Saving Seafood

ALASKA: Pink salmon disaster relief payments delayed

November 27, 2019 — Federal relief payments to permit holders who participated in the disastrous 2016 Gulf of Alaska pink salmon fishery have hit another snag, and now won’t be forthcoming until March.

News of the payment delay, which was slated to be within six to eight weeks of the Oct. 31 deadline for skipper applications for relief reached Rep. Louise Stutes, R-Kodiak, on Nov. 15.

Permit holders can now expect to receive their disbursements six to eight weeks after the Jan. 31 deadline, she said.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game is in the process of updating information on the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission website to explain the situation and post a new timeline. Permit holders should keep an eye out on psmfc.org for changes.

According to AD&G, the delay was needed because it became apparent to the agency that there was very consistent underreporting by the skippers of crew in certain fisheries.  Additionally, only 65 percent of permit holder applications were returned to the PSMFC, the interstate compact agency named to administer these disaster funds.

Read the full story at The Cordoba Times

ALASKA: Payments For 2016 Pink Salmon Fishery Disaster Delayed

November 21, 2019 — SEAFOOD NEWS — Fishermen who were expecting payments from the 2016 Gulf of Alaska pink salmon fishery disaster relief in December will have to wait until March to receive their checks, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

Many Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission permit holder applicants misreported their crew percentages or did not list any crew at all, said Karla Bush, the Fish and Game federal fisheries coordinator.

The Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission will delay payments until after the crew member application deadline on Jan. 31.

“I know participants were expecting checks to come six to eight weeks after the Oct. 31 deadline. That’s now going to be pushed back,” Bush said.

The Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission is an interstate agency that helps resource agencies and the fishing industry manage fisheries resources. Member states include Alaska, California, Oregon, Washington and Idaho.

After crew members send in their applications, Fish and Game will match crew members to the permit holders they work for. Payments will be sent to permit holders and crew at the same time, Bush said.

Payments to crew will be deducted from the permit holder’s total disaster payment based on the crew shares provided in the permit holder’s application.

The amount each permit holder received was calculated by averaging the value of pink salmon caught in even years from 2006 to 2014, minus the value of fish caught in 2016.

However, fishermen were concerned that the payment calculation did not take into account the unique circumstances in the fishing industry.

For example, some fishermen switched from a lower volume gear type to a higher volume gear type. Others had a partial catch history instead of a full or no catch history, causing their payments to be substantially less than others who fished alongside them, according to a letter written by Rep. Louise Stutes, R-Kodiak.

To address such issues and review calculations, an appeal process was put in place. Friday was the deadline to appeal.

These payments are part of the $53.8 million approved by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in July to restore losses caused by a poor 2016 salmon season in the Gulf of Alaska. The areas receiving funds are Kodiak, Prince William Sound, Chignik, Lower Cook Inlet, South Alaska Peninsula, Southeast Alaska and Yakutat.

Fishery permit holders and crew will receive $31 million, fish processors will receive $17.7, municipalities will receive $2.4 million and $3.63 million will go to research.

The payments to municipalities will be based on losses of fish taxes, Bush said.

Calculations for municipality payments are not yet available because NOAA is working the office of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget on the approval process.

Municipalities will use the funds for specific projects related to the pink salmon fishery such as projects that support the pink salmon fishing fleet.

“The people at NOAA grants are trying to work with the office of OMB in the White House to see at what level the projects need to be approved,” Bush said. “OMB wants to approve the list of projects that each municipality will put forward themselves. We know that that will cause some additional delays, so we hope those will be approved by Pacific States or NOAA grants and not have to be forwarded all the way to the highest level.”

Fish and Game is also waiting on fishery tax information from the Alaska Department of Revenue as a basis to calculate the payments, Bush said.

The tax information is vital before calculating the payment amount, because the Department of Revenue does a “split between the cities and boroughs and so I would expect the city of Kodiak and the Kodiak Island Borough would be getting a share of those moneys,” Bush said.

To expedite future fisheries disaster funding, Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., chairman of the U.S. Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, sponsored legislation that would reform NOAA’s Fishery Resource Disaster Relief program of the National Marine Fisheries Service to expedite relief for fishermen during fishery disasters.

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

ALASKA: Bristol Bay red king crab fishery trends toward closure as fleet reports slow fishing, aging stock

November 20, 2019 — Next fall, the Bristol Bay red king crab fishery could face its first closure in 25 years.

This season, the 54-vessel fleet has reported slow, spotty fishing, and the stock continues to show signs of decline. The current quota — 3.8 million pounds — is the lowest since the fishery was rationalized in 2005.

“A lot of boats had to scratch their way through the season,” said Ethan Nichols, assistant area management biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. “There were only one to two large schools of legal males that were reported to us from captains out on the grounds. So the season was definitely a bit of a grind.”

With 99 percent of the harvest landed, Nichols said the average number of crab caught in each pot is down five from last season, marking the lowest catch per unit effort since rationalization.

The average crab weight, however, continues to go up.

“Last year, it was 7.1 pounds. Right now, we have an average weight of 7.14 pounds,” said Nichols. “It’s the highest average weight in the history of the fishery.”

Read the full story at Alaska Public Media

Alaska’s 2019 salmon season by the numbers

November 13, 2019 — Alaska’s 2019 salmon season was worth $657.6 million to fishermen, a 10% increase from the 2018 fishery.

Sockeye salmon accounted for nearly 64% of the total value, topping $421 million, and 27% of the harvest at 55.2 million fish.

Those are the lead takeaways in a summary from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game that reveals preliminary estimates of salmon harvests and values by region. The final values will be determined in 2020 after processors, buyers, and direct marketers submit their totals paid to fishermen.

