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Mineral Resources Management Division - Rigs to Reefs Workshop

Mike McCorkle

Mr. McCorkle is a senior representative of the Southern California Trawlers Association.

~ From Transcript ~

I look around the room, and I see four commercial fisherman in the room today. I see myself and one other one that actually know what it's like to trawl on the bottom of the Santa Barbara channel.

I've been fishing myself for 44 years.  I've been trawling for 26 years.  I've been fishing around the oil platforms since 1958. I've fished around With all types of gear. Every type of gear you can imagine I've Used at one time or another. 

I don't think that the trawlers are giving a bad rap to rigs to reefs and mussel mounds and such, and I don't think that anybody in this room except for one other trawler I see understands what entails trawling on the bottom around the oil platforms and mussel mounds.

And when we try to explain it to people, they kind of think they know. But they don't know, and they accuse us of being the bad guys in this situation, which we're not.

We're out in the ocean, and our job is to supply fresh local seafood to the people in California that can't go out and catch it themselves. The oil company's job is to develop oil leases and produce oil.  We're both working in the same area.

In fact, a lot of the areas where the oil platforms are now is where we used to fish before the oil came because it seems like there's a -- I can't say the word. But there's something that fish and oil go together. In other words, where you saw a picture of some shrimp on a mussel mound, well, those shrimp might have been there before the mussel mound was there before that oil platform was there.

And that oil platform got put there and shrimp are standard eating. I just spent a week in the gulf. I went to Louisiana. I went to Mississippi. I went to talk to a fisherman from Texas Shrimp Association. I talked to him a couple years ago about rigs to reefs and are they happy over there and is everything fine. I talked to them again this week.

I heard today some things and I wrote a few little notes down that there’s no -- all the commercial fishermen wanted the reefs. That’s not true. It depends what your type you are if you wanted the reef or not.

If you're a trawler, you didn’t want the reef. A trawler wants clean bottoms with nothing on it.  Clean. If there’s any oil debris, any reef is a chance to snag and tear his net. So it's not true that all Commercial fishermen in the Gulf wanted artificial reefs and rigs to greet them and that they're just happy as heck about it.

And then there was a question asked, well, have you ever heard of any gear loss over in the Gulf?  No. Not that I know. There’s lots of gear loss in the Gulf. That’s a -- just go talk to some fishermen with fish on the bottom, and you'll see that there is gear loss.

Now, it might not be reaching the right people. They have no contingency fund for that type of gear loss. The fishermen Over there, the trawlers, the shrimp fishermen, they support the rigs to reef in the concept where the rigs, taken out, the bottom’s cleaned up and the rig is moved to another area, a specified area, and that has cleaned the area we're at.

We have no problem with that. We have no problem with that in California either. We've worked here in the past with Exxon and Chevron because we're both in the same area, and certain problems have arisen during the 40 years that Chevron has been here.

Exxon, we have problems with debris. We have problems with pipelines. We have problems with different situations that happen, and we've actually -- we've worked it out real good to both parties' benefit. It's not something that can't be done.

It's OCS rule 9-C says that the oil company cannot hinder or, you know, bother fishing in any way. So these different problems come up. Well, we have a problem. We've sat down with the oil companies and we've worked it out.

We have a problem right now with the mussel mounds. We've sat down with Chevron. We've worked out an agreement. And nothing's happening in the agreement. Four years now have gone by, as we see it. I can see another two or three years of studies, and probably nothing will happen then.

And there's a real good chance these mussel mounds are still going to be there. Chevron's not honoring their agreement with us yet. That's something that we would like to see happen so we can continue to fish.