Focusing on the levels known to be desired by two categories of fish – striped bass and highly migratory species such as tuna – Coast Guard and NGA officers created charts once or twice a week that plotted the most likely locations of those fish. The mapping tool has saved the service time and fuel, focusing finite patrol assets on enforcement and boardings, rather than hunts for fishing vessels.

“It’s essential to know where the bait fish are going to be, the fish that the tuna or the striped bass eat,” said Saunders. “So we’re actually two steps ahead of the fishermen with this information. It allows us to better coordinate where we’re going to place our resources – because we have very limited resources to do fisheries enforcement.”

 

The Vast Pacific

In the Coast Guard district farthest from the mid-Atlantic – the 14th, headquartered in Honolulu, Hawaii – partnerships are also essential to allow the Coast Guard to patrol 43 percent of the nation’s EEZ – 1.5 million miles of territorial waters ranging from Guam, the nation’s westernmost territory, to American Samoa, its southernmost. Between those two locations lies about 3,600 miles of ocean, about the same distance as between New York and Amsterdam, Holland.

In such a colossal expanse of ocean, the United States and its neighboring island nations face a difficult task, especially when it comes to protecting the most overfished species in the western Pacific, the highly migratory bigeye and yellowfin tuna. Fortunately, the nations of the region, for some years now, have been combining resources to more efficiently conduct fisheries enforcement and security patrols. The Coast Guard plays a leading role working with several regional enforcement agencies, including the Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency (FFA) and the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC). These agencies promote the conservation and sustainable harvest of migratory fish stocks.

The Coast Guard also participates in the Quadrilateral Defense Coordination Operational Working Group, or “Quads,” a collaboration between France, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand on maritime security in Oceania.

Relationships among these three regional partners are maturing, as well. Recently the Pacific Island Nations (PINs) and the Quad partners met together for the first time. “We’re broadening the Quads to include participation of the PINs,” said Capt. Eric Brown, the 14th District’s chief of response, “and therefore the Quad nations can better partner together operationally to make an impact on mutual interests between countries.”

For the FFA, these operational partnerships take the form of joint patrols, typically coordinated from the forum’s headquarters in Honiara, Solomon Islands. In April 2012, for example, a Coast Guard officer embedded at the forum’s Surveillance Center helped to dispatch assets participating in the multilateral Operation Rai Balang, which involved surveillance flights conducted by aircraft from participating Quad nations.

The Coast Guard also executes bilateral agreements with eight Pacific Island nations that allow joint maritime surveillance and boarding operations, in which a visiting law enforcement officer rides aboard – a shiprider – a Coast Guard vessel or aircraft and, essentially, uses that vessel as a platform for enforcing his or her nation’s EEZ. “All of our bilateral agreements are nested around our U.S. EEZs,” said Brown, “or they’re on regular transit lanes from one U.S. EEZ to another, in lucrative fishing areas where the U.S. fleet operates. So the agreements allow us to protect these highly mobile fishery stocks, to guard against foreign incursions in U.S. EEZs, and to ensure the U.S. fleet is fishing properly and is also safe.” The service exercises flag-state authority over any U.S. vessel more than 12 nautical miles off another country’s land boundary, no matter where it is.

Within the immense boundaries of  District 14, the Coast Guard also tries to leverage its own assets and those of its partners in the U.S. government. The district often takes advantage of the trans-Pacific voyages of vessels under the jurisdiction of the Coast Guard’s Pacific Area Command – large cutters such as the Jarvis, the Rush, and most recently the national security cutter Waesche – for use as platforms to conduct fisheries and security patrols, many of which feature a shiprider. In June 2011, for example, the CGCs Bertholf and Galveston Island, during an inbound transit for the Bertholf, conducted a five-day law enforcement surge operation in the heavily trafficked fishing grounds just north of the main Hawaiian Islands’ EEZ.

In 2009, the Coast Guard established a valuable partnership with the U.S. Navy that allowed the service to take advantage of the Pacific voyages of the 7th Fleet, first placing an officer aboard the Navy frigate USS Crommelin to conduct fisheries surveillance. For the past three years, Navy assets have served solely as surveillance platforms, as the secretary of defense has had a long-standing directive against using the Navy for domestic law enforcement – but that was set to change in April 2012, when the Office of the Secretary of Defense signed a memorandum of understanding, the Oceania Maritime Security Initiative (OMSI).

“With the OMSI signing,” said Brown, “we have the potential to bring a Coast Guard law enforcement detachment on board and actually exercise law enforcement authority, in accordance with the Posse Comitatus Act, from the deck of a naval ship. It’s something we do in other places throughout the world, mostly for drug law enforcement. This would be the first time it would be used primarily for fisheries law enforcement.”

From May 7-16, the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson (CVN 70) and Carrier Strike Group became the first carrier strike group to participate in maritime surveillance for District 14, during Vinson’s transit in both the U.S. 3rd and 7th Fleet areas of operation. According to the Coast Guard, the information that can be collected on Navy ships transiting the area can be extremely useful to the region, and hopefully will help reduce Oceania’s $1.7 billion annual regional gross domestic product loss to illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing.

The Coast Guard is already working with its international bilateral partners and WCPFC members to alter existing bilateral shiprider agreements and add U.S. Navy ships to lists of authorized law enforcement vessels. In the Pacific, as the 14th District continues to refine its capabilities and strengthen its alliances, these partnerships are the key to preserving these precious fish stocks.

“Each day, as we partner, we become more effective,” Brown said. “We have more shipriders, and we’re able to use maritime domain awareness tools to better position our operational units to guard against threats to our U.S. EEZs. So our units are actually doing more law enforcement, and helping to drive the compliance rates up – which is a good thing.”

This article first appeared in the Coast Guard Outlook 2012 Summer Edition.