Longline fishing boats bobbed in the water at Pier 38 on Tuesday afternoon as Vietnamese pop music echoed from one of the vessels. Nearby, James Shane sat aboard the Vicious Cycle, monitoring his shortline fishing crew.
Shane, 59, a shortline fisherman since graduating from Kalaheo High School in 1984, primarily catches big-eye tuna during weeklong trips at sea. But for 30 years he exclusively fished for snapper in the now-restricted waters of the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument about 155 miles northwest of the main Hawaiian islands.
“That’s where I made my living,” Shane said.
Shortline fishers like Shane, as well as Hawaii’s longliners, now have a shot at resuming fishing within the monument, which is comparable in size to the Gulf of Mexico.
The Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council voted June 11 to urge President Donald Trump to lift the nearly 16-year-old ban. Expanded under former President Barack Obama, it was imposed to protect submerged reefs, atolls and seamounts that are home to around 7,000 species, about 23 of which are endangered.
If lifted, commercial fishing could resume by the end of the year, according to Westpac Executive Director Kitty Simonds.
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The Westpac vote came after Trump signed a proclamation April 17 “Unleashing American Commercial Fishing in the Pacific,” allowing American fishers into the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument, which is also under Westpac’s jurisdiction.
On the same day, he also signed Executive Order 1426, which gave the nation’s regional fishery councils 180 days to review management of the country’s five marine national monuments — four of which are in the Pacific region — and submit recommendations to open them or keep them closed, Simonds said.
But Papahanaumokuakea is unique from the others, and some Native Hawaiians say it is sacred.
A cultural debate
Native Hawaiians revere the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands within the monument — known as the Kupuna Islands — as a wahi pana, or place of significance. In the Kumulipo creation chant, all life forms came and evolved from Papahanaumokuakea, beginning with its coral polyps.
The current monument is co-managed by the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, as one of four co-trustees, along with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the state Department of Land and Natural Resources.
Pelika Andrade is a member of the Native Hawaiian Cultural Working Group made up of cultural experts who advise OHA in decision-making regarding the monument’s permitting processes and management plans.
Andrade said that in addition to its cultural significance, commercial fishing in the area would be out of sync with Native Hawaiian values.
Native Hawaiians, she said, functioned on an ahupuaa system that maintained large sections of land and water dependent on a system of balance. Fishing outside of one’s ahupuaa, which Andrade said Westpac is proposing, would not align with the native culture or the islands’ history, she said.
“No one’s living up there, so there’s not an active feeding of back and forth, and … one of the really key relationships of Hawaii is reciprocity,” Andrade said. “That’s not your backyard, and you are not a constant tender of that resource that you want that access to.”
Westpac believes it is.
The monument, Simonds said, officially belongs to the U.S., which would designate it as an exclusive economic zone for American fishers, icing out foreign competition in domestic waters.
It’s partly the same reasoning used to open up the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument in April.
The council is assessing management of the monument since it was established in 2009 and preparing a final document that will be reviewed by Westpac’s executive committee and sent to the U.S. secretary of commerce.
Simonds noted they do not plan on changing the restriction prohibiting longline fishing between zero to 50 nautical miles of the islands that has been in place since 1991.
It is a compromise, of sorts, that would allow for cultural and environmental protections for the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands while giving fishers more economic opportunity, said Simonds, who is half-Hawaiian.
“We respect the views of our people and the culture,” she said. “Fishing, after all, is a part of the Hawaiian culture. Fishing can coexist with protection and conservation, but these are things that need to be discussed. People have their opinions and I respect them.”
Where the fish are
Eric Kingma, executive director of the Hawaii Longline Association, represents the fishers of Hawaii’s 145 longline vessels that catch yellowfin tuna and swordfish, 80% of which is sold locally.
The fleet contributes to the largest food-producing industry in Hawaii, he said. In 2022, it achieved a globally recognized certification for sustainable fishing by the Marine Stewardship Council.
Kingma said the HLA isn’t advocating one way or the other as far as whether the monument should be opened, adding that Hawaii’s fleet will simply “follow the science and what the government says we’re allowed to do.”
