Saving Seafood

Trawl overhaul? Alaska fishermen go to bat for kings and crabs

October 8, 2021 — Animosity toward Alaska’s trawl fleet reached a fever pitch over the summer. In most parts of the state, where salmon fishing would have kept stakeholders busy, lackluster returns and some closures instead gave thousands of fishermen more time to mull over answers to where the fish may have gone.

Although Alaska’s overall salmon returns have been strong this year, the results are stratified. King salmon returns, specifically, have been in a long and steady decline. Statewide, king landings — by number of fish — have declined by more than 70 percent in the last 40 years, from a high of 875,630 fish in 1982 to 265,081 in 2020. The harvest so far for 2021 is about 212,000 fish.

When accounting for landings by weight, the reduction is almost 85 percent over the same period, from 16.9 million pounds in 1982 to 2.9 million in 2020, according to the Alaska Department of Fish & Game.

As council meetings went virtual during the pandemic-induced shutdowns, participation and feedback from local stakeholders increased significantly.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

 

Amid an unprecedented collapse in Alaska Yukon River salmon, no one can say for certain why there are so few fish

September 7, 2021 — A single slick silver salmon lay flat in the center of a floating dock.

The lone coho was the only fish that turned up in the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s test net that mid-August evening. A technician stooped low in her orange rubber gloves and sandals for measurements.

Test nets are one of the tools that fisheries managers use to understand what’s happening with the salmon runs on the Lower Yukon River. Any of the fish caught, once sampled, are given to local residents for food. In normal times, when big pulses of chum surge into the river, managers sometimes have 50 or a hundred fish at a time to donate. But this year, test nets sometimes went as long as three days without a single salmon. People stopped bothering to even check the bins set down the road from the AC store.

So it was a big deal that hours earlier during the morning run, the test nets yielded a catch.

“Word traveled fast that we got three fish,” said biologist Courtney Berry.

“Fishing for water all summer has been … boring,” Berry said.

The salmon situation this year on the Yukon is bad. Kings have been in decline for years, here and almost everywhere else in the state. This summer was the fourth lowest count of kings in the Yukon since 1995.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

 

Alaska’s 2021 salmon harvest has blown past the season’s forecast

August 31, 2021 — Alaska’s 2021 salmon harvest has blown past the forecast and by Aug. 27 had topped 201 million fish, well above the 190 million projected at the start of the season.

The catch was bolstered by a surge of pink salmon to the three top-producing regions: Prince William Sound, Southeast and Kodiak, combined with strong landings of sockeyes.

“Pink salmon runs are over 95% complete, based on average run timing. Effort drops off quickly this late in the season, so it is difficult to predict where that harvest will end up,” said Forrest Bowers, deputy director of the Commercial Fisheries Division at the Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game. “My guess is up to another half million late-run sockeye salmon and perhaps 10 million pink salmon will be harvested. If that occurs, we will end up with around 143 million pink salmon, 54 million sockeye, and 207 million total salmon harvested. 2021 could end up being the sixth-largest sockeye and sixth- or seventh-largest pink salmon harvest on record.”

Pinks are the “bread and butter” catch for Alaska salmon fishermen and total landings were approaching 137 million, well above the 124 million projected for this season.

At Prince William Sound, which had a catch forecast of about 25 million pinks, nearly 62 million had crossed the docks.

“Wild stocks are returning stronger than anticipated (to PWS) given the uncertainty about spawning success from the 2019 parent year which was negatively impacted by drought conditions,” said the weekly Fish and Game inseason summary.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

ALASKA: Subsistence users, scientists seek answers for chum salmon declines

August 31, 2021 — Bill Alstrom lives in St. Mary’s on the lower Yukon River. It used to be that if he wanted fresh salmon for dinner, he’d throw a net in the river to catch a couple. But with fishing closures this season, he can’t do that anymore.

“It’s hard to comprehend that this is happening in my lifetime,” said Alstrom. “It makes me sad just thinking about it.”

Chum salmon stocks have sharply declined over the last two years in Western Alaska. It’s a major problem because people in the region, like Alstrom, depend heavily on the fish for food and for work. With chinook salmon low for decades, chum were the fish that families could depend on until last year, when the summer chum run dropped below half of its usual numbers. This year, the run dropped even further, to record lows. The State of Alaska has closed fishing for chum to protect the runs.

