All Trawler Owners, Captains and Crew (draggers, shrimpers, whiting) - you are invited to attend one of our local port meetings. Lunch is provided. We will provide a short presentation on potential Subsea Cables landing off the Washington coast. Please attend and pick up a new thumb-drive (v12.1) and a complimentary OFCC hat.

See you there! For more information, please call OFCC at (503) 325-2285 or (503) 440-3569, or email us at  staff@ofcc.com.

OFCC Version 12.1 is available for your plotters, adding the as-laid Bifrost Cable route. Bifrost lands a few miles North of Neskowin, between Cascade Hd and Cape Kiwanda.

V12 thumb drives are available at the OFCC office at 2021 Marine Dr., Suite 102; email: staff@ofcc.com; or call 503.325.2285 (or Scott at 503.440.3569).

The Oregon segment of the Bifrost Cable lands in South Tillamook County near Neskowin, OR. This cable connects to the Los Angelas area and Rosarito, Mexico on the west coast of North America, and Guam, the Philippines, Indonesia and Singapore in the Asia-Pacific region. This is the world’s first subsea cable system to directly connect Singapore to the West Coast of North America via Indonesia through the Java Sea and the Celebs Sea.

AMCS LLC, a subsidiary of AWS joined the OFCC on July 29, 2022. They are the US landing party for the consortium of cable owners that commissioned the Bifrost Cable. The original cable route was provided to the OFCC where it was plotted in OLEX, then reviewed and modified by fishermen from Newport, Oregon who were very familiar with the sea bottom in the area. The modified route was further modified by cable route engineers to make sure the route conformed to standards for cable laying. In Sept. of 2021 a survey ship did a detailed survey of the cable route on the Oregon shelf and slope with two Oregon fishermen on board to assist. The cable was built for the route following the cable route survey. The French cableship Ile De Brehat departed San Francisco Aug. 14, 2024, to begin the installation of the Oregon leg of the cable, which took over 1 month to complete. Following the installation, the OSV Nautilus began post-lay inspection and burial (PLIB) which continued until the end of October 2024.

A steep slope near the offshore end of the trawl grounds prevented plow burial, but this area was retro buried by a jetting ROV on the OSV Nautilus. Jetting burial is good but doesn’t get the deep burial that modern cable plows achieve. The OFCC has flagged the area (Area 1) from about 1.6 nm inshore of the EFH 700 fm line out to the EFH 700 line as having lower burial and have deemed it a Precautionary Area where extra vigilance is suggested.

Bifrost Precautionary Area 1



Bifrost Precautionary Area 2

A second area of jetting burial was needed at Area 2 where the ship was able to get burial on most of the site, but a 17-meter section has burial that is less than .5 m. This is identified as the Area 2 Precautionary Area. Please take the utmost care when fishing in this area due to a (17meter) length of shallow buried cable. On our plotter programs, both these areas have a .25nm yellow boundary around the areas of lower burial.

Jupiter Cable

Facebook joined the OFCC on June 20, 2018, becoming the ninth submarine cable owner, joining General Communications, Inc. (GCI), Alaska Communications (ACS), Verizon, Tata Communications, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, GU Holdings Inc. (Google), Microsoft Infrastructure Group, LLC., and Hawaiki Submarine Cable USA LLC. Facebook is one of the consortium owners of the Jupiter cable system. The Jupiter system will land in California and in Oregon. The California portion has been completed. Phase 1 of the Oregon landing of the Jupiter system, going west from 3 ½ miles offshore, was in Summer 2020 off Sand Lake, near Cape Kiwanda. The near shore portion of the installation was completed in fall 2021. There is more testing and network procedures to complete before going live some time in 2022. Facebook worked with the Oregon fishing industry to get the best route crossing the shelf and slope. Jupiter will cross the Pacific Ocean to Japan and the Philippines, a total length of 4,860 nm. The cable has a design capacity of 60 Tbps. SubCom is the manufacturer and installer.

Successful Science Platform and Gear Recovery

On July 7, 2018 the RV Bold Horizon, using a small Remote Operated Vehicle (ROV), successfully recovered fishing gear and the sub-surface platform the gear was fouled on. The science platform, part of the Ocean Observatories Initiative, was struck by trawl gear on September 16, 2017, disabling the platform and the shallow-water profiler that was onboard. Pelagic Research Services, which was contracted to recover the platform and gear, found the platform and a trawl door about 38 fms off the bottom in 304 fms of water. OFCC Board member and fisherman Gary Wintersteen assisted with the recovery. Photos courtesy of Gary Wintersteen. More photos and video are available on our Facebook page.

Since its inception, the committee works to follow the goals of its charter - to facilitate communication, coordination and cooperation between the fishing industry and the submarine cable industry and to inform the fishing fleet of appropriate operation procedures.