March 16, 2016 -- State Senator Ben Allen, D-Santa Monica, announced Tuesday that he is authoring legislation to phase out the controversial use of drifting gillnets off the California coast.

Credit: Turtle Island Restoration Network

The bill will end “the most harmful fishing practice on the West Coast” by moving the industry from the giant floating nets to a fishing method using sensors that alert commercial fishers to other catch, some of it marine life that is legally protected, Allen said. “It’s time for the swordfish industry to transition to a proven, safer alternative,” Allen said. Allen said that he, like many environmentalists, is worried about the marine wildlife that inadvertently gets caught in the nets. “We have a moral imperative to protect whales, dolphins, sea turtles, and other marine life from senseless injury and death in harmful drift gillnets, Allen said. The bill authorizes using "deep-set buoy" gear while phasing out exiting permits for drift gillnets.

It would ban any new permits for the nets as well.

Allen said the users of drift gillnets also would be offered incentives to make the switch, such as making it easier to obtain permits for alternate gear.

Allen said he is still working on specific language for the legislation, which will formally be Senate Bill 1114. Its first hearing is expected sometime in April before the Senate’s Natural Resources and Water Committee, of which Allen is a member.

The state senator’s bill could lead to the use soon of a hook-and-buoy system for commercial swordfish operators, a method that entails dropping hooks as deep as 1,200 feet.

A special submerged buoy would then indicate quickly whether to release the catch alive if it is not a swordfish.

Allen’s bill won praise from environmentalists, who often call the gillnets "curtains of death.”

"This new legislation halts the process of essentially strip mining our ocean with mega nets in order to ineffectively catch one type of high-in-mercury fish,” said Doug Karpa, legal program director at Turtle Island Restoration Network.

Allen said California is the only state on the West Coast that still allows the giant underwater nets, which legislators have said kills more dolphins and whales than all other West Coast and Alaskan fisheries combined.

The swordfish industry argues that drift gillnets are the least-used and most-regulated method on the West Coast of catching swordfish, and that the decades-old practice is not particularly lethal to the catch not meant for its nets.

State reports have indicated that demand for swordfish remains high, with more than 800,000 pounds hauled in by 20 boats alone in 2013. The industry's total worth is about $2.7 million, officials said.

Allen’s bill is the latest of several moves aimed at ending use of drift gillnets.

A 2014 bill in the state legislature requiring commercial catchers of swordfish to use such means as harpoons or hand-held hooked lines failed its first committee.

In 2010, the death of two endangered sperm whales snared by drift gillnets prompted an emergency crackdown by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The NOAA warned that the fishery involved would be closed if another sperm whale was caught in the nets. That rule, however, was subsequently lifted.

Allen said drift gillnets are responsible for the death of an estimated 16 endangered sperm whales in the last decade.

The nets also have caught an estimated 22 Pacific leatherback turtles, an endangered species, as well as loggerhead sea turtles, he said. If more than one Pacific leatherback is killed in a six-year period from any human activity, “the entire population recovery is at risk,” he added.

Only 1,438 of the sea turtles are still left and are on a course to extinction by 2030, Allen said.

Drift gillnets have also caught at least five megamouth sharks, a species so rare, he added, that fewer than 102 have ever been seen worldwide.

Another 885 other marine mammals have been killed by drift gillnets in the last decade, he said.