REEDSPORT - About a dozen commercial crabbers - and some trawlers and salmon trollers, too - met Thursday evening with one thing on their minds: access to fishing grounds.

Several proposals are being considered for wave energy parks off the Oregon coast that would consist of several buoys - up to 200 or so - anchored to the seafloor. The footprint could be as much as 3 square miles of ground, not including the off-limits area surrounding the wave parks.

But it's the depth at which the parks would be placed that has fishermen upset.

The companies who own the wave buoy technology and who have applied for parks off of Gardiner, Coos County and Bandon - Ocean Power Technologies and Finavera Renewables - have said the buoys need to be placed on sandy ocean bottoms, between about 25 and 40 fathoms.

It's the same area where commercial crabbers place their pots in the wintertime.

Those depths are the same ones used by salmon trollers during the summer.

Beach draggers (trawlers towing nets) can only access some species of fish at those depths.

“There's nothing positive here for the fishing industry,” salmon troller and Port of Umpqua Commissioner Barry Nelson said.

The situation is similar to a few years ago, when communications corporations began to place undersea cables on the ocean floor. It would have displaced many trawlers from traditional fishing grounds but the fishing industry and communications companies eventually - though the process was not easy - came to a resolution that would work for both sides. Part of that solution resulted in cable committees designed to keep the lines of communication open between the fleet and the telecommunications companies and also setting aside funds to compensate a fisherman should his net get hung up on a cable. The belief was that a cooperative approach would be more likely to result in the prevention of damage to cables than threats of stiff civil and criminal penalties.

The cooperative agreement has worked for almost a decade.

But in Reedsport at the Port of Umpqua, only the tentative first steps were taken.

Port Commissioner and Oregon Solutions team co-convener Keith Tymchuk said there was a benefit to the fishermen - and OPT, the company proposing the wave energy park off Gardiner - by their attendance.

“You are part of the process, part of the dialogue,” Tymchuk said.

Commercial crabbers agreed Wednesday, at the Oregon Dungeness Crab Commission meeting, to begin developing an ad campaign to promote the industry's perspective.

ODCC Interim Administrator Hugh Link read a letter outlining the fleet's perspective on Thursday night:

€ Oregon crabbers are willing to share access to the areas of the ocean, but they fear that once the wave energy buoys are placed, those areas will be permanently off limits to fishermen. “Š the only area that we feel it is fair to place the buoys in is an area where these buoys will not displace any fishing on a permanent basis,” the letter said.

€ that placing the buoys in depths between 27 and 32 fathoms off Reedsport is unacceptable and cost-prohibitive for fishermen;

€ The fleet is sorry that it is too costly for OPT to locate their huge anchors on hard bottom, but Oregon crabbers need the sandy bottom to fish the crab's habitat. “Therefore, we require that wave energy buoys and their anchors not be placed on or above sandy bottom in Oregon;” and

€ as a commodity commission, ODCC's role is to protect the commodity it represents and the fleet's ability to catch Dungeness is threatened by wave projects off Oregon.

“We respectfully request that OPT find a way to share, not take, traditional fishing grounds away from Oregon fishermen,” the letter concluded.

Tymchuk said there still is time to find some resolution to the issues and that he would share the crabbers' issues with OPT.

“This is a process I hope we can continue,” Tymchuk said.

Fishermen also requested OPT representatives be present at the next meeting. Tymchuk agreed that if that was what fishermen wanted, OPT spokesman Steve Kopf would be available to talk with the fleet. A tentative meeting was set for the middle of June.

“What is different here,” Tymchuk said, “is that this is a focused discussion rather than (talking about) larger issues.”