I don't know what "significant portion" means, or why it would be relevant to my viewpoint, but thanks for giving me a further opportunity to elaborate on charters. The longliners cried for years that the charter operators were crowding into their (free) quotas, implying or stating that the charters were taking fish away from them. That, of course, was the big lie, one that the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, was only too eager to embrace.

In reality, the charter operators are water taxis that bring fishermen to the halibut holes. The charter crew cannot catch or keep one ounce of halibut. Only the client fishermen - and I think that it is safe to assume that they are almost all Americans, and probably mostly Alaskans - can keep those halibut. So who owns the charter boat is irrelevant, and is trotted out as a straw man.

Now, with charter IFQs, Americans get to pay more for charters that offer dramatically reduced catch limits. For fish we used to own. Thanks to greed.