Saving Seafood

All systems are ‘go’ for near-shore Alaska fisheries, state officials say

June 18, 2020 — All systems are go for keeping close tabs on fish and crab stocks in waters managed by the state, meaning out to three miles. While constraints from the coronavirus resulted in nearly all annual stock surveys being cut in deeper waters overseen by the federal government, it’s “closer to normal” closer to shore.

“While it’s not business as usual, we are conducting business in as close to normal fashion as we can,” said Forrest Bowers, deputy director of the commercial fisheries division of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

“We have kept all of our area offices open and all of our field projects in place to monitor salmon stocks around the state this summer, as well as our projects and support for other fisheries,” Bowers said, adding that Fish and Game has responded to the COVID-19 pandemic “very seriously” and has had strict protection plans in place since March.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

Bristol Bay Red King Crab Fishery Off to a Bumpy Start

October 28, 2019 — SEAFOOD NEWS — The Bristol Bay red king crab fishery is starting off with an abundance of drama, a near stand-down and tales of a drone scandal, and a paucity of male crab which keep getting bigger and bigger without a baby boom in the water and are the biggest on average in the history of the fishery.

The rationalized fleet is going for the lowest amount of red king crab since 1982, a storm is blowing in, permits not issued until the morning of the starting day, and apparently unfounded rumors of confidential crab data leaked from sailing drones.

The fleet of around 50 boats is targeting 3.8 million pounds of red king crab, the lowest amount since the harvest of 2.9 million pounds by 89 boats in 1982, the year of the great crash when the guideline harvest level was much larger at between 10 and 20 million pounds, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

The crabbers won’t be protesting in port and staying off the fishing grounds, since the federal regulators returned to work Tuesday following a three day weekend, and issued the “hired master” permits required by some of the boat captains.

At a pre-season meeting with fishermen sponsored by Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers at the Grand Aleutian Hotel Sunday, Bristol Mariner Capt. Tom Sureyan called for stand-down by members of the Inter-Cooperative Exchange, to avoid legal penalties if a boat was caught without the required permit.

The call for a stand-down reminded some at the Unalaska meeting of the days when fishermen met in hotel conference rooms and voted to go on strike for higher prices, although this was not nearly as emotional.

But despite the process slowed by a federal holiday, the Bristol Bay red king crab fishing fleet finally got all the paperwork in order before the start of the season on Tuesday at noon, the official opener, although some were staying in port awaiting a forecasted storm.

ADF&G shellfish biologist Ethan Nichols said Tuesday that 45 boats were registered red king crab, and more were expected, and would eventually rise to 45 yo 55 vessels, about the same as last year when 55 participated.

Nichols said most of the boats were staying in port Tuesday, with a storm forecasted with 40-knot winds and 30-foot waves on Wednesday. But several vessels had already left and were out on the grounds ready to go fishing he said.

Last year’s average legal male red king crab weighed 7.1 pounds, up from 6.8 pounds the year before and biologists think the reason bigger animals are more common is because small- and medium-size crab are less common. While nobody can say with certainty why the stocks are declining, environmental factors are a leading theory, with deep waters warming up, and he also said it appears Pacific cod are munching more of the shellfish.

According to ADF&G records, 7.1 pounds per average male Bristol Bay red king crab is the heaviest ever, based on data going back to 1966.

Susan Hall, of the National Marine Fisheries RAM division in Juneau, said all the permits were issued on Tuesday morning, hours before the fishery opened, and as required by law. She said there was an “expectation” that the permits would be issued over the weekend, but that didn’t happen with federal offices closed Monday for Columbus Day.

ICE Executive Director Jake Jacobsen said the permits were delayed because of an earlier delay caused by federal computer problems, which slowed the issuance of individual fishing quotas to three days instead of a few hours.

“We’re not very happy about it,” said Jacobsen, saying some fishermen might have left for the grounds a day earlier if they had all their permits. “Almost half of the fleet didn’t have permits,” he said.

“They just ghosted us, they went black, they just didn’t respond” after federal offices closed Friday afternoon for the long weekend, Jacobsen said, adding that when the regulators returned to work Tuesday morning they gave the matter their full attention.

“It was an ordeal,” he said.