Kingma said there are misconceptions about “what the monument is in terms of the resources that are there, the threats that are there, the protections that it does put in place for tuna, a highly migratory species,” and Hawaii’s strictly monitored fleet of longline vessels that would be fishing there.
The HLA is working to install onboard camera systems that will record and monitor all fishing activity within the next three years, he said. Currently, every vessel has a satellite tracker that records and transmits its positions every hour to the U.S. Coast Guard National Fishery Service. Each vessel is also required to report its daily catch via satellite transmission.
“We want to protect the ocean just as much as a lot of other groups and individuals,” Kingma said. “We survive off the ocean. We’re not in it to degrade it, to destroy it, to rape and pillage.”
Since the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument opened in mid-April, 20 fishing vessels have fished there, according to Kingma, and catch reports have seen no difference between tuna caught inside the monument and outside.
“(That) tells you that these areas are not reservoirs for tuna; they’re not holding tuna in there because there’s no fishing there. The tuna are there when they’re there, and they’re not when they’re not,” he said. “They’re moving in a very dynamic time and space in the ocean, and they’re following currents and temperature breaks and oxygen content and salinity. When it all aligns, that’s where the fish prefer to be.”
Shane, who is a shortliner and doesn’t compete with foreign vessels, said that from around February to April, he, along with his fellow shortliners, barely caught a single fish.
“We were all thinking we would go out of business, maybe become Uber drivers, this and that,” he said. “If we had that opportunity to fish in (the area of Papahanaumokuakea), we could keep ourselves afloat, keep ourselves going until the fish come back, just like they did (last month).”
Ultimately, Kingma said, “if it’s closed it’s closed, if it’s open, it’s open, but it doesn’t necessarily change the way we’re going to fish.”
Lingering concerns
Opening up the Pacific waters for Hawaii’s fishers comes amid a push to pass the U.N.’s High Seas Treaty that would close fishing beyond national jurisdictions for ocean protections in the high seas, or waters around 200 nautical miles from the coast, where 80% to 90% of Hawaii’s longliners fish, Kingma said.
“(The treaty) has the potential to close areas that we fish right now or close areas that are more distant but that would then displace fishing efforts closer to Hawaii and in our international fishing grounds,” Kingma said. “Where would that leave this fleet? If we can’t fish in U.S. waters, and we can’t fish in international waters, where does Hawaii get the tuna that we need?
“We’re trying to do our part to provide fresh fish for Hawaii, and we believe this fishery is part of the cultural fabric of Hawaii.”
But even if all the regulations are followed, the impact of proximity still concerns environmentalists and OHA’s Chief Advocate Leina‘ala Ley, who said the by-catch could include seabirds, turtles, monk seals and sharks, which are sacred aumakua, or ancestral spirits, to some Native Hawaiians.
“It’s so disingenuous to suggest that somehow this is like an empty expanse,” Ley said. “Westpac represents commercial fishermen. These are big commercial operations that, not only with respect to the environment, but even with respect to their human labor, do not have a good track record of being responsible stewards of our natural resources.”
According to the Papahanaumokuakea Marine Debris Project, about 115,000 pounds of derelict fishing gear, or ghost nets, wash in from the open ocean annually and there is an estimated 431-metric-ton backlog of ghost net accumulation on its reefs.
Kingma said that at least for Hawaii’s longliners, “these guys love the ocean. They’re living and breathing the ocean every single day. They’re busting their butts to provide fresh, highly monitored fish that the government says is sustainable, that NOAA says is sustainable.”
Simonds said there are currently no guarantees Papahanaumokuakea will be open to commercial fishers when Westpac submits its assessment to the head of the U.S. Department of Commerce. Andrade of the Native Hawaiian Cultural Working Group said the issue is a complex one and requires that Native Hawaiian culture and history be considered.
“It’s really, really hard because we know a lot of these fishermen, but we also know some of the smaller fishermen that are coming to us and are going, ‘We see the spillover, we see more coming toward the main Hawaiian Islands,’” Andrade said. “This is part of the community that we do want to support and we do benefit from, too, but they get dragged in. What is being proposed does not benefit them, really. It benefits everybody else except them, and then collectively, all of us.”