California Coast & Ocean

For several decades, most commercial and recreational fishing equipment has been constructed from synthetic materials that do not decompose in seawater for years. Some of the gear lost over the last half-century is still in the marine environment. Nets, lines, pots, traps, and other equipment lie on the seabed, get caught on rocky reefs, or float in the water column, entangling and trapping marine life, endangering boats and people—especially divers—and damaging habitat.

Fishermen seldom abandon gear in the ocean intentionally: the loss of a large gillnet or a set of crab pots is a significant economic blow to them. However, it is not uncommon for a line attaching a piece of gear to a vessel or a float to fail, or to get cut by another boat’s propeller. Sometimes stormy weather will wash a pot, trap, or net far from where it was put in the water, so that the fisherman can’t find it when he returns to harvest his catch.

The cumulative impacts on the marine environment can be enormous. Around the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, hundreds of tons of fishing nets clog the reefs, tear away corals, and entangle marine life, including sharks, birds, sea turtles, and the endangered Hawaiian monk seal.

Between 1982 and 2000, divers found more than 200 Hawaiian monk seals drowned in derelict nets—in 1999 alone they found 25, according to studies by Raymond Boland, Mary Donohue, and others published in Marine Pollution Bulletin.

In Puget Sound and the Northwest Straits, hundreds of crab pots and gill nets have been documented on the seafloor and on underwater rocks. Gillnet fishermen there report that they lose 10–20 percent of their gear every year, and in surveys for bottom fish in Puget Sound and Hood Canal, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife recovered more than 100,000 pieces of derelict fishing gear in their sampling nets during just one year. Off the San Juan Islands, divers observed piles of bird bones as high as three feet under a gill net caught on some rocks. The bones had drifted down from decomposing carcasses. The problem is global, and California is not exempt. Off the North Coast, numerous crab pots are lost in the water each year. Often, by the time the Department of Fish and Game has a chance to go pull some of them out of the water, many are embedded in the seafloor and impossible to drag to the surface. Along the Central Coast and off the Channel Islands, underwater surveys have found derelict gear draped over rocky reefs, some of it “flagging ”—waving in the water column.