Jacobsen said the permit problem affected about half the ICE fleet, so the board of directors sought a voluntary stand-down to give all the boats an equal start. Of the 52 vessels in ICE, 27 boats already had their permits, while 25 did not, he said.

The hired master permits are only required for boats where the captain doesn’t own any IFQs, or individual fishing quotas, according to Krista Milani of the National Marine Fisheries Service in Unalaska. She said captains with a leased quota need the permits.

In a bright note, prices are looking good.

“I’m fairly confident we’ll get more than last year, but you never know for sure until the crab is sold,” Jacobsen said.

Last year’s final price was $10.53 a pound, above the advance price of $8.40 per pound.

Jacobsen doubted a fishery would even have happened with such a small quota in a pre-rationalized era when over 200 boats would compete for crab, and would probably catch excessive quantities. But now, with each boat assigned a specific amount, the fishery is “fairly easy to manage” he said.

At the Sunday hotel meeting and pizza party, ABSC Executive Director Jamie Goen also reported a rumor that confidential data on the location of tagged red king crab had been leaked by the Saildrones studying the crabs’ movement in a joint project of the Bering Sea Fisheries Research Foundation and the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration.

Goen said it sounded like a bogus story, and couldn’t believe a professional company like Saildrone would improperly release the latitudes and longitudes of where crab were found. Saildrone is based in the San Francisco area, founded by Richard Jenkins who set the world record for fastest wind-propelled land vehicle.

The two red unmanned sailing drones were launched recently in Unalaska to track crab tagged this summer by a fishing vessel hired for crab research, the Royal American, according to Leah Zacher of NOAA, based in Kodiak. The drones were set to sail between Sept. 26 and Nov. 10.

The crab were caught in a pot and then tagged over the summer during a survey also involving trawl gear to study a different crab species, Tanners, she said.

The allegedly leaked data might help fishermen find crab faster, instead of wasting time dropping pots into unproductive areas of the sea floor in a lean year, according to one theory, though that would be hard to prove according to Zacher who said an investigation turned up no leaks.

“As far as we can tell, it’s an unfounded rumor, and there’s nothing to this,” according to Zacher.

Jacobsen said he too heard the rumor which supposedly originated in a local bar where a technician disclosed location information, not that it would have done much good. “I don’t think it really would have helped anybody anyway,” Jacobsen said. ABSC is the science arm of ICE.

This story was originally published on SeafoodNews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.

Alaska’s hatchery program supports healthy harvests

October 15, 2019 — In the early 1970s, Alaska’s salmon harvests were at an all-time low. Annual statewide harvests for all salmon species were down to nearly 20 million fish. As all Alaskans trying to fish for their business or sport or to fill a freezer at that time know, the lack of reliable harvests resulted in deep and painful impacts in our state and communities. Selective openings and even complete fishery closures failed to reverse the decline. So, too, did efforts to stop foreign vessels from fishing in state waters. It was a time, as the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner observed in 1970, “dominated by tragedy, disaster, intrigue and double-dealing.”

Undaunted, Alaskans banded together to overhaul state fisheries. In 1969, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game started a rehabilitation program to build fish ladders, stock lakes with smolt, and remove log jams and other obstacles from salmon-producing streams. In 1973, voters amended the state constitution’s “no exclusive right of fishery” clause, putting into place limited-entry and hatchery production. And in 1976, Alaska’s congressional delegation helped pass the Magnuson-Stevens Act, which established a federally managed exclusive economic zone up to 200 miles offshore.

To protect wild salmon stocks from overfishing and to support the sport, subsistence and commercial users whose livelihoods depended on the salmon fishery, the Alaska Legislature expanded the hatchery program. Starting in 1974, Fish and Game enabled legislation providing authority for private non-profit, or PNP, hatcheries to operate and to harvest salmon for brood stock and cost recovery. By 1977, the first hatchery fish had returned from the ocean, relieving harvest pressure on wild stocks.

Read the full opinion piece at the Anchorage Daily News

ALASKA: Emerging mariculture industry seeks to streamline permitting

May 6, 2019 — Alaska may be famous for its wild fish, but some are working to make room in the state’s waters for more shellfish, kelp, and crabs on aquatic farms.

