LAGUNA BEACH — Kurt Lieber was shocked when he counted 130 lobster traps set in a straight line along a half-mile border on the northern side of the city’s Marine Protected Area.
The founder of Ocean Defenders Alliance, a nonprofit dedicated to a debris-free sea, was searching for hot spots with a high density of traps that could endanger whales traveling along the coastline. In the past few years there has been a huge spike in whales entangled in fishing gear.
Gray whales regularly pass by the beaches of Laguna on their annual migration from Alaska to the lagoons of Baja. Humpbacks are seen there too, especially in winter months.
“It’s insane, a whale can’t navigate through that,” Lieber said, adding that some traps were set just 10 feet apart. “The wingspan of a humpback is about 50 feet.”
Lieber, of Huntington Beach, found the traps when he took his boat out from Dana Point Harbor two weeks ago. Just off the breakwater, he counted 67 traps. While the total number of traps off Dana Point didn’t alarm him, he said he was horrified by the number of traps starting in 10 feet of water just off Table Rock Beach in Laguna.
“It seems anywhere there’s a Marine Protected Area, the traps are densely set,” he said.
But Laguna Beach and Dana Point aren’t Lieber’s only targets. He’s monitored boundaries on the border of Santa Monica Bay, on the south side off Redondo Beach and the north side off Malibu — where he found 180 traps along 1.8 miles.
In San Diego County, he flew over La Jolla, another Marine Protected Area. In Central California, he counted crab traps — considered among the most threatening to whales — and gathered data at Morro Bay, Monterey Bay, Drakes Bay, Bodega Bay and Moss Landing.
A lot of gear types can be problems for whales including drifting net, crab and lobster traps. Crab and lobster fishing make up 50 percent of the entanglements, Lieber said.
Lieber will provide data and mapping to researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Turtle Island Restoration Network and the Center for Biological Diversity. The latter, in October, filed a lawsuit against the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, claiming the agency has fallen short in preventing Dungeness crab fishery gear from killing humpback and blue whales and leatherback sea turtles.
In 2015, there were 62 reported entanglements in all forms of fishing gear. Eleven of those were found with gear from the California Dungeness crab fishery, according to NOAA. In 2016, there were 71 whale entanglements, well above the average of eight whales trapped in fishing gear annually from 1982 to 2015, according to NOAA.
“If we can locate them maybe we can minimize the impact by spacing them further apart or putting less in the water at one time, ” Lieber said. “I’m hoping to spark a dialogue.”
Rodger Healy, a 30-year lobster fisherman from Dana Point, called Lieber’s claims “absurd.”
In 2016, the lobster fishery brought in 679,000 pounds, according to Andrew Hughan, a spokesman for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. Healy said the fishermen go out of their way to make sure their traps don’t endanger whales. He said in 120 years, only one humpback in 22014 has become entangled in a lobster trap in California.
“That was during an El Niño year where we fished deeper,” he said.
Typically, Healy said, he fishes no deeper than 100 feet. Gray whales on the northern migration generally pass in deeper water. But southbound whales and calves often pass closer to shore.
The lobster fishery, like the crab fishery, is regulated by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. The fishery opens in October and closes in March. There are no restrictions on where lobster traps are placed in relationship to each other, said Hughan. Traps, though, have to be more than 750 feet away from a pier or jetty.
The beaches off Laguna were declared a Marine Protected Area in 2012, the result of efforts of local organizations and individuals – collectively the Laguna Bluebelt Coalition – that wanted to restore Laguna’s marine life and habitat. Laguna’s coastline — once known for an abundance of abalone — had been depleted by decades of fishing.
Now, five years later, local watermen report a variety of fish, tide pool creatures and kelp along the protected coastline. Gray, blue and humpback whales are no longer a rarity in the picturesque coves.
Earlier this year, the Department of Fish and Wildlife released the results of a study monitoring the state’s Marine Protected areas. A review of the state’s lobster revealed that Laguna’s protected area showed the most significant growth.
Healy said it’s that Marine Protected Area which closed off fishing along seven miles of coastline — from Table Rock Beach to Irvine Point — that led to the increased trap density along the boundary line.
“The closure in Laguna took half of my traps,” he said. “The amount there now may sound like a lot but there were upward of 1,000 traps there before the closure. We were more spread out and now we’ve had to condense. This is a direct result of the closure. We’re trying to catch the spillover that was promised to us in the process.”
