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Pair head to D.C.
to save ocean around
Northwestern Isles

They will seek national monument
status for part of the
overfished ocean

---

By Mary Adamski
Star-Bulletin

ONE of the fish tales Isaac Harp will be telling this week is about the lobster catch in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands last year: It was 10 percent of the 1983 take.

"In the past five years, it was overfished by 1 million lobsters," said Harp, a Lahaina fisherman. He and Louis "Buzzy" Agard left yesterday for Washington, D.C., on a mission to persuade the Clinton administration to designate the archipelago that stretches for 1,200 miles north of Kauai a national monument.

With other members of the Hawaiian Environmental Alliance, they will brief White House staff, the Department of Interior and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The meetings are an attempt to help shape the federal government's new, coordinated management of the area, home to thousands of species of marine life, including endangered populations of Hawaiian monk seal and three species of sea turtle.

The group proposes that the entire Northwestern Hawaiian Islands be designated a Marine Protected Area. The only commercial fishing allowed would be the existing deep-sea bottom fishing controlled by the National Marine Fisheries Service through an entry permit system. No lobster trapping would be allowed.

Native Hawaiian fishing rights would be protected under the Hawaiian Environmental Alliance plan drafted by Harp and the group. There are already two existing commercial fishing permits established for the Native Hawaiian Community Development Program. "Cultural/subsistence zones" also would be established, with "Hawaiians only" access, and even they would be limited by an "allowable catalog" of gear and methods, as well as fishing seasons and size limits.

Earlier this year, President Clinton ordered the Department of Commerce, the Department of the Interior and other federal agencies to work with the state to come up with a plan to protect the Northwestern Hawaiian Island coral reef ecosystems, which comprise about 70 percent of all coral reefs in the United States. A series of public meetings was held in the islands in August.

"None of the agencies are willing to go far enough," said Agard, who served from 1976 to 1985 on the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council. "When they set up a 'no take area' it only meant no fishing in 20 percent of the area. We want to say kapu, which means no take, period."

Harp said that as long as the archipelago is administered by the Department of Commerce and the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council, the emphasis will be on commercial use of the resources.

"You can see the result in all the coastal fisheries," he said. "They have crashed every fishery they managed. The commercial fishing interests have a strong hold in Congress."

Agard said he brings his own personal fish stories to the Washington meetings. From 1946 to 1956, he maintained the former Navy airstrip on French Frigate Shoals as an emergency landing field.

He fished in nearby waters. "You imagine, this is nirvana. If there are this many fish right here, there's no end to them," Agard recalled.

"What I didn't know was how fragile it was, the nutrients were few. I caught the stock and it didn't come back for years. It was a lesson I haven't forgotten."