Having an impact within such a vast area is difficult – more so in 2012, when the Coast Guard’s major cutter hours devoted to EEZ enforcement in the Coast Guard’s Pacific Area (PacArea) – which includes Alaska and the continental West Coast – were reduced by more than 40 percent over the previous year.

Somehow, in spite of these difficulties, the Coast Guard has managed to increase the effectiveness of its enforcement efforts with an array of tactics, including better monitoring, surveillance, and environmental analyses that predict fishing fleet locations. These tactics help the district more effectively to target its cutters and aircraft. “When we don’t have surface resources available to use, we can utilize equipment on the C-130 [Hercules aircraft] to make a law enforcement case from the air, without actually having boots on deck,” Hendrickson said. “Now, there are only certain types of cases that we can effectively make from the air – obviously, we can’t check gear or check their catch – but when it comes to closed areas or exclusive economic zone incursions, we’re able to use C-130s to bridge the gap in resources for surface assets and make our cases that way.”

Hawaii, home to the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet, offers both a homeport and a way station for other significant U.S. assets, and increasingly, the Coast Guard has made use of these as platforms for enforcement. Two of the Coast Guard’s 378-foot high endurance cutters, the Rush and the Morgenthau (which replaced the Jarvis after it was decommissioned in October 2012), are homeported at Honolulu, Hawaii. Though under the PacArea Command, these cutters alternately conduct annual patrols throughout District 14 and adjacent seas. The Jarvis’ final deployment, which ended in September, involved an August fishery patrol of Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument in the remote northwest Hawaiian Islands, one of the largest marine protected areas in the world.

District 14 has also started taking advantage of other PacArea surface assets as they transit to and from Pearl Harbor to participate in tailored ship’s training availability, or TSTA, a periodic event hosted by the Navy’s Afloat Training Group Middle Pacific. “Their crews will come down and take courses in firefighting and damage control,” said Hendrickson, “and get evaluated on their navigation skills. And as they transit south, they have to come through our area of responsibility, so we’ve been working with PacArea and the cutters to leverage that asset and maybe get a day or two of boardings from them as they come in and as they go out. The same goes for major cutters that are transiting the area in support of a defense deployment, where they’re working for the combatant commander but they’re transiting through the region.” The 14th District has wrung enforcement hours, for example, out of the national security cutters Waesche and Bertholf on their way to and from defense exercises such as Exercise Talisman Saber, a joint U.S.-Australian military exercise, and Exercise CARAT (Cooperation Afloat Readiness and Training), an annual bilateral military exercise conducted by the U.S. Pacific Fleet and members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

The Coast Guard and the U.S. Navy established a close working peacetime relationship in 2009, when the Coast Guard began to take advantage of the Pacific voyages of the Navy’s 3rd and 7th fleets. For the past four years, Navy assets have provided surveillance platforms for Coast Guard law enforcement officers as they transited through the Pacific. “Under the Posse Comitatus Act and their Title 10 authorities,” Hendrickson explained, “the Navy doesn’t have law enforcement authorities. They have the authority to do what’s called D&M, detection and monitoring, but they can’t actually put feet on deck to execute U.S federal law enforcement. The Coast Guard, under our Title 14 authority, can do that. So, future plans are for the Navy to transport our folks, and respond to cued intelligence, and then our law enforcement teams go from the Navy ship to the offending vessel and conduct a boarding.”

This arrangement, known as the Oceania Maritime Security Initiative, was created through a memorandum of understanding between the departments of Defense and Homeland Security in April  2012. The 14th District’s future plans are to put boarding teams, much in the style of Coast Guard law enforcement detachments (LEDETs) using Navy assets as platforms for counterdrug operations in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, regularly on naval vessels transiting through the high seas and the U.S. EEZ. “We’ll focus on transnational threats here in the Pacific,” said Hendrickson, “and, of course, the biggest transnational threat in this region is IUU [illegal, unreported, and unregulated] fishing.”

Perhaps the Coast Guard’s most powerful tool in the fight against IUU fishing in the Pacific is its participation in international and regional partnerships that help extend the reach of its enforcement assets. “We don’t have enough people to do the mission by ourselves,” said Hendrickson, “so we leverage many partnerships out here, both international and interagency.”

The Coast Guard has significantly expanded cooperative maritime enforcement through bilateral “shiprider” agreements that allow law enforcement officers from nine Pacific Island nations to conduct boardings from Coast Guard vessels and aircraft transiting through their waters or airspace. These joint operations help to amplify enforcement capabilities and interdict suspicious vessels in the EEZs of partner nations. The agreements not only help to protect depleted fish stocks, but also to encourage good governance, deterrence, and the sharing of expertise – for example, as the trend toward more large cruise ships in the Pacific continues, the Coast Guard has conducted several search and rescue conferences with Pacific Island partners.