Pink salmon were the second most valuable species, representing 20% of the total dockside value at $128.6 million and 62% of the harvest at just over 129 million fish.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

Southeast Alaska winter king salmon landings up from last year but still below average

November 13, 2019 — Southeast Alaska’s winter troll season for king salmon has gotten off to a little better start in 2019.

Commercial landings and number of fish caught are up from last year. However, both still lag behind five and 10-year averages for this point in the season.

Perhaps the most encouraging sign was the opening price of $12 per pound. Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologist Grant Hagerman says that’s the highest starting point on record.

“At this time last year the price had increased over the first month and it was just under 12,” Hagerman said. “So it’s pretty similar to last year. But starting out at $12 is the highest that we’ve had on record.”

Read the full story at Alaska Public Media

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: Unalaska Mayor Laments ‘Depressing’ Year for Crab

October 16, 2019 — SEAFOOD NEWS — There will be a Bristol Bay red king crab fishery this year, though at an extremely low level, continuing a downward trend that probably hasn’t yet hit the bottom.

“Red crab is not looking well at all, everything is down,” said Miranda Westphal, shellfish management biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game in Unalaska. “There’s not a lot coming into the system.”

The crab season opens Oct. 15, and crab fishermen are busy working around Unalaska docks rigging pots for the red crab. The snow crab season officially opens the same day, but fishermen won’t start targeting the smaller opilio snow crab for several months.

Bering Sea crab quotas were announced Sunday by ADF&G’s Division of Commercial Fisheries. The red king harvest level is set at 3.79 million pounds, down 12% from last year’s 4.3 million, Westphal said.

“I don’t know if it’s ever been this low,” she said.

In one bright spot, at least for this year, the snow crab quota increased by 23%, at 34 million pounds, up from last year’s 27.6 million pounds. But future snow crab populations appear weak, and don’t bode well for upcoming years, she cautioned.

The Tanner crab season is closed in both the eastern and western districts, a “depressing” development, said Frank Kelty, who steps down as Unalaska mayor later this month. Yet despite this year’s closure, Westphal said Tanners appear to have a bright future.

“It’s actually looking the best out of all the stocks,” said Westphal, citing survey results showing large populations of juvenile Tanner crab, especially in the western district.

Two smaller Bering Sea crab fisheries that are frequently closed did not open this year. The St. Matthew’s blue king crab, and Pribilof Islands red and blue king crab fisheries are both closed again.

The quotas are set based on the summer trawl survey of the Bering Sea conducted by the National Marine Fisheries Service in an annual research projects that catches all species with nets, and uses the results to determine the quotas of crab and pollock and flatfish in the various commercial fisheries.

Kelty said he wasn’t surprised by the bad news when the quotas were announced over the weekend.

“This is what I expected,” he said.

Kelty, like Westphal, is also worried about the future of the snow crab fishery. He said warming waters will attract Pacific cod to the area north of St. Matthew’s Island, which he said is the “nursery” of snow crab, and their babies are the “favorite food” of the cod.

Previously, the cod stayed to the south, blocked by a deepwater “cold pool” of seawater, which is now shrinking. And as the water warms in the depths, the cod travel further north. Kelty said he knows cod like baby snow crab from personal experience, “cutting a lot of cod bellies open,” as a former Unalaska seafood worker.

According to NMFS, “In 2017 and 2018 the maximum extent of sea ice in the Bering Sea was the lowest on record. The cold pool was dramatically smaller than usual and large numbers of Pacific cod and pollock were found in the northern Bering Sea in the spring and summer months.”

Meanwhile, another Bristol Bay red king crab survey project is underway in the Bering Sea, this one involving the unmanned wind and solar-power Saildrones, which are tracking acoustic tags attached to the crab during the summer trawl survey.

“All vessels are asked to avoid the saildrones,” which look like red kayaks with big red rigid sails and solar panels.

The Bering Sea Fisheries Research Foundation is conducting the study with the federal agency NOAA Fisheries to “better understand crab movement in the Bering Sea.”

“Any commercial fisherman that captures a tagged red king crab should note the capture coordinates and tag number and quickly release it unharmed in the same location it was captured,” according to a postcard sent to fishermen.

Two representatives from the study attended a recent Unalaska City Council meeting to explain the project, Leah Zacher a NOAA scientist, and Scott Goodman, the executive director of BSFRF. More information is available at bsfrf.org, or facebook.com/BSFRF.

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: Fisheries managers announce crab quotas, season closures

October 8, 2019 — With the fishing season starting next week, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game has released crab quotas for Bristol Bay and the Bering Sea.

The total allowable catch for red king crab is 3.8 million pounds. That’s about 12 percent less than last season, which was already the lowest since 1996.

Meanwhile, the tanner crab season has been closed entirely due to below-threshold estimates of mature males.

Managers have also canceled the St. Matthew Island blue king crab fishery, which has been declared “overfished,” and continued the longtime closures for Pribilof Island red and blue king crab, which have fallen below federal minimums for two decades.

Read the full story at Alaska Public Media

Hugely successful Alaskan sockeye season smashes regional value records

September 27, 2019 — Alaskan salmon fishermen on the shores of Bristol Bay have enjoyed one of their most successful harvesting seasons on record, according to preliminary reports from Alaska’s Department of Fish and Game.

In 2019, the bay saw a total return of 56.5 million sockeye salmon, making it the fourth-largest return in the fishery’s 130-year history, as well as the fifth consecutive year with a return of more than 50m specimens.

Furthermore, fishermen in the Bristol Bay area harvested over 43m sockeye in 2019, the second-largest figure on record. When combined with catches of other salmon species, they netted a record-breaking $306m, nearly double the 20-year average.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News