for people to understand. That's gotta be pretty challenging, cause it's complicated. You got this federal, you got this federal, you know, world.

David Bayes (1:04:25)
Thank

The State I Am In (1:04:47)
operating here and then you got the state and like with what you're saying with the Department of Commerce, I thought that was really interesting. That's got to be a challenge to try to do that. What would you say is like the most surprising thing that you've found as you've kind of jumped into those, you know, deeper topics or the weeds on that issue?

David Bayes (1:04:54)
you

Well, so one of my, like, the times when I feel like it's working is the one is if you hear a politician talk about it, that means it's filtered through the levels, you know, and become this issue where five years ago, people didn't know the word, but now it's in political debates. But another one we've really seen evolve is this NPFMC has five meetings per year. They usually have these agenda items where they solicit written public comment. You can write up a comment letter and send it in.

And five years ago, the letters that used to go in there were based upon what the public knew about it. So there'd be of this, I hate trawling, know, 500 times, or we should ban the trawlers type thing. Um, which was very valid point. It still is. But now we're starting to see these super in depth comments of like looking at, Hey, Pollock is a forage fish. Maybe the habitat can't support it. What are the ethics on CDQ groups? What about all this money going to Seattle versus Alaska?

And so that's really encouraging for me from, I guess, my biology teaching roots to see that people are learning these, putting together all these levels and building their own big ball from these little chunks we've been giving. So that's really cool and really encouraging.

The State I Am In (1:06:20)
And those are letters being sent to the NPFMC you said.

how would you direct people to like, you know, submit those comments, I guess like actionable steps people could take.

David Bayes (1:06:30)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, so we typically post about it pretty heavily on the page, kind of in a couple weeks leading up to when this comment period's open for, say, 30 days at a time before the meeting starts. So that's a good place to find it. You can also Google, like, Next or Current NPFMC meeting, and it will come up with the agenda for the next meeting. But yeah, it's pretty cool. It's pretty easy to do. People can do it anonymously. We've seen, like, trawl crew that get in there and say,

scared to put my name down or I don't want to my name down but this is what I've seen. So it's a really good opportunity. It doesn't take much more time than making a Facebook comment does. It doesn't cost anything. But it also goes into this official record. So now we're, you know, there's this conversation about if there's ever a lawsuit and I hey anybody ever bring this up to the NPFMC 15 years ago. They can look back and see all these, this comment history of like Alaskans have been.

worried to death about this for 20 years, you know, and you've never done anything. So it's pretty cool to engage in that way, but at the same time, we're still the chickens testifying to the Fox in there. It's good to get it on record. It's good to say it, but I don't think rapid change is going to come out of there, at least until a new governor starts putting new representatives in.

The State I Am In (1:07:40)
which is an important note for Alaskan voters. That's one way that we can affect change for sure is through our vote. And historically, we're not great voters. We don't get out there a lot. so if you care about this issue, let that be your motivation to vote, knowing that that governor's seat is an important one.

David Bayes (1:07:45)
Mm-hmm.

The State I Am In (1:08:00)
What else? David, anything else we missed?

David Bayes (1:08:03)
I don't think so. this 2026 is a big year with all these different elections, Senate, Congress, governor. I want to see all the candidates talking about it and trying to outdo each other, but that's just a function of how hard the voters push them. So if it's an important thing to you or anybody listening, just definitely take the chance to ask the question.

The State I Am In (1:08:23)
I agree. Keep talking about it. bringing it up. Keep commenting. love seeing every... There's so many people comment in the comment section on anything fishing related in the state. feel like you'll find a good half dozen people saying ban trawling or what about trawling? And that always makes me happy because people are sharing their opinion on it. And I definitely want to see that going, those conversations happening.

David Bayes (1:08:34)
Mm-hmm. ⁓

Hmm.

The State I Am In (1:08:48)
So one of the things I always ask people, every guest on, is other Alaskans or people that you would like to see on the show. Anyone have a unique Alaskan story or perspective that could be fishing related or not? Do you have anyone that comes to mind for you?

David Bayes (1:09:02)
Well, think there's, you know, Braxton Dew is a former NOAA scientist. He's studied red king crab in the past, was a specialty. He posts on the page quite a bit. He's done this, ⁓ peer complaint on how NOAA has dealt with crab bycatch. One of the big deals there is that they consider trawl bycatch of crab to be natural mortality because they weren't fishing for, and they say it can't be prevented essentially, but there again, that

that definition doesn't line up. Anyways, he'd be pretty neat to talk to, but also all these candidates coming up. I personally love to see what the 10 governor candidates have to say specifically about trawl So if you get the opportunity.

The State I Am In (1:09:44)
would be amazing. And thanks for that suggestion.

I'll look them up. Well, David, thank you for your time today. Like I said, I always enjoy talking about this issue. I appreciate your unique position to be able to speak to it and just your passion and your drive to keep speaking about it. I know it's mentally exhausting at times, I'm sure, but it's a work that many appreciate. The nearly 50,000 people on that Facebook page appreciate your diligence.

and your effort and yeah, we're right there with you rooting for you and appreciate everything that you bring to that community. So on behalf of everyone, myself included, thank you so much for your time.

David Bayes (1:10:26)
All right, well yeah, I really appreciate it and keep spreading the word.

The State I Am In (1:10:29)
David.

Manny (1:10:32)
If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to support the show by following and sharing it on social media, subscribing on YouTube and leaving a review wherever you get your podcast, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio, wherever. It really helps more Alaskans and people everywhere join in on these conversations.

now, more than ever, I believe sharing the voices of our fellow Alaskans matters. And I will continue to do this work for as long as there are people willing to sit down and share meaningful conversations. Keep North Alaska. And thank you for joining me on the state I'm in.