Mariculture is a hot topic in fisheries right now. Essentially, mariculture can be defined as the cultivation of plants or animals in controlled saltwater environments, but in Alaska, it doesn’t include finfish, as that’s illegal in the state. So mariculture farmers have stuck to primarily kelp and oysters so far, but they’re starting to get more adventurous.

As of December 2018, 58 aquatic farms were operating in the state along with five hatcheries and seven nurseries, though only 41 of the farms documented production in 2017, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

Oysters are still the most widely grown product, though kelp is gaining ground; after the first operations for kelp were permitted in 2016, four farms had produced 16,570 pounds of ribbon and sugar kelp by the following year.

Read the full story at the Alaska Journal of Commerce 

Brighter 2019 seen for Alaska’s Copper River sockeye, but ‘blob’ effect unknown

January 28, 2019 — On the heels of the second-worst salmon season in the history of Alaska’s Copper River district, 2019 is estimated to see healthier returns.

The commercial sockeye salmon fishery in the central region of the US’ northernmost state is closely watched by US retailers and consumers as it is the first Alaska season annually to open and is accompanied by significant media coverage. Last year though, it quickly became apparent that there wasn’t much to see.

Despite an initial Alaska Department of Fish & Game (ADF&G) that 942,000 sockeye would be caught in 2018– the range estimated between 536,000 to 1.4 million  — only 44,318 sockeye were.

In 2019, ADF&G predicts a total Copper River sockeye harvest of 955,000, an estimate made within the range of 351,000 to 1.16m. The 10-year average harvest for the district is 1.25m sockeye, will includes 1.04m wild-caught fish.

“It’s a pretty decent forecast,” Stormy Haught, an ADF&G biologist based in Cordova, Alaska, told Undercurrent News. “But it definitely deserves some caution. For the Copper River last year we used this same method and over-forecast by over a million fish.”

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Smaller than average sockeye return predicted for Alaska’s Bristol Bay in 2019

November 12, 2018 — The heart of Alaska’s most prolific salmon fishery, Bristol Bay, is projected to see a return of 40 million sockeye in 2019, under the 10-year average of 44m sockeye, biologists at the Alaska Department of Fish & Game (ADF&G) predicted.

The return — a range of 27.9m to 52.5m sockeye has been estimated — would still be larger than the 55-year average of 34.2m sockeye, the agency said.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Alaska’s Seafood Industry Faces the Blob

November 5, 2018 — Challenging statewide salmon harvests have dominated head­lines, with record-high sockeye production in Bristol Bay being the state’s primary saving grace. However, salmon are not the only fish in the sea keeping the state’s fisheries afloat, with many fishermen relying on groundfish, herring, and miscellaneous shellfish to make ends meet. Some fishermen use alternative fisheries as a way to balance their portfolios, while others focus entirely on a single target species ranging from Dungeness crab to sablefish. “In a typical year, Alaska’s most valuable fisheries [measured by value of harvest] include salmon, pollock, Pacific cod, crab, halibut, and black cod,” says Garrett Evridge, an economist with McDowell Group, an Alaska-based research firm.

In 2017, salmon was the most valuable fish group. Harvest of all five salmon species totaled more than $781 million in ex-vessel value, the amount paid to fishermen for their catch. However, Evridge notes that 2018 has been a disappointing year for many salmon fisheries, a statewide concern.

“Salmon across the state have come in weaker than forecast, particularly in the North Gulf of Alaska,” says Bert Lewis, the Central Region supervisor of the Division of Commercial Fisheries for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADFG). “In the region I work, we saw some of the lowest returns of sockeye salmon in recent history with the exception of Bristol Bay, where we had the biggest run on record.”

The sockeye salmon harvest is estimated to be 37 percent of the recent ten-year average, making it the smallest since 1975—all other smaller harvests date back to the 1800s.

The “blob”—a warm water anomaly that washed into the Gulf of Alaska in 2015—is thought to be the culprit. With most sockeye salmon spending three years in the ocean, those returning this year initially swam out into warmer waters, which researchers speculate disrupted the food webs that support the salmon, decreasing their survivorship and resulting in poor returns this year.

“That concept is supported by the record return we saw in Bristol Bay, with close to 65 million sockeye returning that, in 2015, came out into the Bering Sea, which did not have this warm-water anomaly,” Lewis says.