Scientists are in the early stages of trying to understand the crash.

Biologist Katie Howard with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game said that the chum declines are not just occurring in the Yukon River.

“When we talk to colleagues in the Lower 48 and Canada, Japan, Russia, they are all reporting really poor chum runs,” she said. “So it’s not just a Yukon phenomenon. It’s not just an Alaska phenomenon, but pretty much everywhere.”.

So why are the chum numbers so low? The short answer is that no one really knows for sure. But there are a lot of theories.

Every week during the summer, subsistence users, biologists and fishery managers gather on a weekly teleconference hosted by the Yukon River Drainage Fisheries Association. They share information and ask each other questions, and the subsistence users bring up one theory for the decline again and again: bycatch.

Read the full story at Alaska Public Media

ALASKA: Kenai River sockeye run over-escaped by 1 million fish

August 27, 2021 — Nearly 2.5 million late-run sockeye are projected to pass through the Kenai River by the end of the month, over-escaping the river by over 1 million fish.

Those numbers concern fishermen like Joe Dragseth, a drift-netter in Kenai. He said he worries about the health of the river. And, he said, it’s unfair commercial fishermen have been restricted while so many fish have made it up the river.

“Basically, they’re taking the living away from us,” he said.

Alaska Department of Fish and Game sets both in-river and sustainable escapement goals for the run each season. The philosophy is returns will be best if the run falls between those goalposts.

This season, and the last several seasons, the sockeye run has surpassed the upper limit of those goals.

This year, the department set an in-river escapement goal of 1 million to 1.2 million for the run. Now, it’s projecting 2.4 million fish will pass through the sonar at mile 19 of the Kenai River by the end of the month.

For Kenai Peninsula set-netters, who’ve had abbreviated fishing seasons due to “paired restrictions” with the Kenai River king run, it’s been particularly hard to watch.

Read the full story at Alaska Public Media

Court case is final hope for Inlet drifters

August 27, 2021 — A late-season bumper run of sockeye salmon has pushed the Kenai River to its highest escapement in more than a decade.

Unfortunately for the commercial fishermen in Upper Cook Inlet, they have had to watch many of them go by.

Over the course of the season, Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologists upgraded the estimate for the run’s escapement multiple times, upping the in-river bag limits for the sportfishery and opening some additional time for the drift gillnet fleet.

With the setnet fleet out of the water after July 20 because of poor king salmon returns to the Kenai, controlling sockeye escapements to the Kenai and Kasilof fell on the drift fleet and on the in-river dipnet and sportfisheries. Both rivers are ending their seasons significantly greater than the upper end of their escapement goals.

ADFG is projecting a final escapement in the Kasilof of 519,000 sockeye compared to the top end of the escapement goal of 320,000; the sustainable escapement goal for the Kenai River has a top end of 1.3 million and ADFG is projecting an in-river run of about 2.4 million sockeye.

Unless something changes, the drift fleet is likely to lose a major chunk of their fishing area at the end of this year, too.

The National Marine Fisheries Service is currently working its way through the regulations review process for a new fishery management plan amendment that will close the federal waters of Cook Inlet to salmon fishing. That section, known as the Exclusive Economic Zone or EEZ, covers the section of Cook Inlet that’s three nautical miles and farther offshore; drifters typically harvest half or more of their salmon from there during the season.

“For most of the fleet, the EEZ is the preferred area for fishing,” said Erik Huebsch, a drifter and vice president of the United Cook Inlet Drift Association. “Without access to the EEZ, the drift fleet cannot harvest enough salmon to meet expenses and cannot afford to operate.

Read the full story at the Alaska Journal of Commerce

ALASKA: Sockeye run overescaped by 1 million fish

August 25, 2021 — Nearly 2.5 million late-run sockeye are projected to pass through the Kenai River by the end of the month, overescaping the river by over one million fish.

Those numbers concern fishermen like Joe Dragseth, a drift-netter in Kenai. He said he worries about the health of the river. And he said it’s unfair commercial fishermen have been restricted while so many fish have made it up the river.

“Basically, they’re taking the living away from us,” he said.

