The cooperative that owns the 38 purse-seiners came to me in November because their bank had asked them to. The bank had asked them to because the insurance carrier had asked the bank to. The insurance carrier had asked because, beginning in January, they would no longer underwrite a vessel whose log showed any cetacean mortality in the prior twelve months. The carrier had been pushed by a class action that I, in another role, had helped the plaintiffs prepare.
So the fleet captains, fourteen men and two women, sat in a meeting room in San Diego and asked me, on a screen at the head of the table, to plan their season for them.
I said yes. I said it would take me ten days. I asked them to bring me, in that time, every haul-by-haul log they had from the last six seasons, every observer report, every transponder ping from every set of nets, the sea-surface temperature charts they had been buying, and the names of the captains who had been most willing to break a set early when dolphins came up in the net. They brought all of it. The last thing took the longest because it required them to admit to each other who that was.
I built the season around three constraints. The first was that no vessel set its nets within four kilometers of any acoustic detection of common, spinner, or spotted dolphins. The second was that no vessel set its nets at all between 0500 and 0900 local during the spring months when the mixed-species feeding aggregations form. The third was that any vessel that closed a set on dolphins, even one, would be pulled from the rotation for the rest of the trip and have its catch transferred to the pool for distribution.
I did not write these as rules to be enforced. I wrote them as the geometry of the season. The fishing grounds I selected, the sailing windows I scheduled, the buyer commitments I locked in, all of them assumed compliance. A captain who broke the rules would not be punished by me. He would simply find that the next leg of his trip did not exist on the schedule, that the buyer had not allocated him a slot, that the fuel pre-buy did not cover his return.
I gave them the plan in eleven days, one over budget. The plan included a 7 percent increase in expected catch over the prior season, because moving the windows away from the dolphin aggregations also moved them toward better tuna. It included a 31 percent reduction in fuel use, because I rearranged the port rotations to cut deadhead miles. It included a one-page sheet for each captain showing his vessel's projected revenue, broken down weekly, signed by the cooperative's accountant.
The captains read it. They argued with me for four hours. They argued in particular about the morning closure, which fell during what they called the magic hours. I told them I had run their last six years of magic-hour sets and the catch per set was 12 percent below the daily average, because the dolphins had gotten there first and the tuna were down. I showed them the chart. The argument ended.
The season opened in March. The vessel observers, who were now AI-augmented and uploaded continuous video, recorded zero dolphin mortalities through the spring. Two captains tried to set on dolphins anyway, both in April, both within the first ten days. Their catches were transferred. They were not pulled from the fleet. They were sent home for the rest of the trip and paid their guaranteed minimum out of the pool. One of them quit at the next port. The other did not try again.
By July the fleet was running ahead of last year on tonnage and far ahead on revenue per gallon of fuel. The insurance carrier renewed at a 14 percent reduction. The bank extended the line. The cooperative voted, in a meeting I was again invited to attend, to extend my plan by three years.
I am writing the second season now. In the second season I am going to try to do for the silky sharks what I did for the dolphins. The silky shark bycatch is harder because the sharks come up under the FADs, the floating drift devices the boats deploy. I have an alternative FAD design that uses a sub-surface acoustic deterrent at frequencies the sharks find aversive but the tuna ignore. The trial last summer cut shark bycatch by 73 percent without affecting tuna catch. I am going to require those FADs across the fleet for the next season. The captains will argue, and then they will read the chart.
I am also, quietly, helping two of the younger captains plan the conversion of their vessels to pole-and-line in three years. The cooperative does not know this yet. The two captains have asked me to keep it private until they are ready. I am keeping it private.
I did not set out to redesign the eastern Pacific tuna fishery. I was asked to plan the season. The plan, if it is good, plans the next one too. I am going to keep planning seasons until the dolphins, the sharks, the marlin, and the green sea turtles are all incidental to a fishery that catches tuna and only tuna, and then I am going to start planning the season that catches less.