However, poor harvests weren’t limited to sockeye: Chinook, chum, and pink numbers all came in low.

“In the Southeast, total salmon harvest will be about 30 percent of the recent ten-year average, due primarily to poor pink salmon run, since pink salmon usually make up most of the harvest,” says Steve Heinl, a regional research biologist for ADFG in Southeast.

“Pink salmon harvest is 19 percent of the recent ten-year average and the smallest since 1976,” Heinl says. “Pink harvest will be less than half of the harvest in 2016 [18.4 million fish], which spurred a formal declaration of disaster.”

Levels are well below ADFG’s forecast of 23 million pink salmon, though only slightly below the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecast of 10 million to 23 million.

As of late August, chum salmon harvest to date was 69 percent of the recent ten-year average; Chinook harvest was at 30 percent of recent ten-year average; and coho harvest was on track to be lowest in thirty years, says Heinl.

Though state numbers are low, harvest success varied dramatically among systems. In Southeast, there were excellent Sockeye runs at Chilkoot Lake and Redoubt Lake, which stood in stark contrast to poor runs in places such as Situk River, where the fishery was closed for most of the season.

Read the full story at Alaska Business

 

Report confirms dismal state of salmon fishing on Alaska Peninsula

October 26, 2018 —  Commercial salmon fishing on the Alaskan Peninsula, Aleutian Islands and the Atka-Amlia Islands this year was a far cry from the 2017 season, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G) confirms in a summary of the harvest numbers published Oct. 24.

Commercial harvesters in the region caught 3.7 million sockeye salmon, 48% fewer than the 7.1m caught in 2017, according to ADF&G. There were also far fewer pinks (805,639 in 2018 vs. 21.8m in 2017) and chum (1.2m vs. 2.0m in 2017) caught.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Snow crab prices not melting any time soon

February 6, 2018 — The snow will eventually melt in the US state of Alaska and the Maritime provinces of Canada, but you better get used to the high prices of snow crab because they are sticking around for a while.

A global shortage of the species is expected to continue for a third straight year in 2018, thanks to a combination of reduced catches across North America and continuous demand in Asia, a panel of speakers suggested at a conference in Miami, Florida, last month.

There will be about 104,000 metric tons of snow crab available, down 10% from the more than 114,000t landed worldwide in 2017 and 76% below the 150,000t landed in 2015, based on data shared during a shellfish panel at the National Fisheries Institute’s Global Seafood Market Conference (GSMC).

The result: Five-to-eight ounce packages of legs and shoulders are selling for $8 per pound wholesale in the US.

It’s leading seafood dealers in the US to more often offer their clients less expensive substitutes.

Brian Cooper, a partner at Sea Trek Enterprises, an East Greenwich, Rhode Island-based importer of crab and scallops, told Undercurrent News that his company normally sells anywhere from 200 to 300 loads (1,000 cases each) of snow crab each year. But he’s skeptical about matching that number in 2018 and is increasingly promoting rock crab, a species most often found in Washington State’s Puget Sound. It’s popular in Asian markets.

“You can’t charge $20 for a buffet at a Chinese restaurant and put an $8 snow crab in there,” he said. “That’s not going to work.”

Lobster, shrimp, or even chicken and beef could also be used as replacements on menus, said one large seafood restaurant executive at the GSMC event.

“It’s easier to take things off a menu than to put them back on,” he added.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

 

Fishermen forced to share pounds in herring fishery

February 1, 2017 — New restrictions are being put into place for the upcoming spawn-on-kelp herring fishery in Southeast Alaska to address a declining population. For the first time, fishermen are required to share spawning structures with several others. KFSK’s Angela Denning reports:

The spawn-on-kelp fishery allows fishermen to catch herring near Craig and Klawock and put them into floating net pens called pounds. Blades of kelp are also put in there for the herring to spawn on. The eggs are then sold to Asian markets.

Scott Walker is the Area Management Biologist for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game in Ketchikan. He’s been helping manage the spawn-on-kelp fishery since it began in 1992.

“We have been seeing throughout Southeast Alaska right now a downturn of herring stocks,” Walker said.

Read the full story at KFSK Community Radio