Alaska Department of Fish and Game sets both in-river and sustainable escapement goals for the run each season. The philosophy is returns will be best if the run falls between those goalposts.

Read the full story at KDLL

Record Salmon in One Place. Barely Any in Another. Alarm All Around.

August 16, 2021 — This summer, fishers in the world’s largest wild salmon habitat pulled a record-breaking 65 million sockeye salmon from Alaska’s Bristol Bay, beating the 2018 record by more than three million fish.

But on the Yukon River, about 500 miles to the north, salmon were alarmingly absent. This summer’s chum run was the lowest on record, with only 153,000 fish counted in the river at the Pilot Station sonar — a stark contrast to the 1.7 million chum running in year’s past. The king salmon runs were also critically low this summer — the third lowest on record. The Yukon’s fall run is also shaping up to be sparse.

The disparity between the fisheries is concerning — a possible bellwether for the chaotic consequences of climate change; competition between wild and hatchery fish; and commercial fishing bycatch.

“This is something we’ve never seen before,” said Sabrina Garcia, a research biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. “I think that we’re starting to see changes due to climate change, and I think that we’re going to continue to see more changes, but we need more years of data.”

The low runs have had ripple effects for communities along the Yukon River and its tributaries — the Andreafski, Innoko, Anvik, Porcupine, Tanana and Koyukuk Rivers — resulting in a devastating blow to the people relying on salmon as a food staple, as feed for sled dogs and as an integral and enriching cultural tradition spanning millenniums.

Read the full story at The New York Times

‘Salmon is Life’: For Native Alaskans, Salmon Declines Pose Existential Crisis

August 12, 2021 — In St. Mary’s, Alaska, the people of the Yupiit of Andreafski look to the south wind, the budding tree leaves, and even the formations of migrating birds to discern whether the pulse of salmon returning upriver to spawn will be strong. Serena Fitka grew up in this tiny Yukon River village, and though she now lives in Valdez, she returns home every summer with her family, to partake in the traditional salmon harvest that is both the community’s main source of sustenance and the fabric of its culture.

This year, however, abysmally low salmon runs in the Yukon River have led Alaska’s Department of Fish and Game (ADFG) to impose a moratorium on fishing for Chinook (or King) and Chum salmon in the mighty river, which runs for 2,000 miles from the Bering Sea to Canada’s Yukon Territory. While Yukon run sizes for both salmon species numbered about 1.9 million in the past, this year they’re projected to be less than 430,000. The moratorium impacts 40 villages and roughly 11,000 people, 90 percent of whom are Indigenous Alaskans. And many have no access to grocery stores or any other source of food besides what they can hunt or harvest.

On a recent trip to St. Mary’s, Fitka said she felt depressed. “I walk on to the riverbank, and I look at the river and . . . I want to go get fish, but I can’t. And that’s how everyone was feeling this year. People came to me and said, ‘I don’t know what to do.’” Fitka is executive director of the Yukon River Drainage Fisheries Association, which represents the interests of Indigenous subsistence fishermen on the Yukon River.

Read the full story at Civil Eats

Processor executives and biologists consider what smaller fish mean for Bristol Bay

August 6, 2021 — The average Bristol Bay sockeye this year is smaller. That’s part of a trend over the past four decades, as increasingly smaller fish have returned to the bay amid larger salmon runs and warming oceans. Processor executives and biologists now have to consider what smaller fish mean for Bristol Bay.

Bristol Bay is home to the largest sockeye run on the planet. But while the size of the run broke records, the fish are getting smaller.

Last year’s average weight for sockeye was 5.1 pounds. But the 2021 average was just 4.5 pounds, according to the McKinley Research Group.

Jon Hickman is the executive vice president of operations for Peter Pan Seafoods. He says the smaller fish play a role in how much time processors spend processing.

“Smaller fish are going to take longer to process,” he said. “So you’re handling a 4 pound fish or a 3 pound fish, as opposed to a 5 pound fish so every time you handle one there’s a two pound difference. There’s more labor going into those smaller fish. You get more labor into them, there’s more costs associated with those smaller fish.”

Hickman says he isn’t worried about how the smaller fish will play in Peter Pan’s markets — demand is good, and he’s comfortable with the market for fish big and small.

Read the full story at KDLG