Shiver me timbers! Once they offload the scurvy dog crew in China, they should scuttle that boat and make an artifical reef out of it! Arrrrgh!
That pencils out to around 10,000 chum...160,000 lbs @ 16lbs/fish, to pull an high-estimated average weight out of the air. The average weight of a Chum is probably less than 16 lbs, so that would indicate more than 10,000 fish.
A punitive fine of $200/fish should be around $2million. That, plus loss of the boat might be fair...probably not enough, though. At the very least, it should be a big enough penalty so that it will be an actual deterrent to other pirate fisheries thinking about pirating salmon. Arrrgh!
Bad news, for sure. Worse news is that this was only one of who knows how many operations out there harvesting illegally. The correct response to such a gross violation would be permanent, assured termination of operations.
I like the idea above about sinking the vessel, but I vote we skip the evacuation step beforehand. That's the only assurance there will be no repeat offense (at least not by this particular asshole).
No... I don't really advocate killing the guys... Well, except maybe just the captain. He's supposed to go down with the ship anyway, right?
I like the way the Russian Navy dealth with pirates they captured off the coast of Somalia. They handcuffed the entire crew to the pirate boat railing and then set off an explosive charge to destroy and sink the boat. You cannot end piracy, but recidivism is preventable.
It would work. Better still, get the rec guys out of the ocean, too, and make all salmon fisheries occur in (or at least very near) terminal areas. This way, we are much more assured of what stocks we're fishing over, all the fish caught are as big as they're going to get, and we have a much better idea how many salmon are ACTUALLY available to harvest in each fishery. (Another bonus with this strategy is that fisheries in terminal areas are much more fair to local communities; how many fish you get to harvest in your area depends on how well each community takes care of its spawning and rearing habitats, rewarding those who are responsible stewards with larger harvests.) This would be win-win-win, for the commercial market, inland anglers, habitat, and, most importantly, the fish.
Of course, the international (even interstate and intrastate, for that matter) politics of commercial salmon fishing complicate things to the point where the only solution governments see to keep all their customers fishing is to fish when and where salmon are most concentrated, and that's in the ocean....
Unfortunately the most likely ending is that the equivalent of a couple hundred dollars were given to the Chinese authorities for release of the crew and vessel, the 80 tons of fish were sold at market, and the boat and crew are already at sea again with another cargo of illegally netted fish.
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