Saving Seafood

Good news in the crab fishery comes from the Gulf of Alaska

September 21, 2021 –Unlike in the Bering Sea, there’s good news for crab in the Gulf of Alaska.

A huge cohort of Tanner crab that biologists have been tracking in the Westward region for three years showed up again in this summer’s survey.

“We were optimistic and we did find them again. Pretty much all the way across the board from Kodiak all the way out to False Pass, we found those crab and in good quantity,” said Nat Nichols, area manager for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game at Kodiak.

The bairdi Tanners are the larger cousins of snow crab (opilio Tanners) found in the Bering Sea.

“The very, very rough preliminary numbers look like we’ve at least hit the minimum abundance thresholds in all three areas of Kodiak, Chignik and the South Peninsula. So we’re excited about that.”

The last Tanner opener was in 2020 for 400,000 pounds, the minimum abundance number for a district to have a fishery. A fleet of 49 boats participated in that fishery and averaged over $4 per pound for the harvestable male crabs that typically weigh 2-4 pounds.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

 

Feds accuse Alaska seafood transporters of ‘secret scheme’ to evade the Jones Act using 100-foot rail line

September 16, 2021 — Attorneys with the U.S. Department of Justice are accusing companies Kloosterboer International Forwarding and Alaska Reefer Management of secretly using a specially built rail track in Canada for years, in order to evade the requirements of a maritime shipping law called the Jones Act.

The accusation surfaced in a filing submitted Friday in a case involving the two companies, which help transport Alaska seafood to the East Coast. The companies potentially face massive fines, imposed by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

The government’s 43-page response is its first public explanation in the case brought by Kloosterboer and Alaska Reefer Management early this month in U.S. District Court in Anchorage. The two companies provide transportation and logistics services as part of the American Seafoods Group family.

The companies are suing the Department of Homeland Security and its division, Customs and Border Protection, to stop the large penalty notices, which they say arrived without warning.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

 

With low stocks and closures looming, Bering Sea crab fleet braces for another blow

September 16, 2021 — The Alaska Department of Fish and Game announced this month that all major crab stocks are down. And for the first time in more than 25 years, the Bristol Bay red king crab fishery will be closed.

The species is world-renowned and was largely made famous by the popular reality TV show “Deadliest Catch.” In the glory days of king crab fishing, locals describe hundreds of boats rushing into the cold Bering Sea to harvest millions of pounds of crab worth even more millions of dollars.

The commercial fishery has been around since 1966. In the 55 years since then, there have been just two other closures: one in the 1980s and the other in the 1990s.

Now, the Bering Sea crab fleet and fishing communities around the state and the Pacific Northwest are bracing for yet another blow to their industry and are calling for new conservation efforts.

“It’s big news, and it’s hitting our industry really hard,” said Jamie Goen, executive director for Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers, a trade association representing commercial crab harvesters. “We’re disappointed and deeply concerned.”

Read the full story at Alaska Public Media

 

ALASKA: All major Bering Sea crab stocks are down alarmingly this season, surveys indicate

September 14, 2021 — Alaska’s Bering Sea crabbers are reeling from the devastating news that all major crab stocks are down substantially, based on summer survey results, and the Bristol Bay red king crab fishery will be closed for the first time in over 25 years.

That stock has been on a steady decline for several years, and the 2020 harvest dwindled to just 2.6 million pounds.

Most shocking was the drastic turnaround for snow crab stocks, which in 2018 showed a 60% boost in market-size male crabs (the only ones retained for sale) and nearly the same for females. That year’s survey was documented as “one of the largest snow crab recruitment events biologists have ever seen,” said Bob Foy, director of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council’s Crab Plan Team.

Again in 2019, the “very strong” snow crab biomass was projected at over 610 million pounds, and the catch was set at a conservative 45 million pounds for the 2020 fishery. No Bering Sea crab surveys were done that year due to the COVID pandemic, but the 2021 results indicated the numbers of mature male snow crab had plummeted by 55%.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

 

‘It’s very emotional’: Chignik residents fear for their communities’ future if abysmal salmon runs persist

September 14, 2021 — Gene Carlson drove the streets of the remote Chignik Bay, between quiet wooden houses and old cannery buildings on an afternoon in July.

“That used to be a restaurant there,” he said. “That’s a web loft over there, which is shut down now. Here’s another one of my cousin’s houses. He’s not living there anymore.”

The Chignik River’s salmon runs have sustained generations in the century-old small fishing communities along the Alaska Peninsula, Chignik Bay included. But, for the fourth year in a row, for reasons no one can definitively pinpoint, the runs came in severely low.

For years, residents have struggled to earn a living fishing and to put up enough fish for the winter, and some worry their villages will disappear if the low runs persist, taking with them a fishing tradition that connects their families to home.

Read the full story at Alaska Public Media

Biden administration moves to protect key Alaska watershed

September 10, 2021 — The Biden administration said on Thursday it will relaunch a process that could permanently protect a vital Alaskan watershed from development of the contentious Pebble Mine project that has been pursued for more than a decade.

The Department of Justice asked in an Alaska federal district court filing that the court vacate a 2019 decision by the Trump-era Environmental Protection Agency to remove protection of the Bristol Bay watershed.

If the court grants the request, it would automatically reinstate the EPA’s Clean Water Act Section 404 review process. The agency could then resume an effort to protect certain waters in the Bristol Bay watershed, whose streams, wetlands, lakes and ponds are home to North America’s most productive salmon fisheries of five types of salmon: coho, Chinook, sockeye, chum and pink.

Read the full story at Reuters

Biden Administration Moves to Protect Alaska’s Bristol Bay

September 9, 2021 — The Biden administration on Thursday took the first steps that would allow it to begin the process of protecting Alaska’s pristine Bristol Bay, one of the world’s most valuable sockeye salmon fisheries that also sits atop massive copper and gold deposits long coveted by mining companies.

The administration filed a motion in the United States District Court for Alaska to quash a Trump-era decision that had stripped environmental protections for Bristol Bay, about 200 miles southwest of Anchorage. If the court agrees, the administration could begin crafting permanent protections for the area.

In a statement, the Environmental Protection Agency argued that the administration of President Donald J. Trump acted unlawfully in 2019 when it rejected concerns that a proposed massive gold and copper mine would threaten the fisheries, withdrawing federal protections from Bristol Bay.

The move will have little immediate effect because the Trump administration ultimately denied an essential permit for the project, known as Pebble Mine, in 2020. That happened after President Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. and the Fox News personality Tucker Carlson, both of whom enjoyed hunting and fishing in the region, joined environmental activists and Native tribes to oppose the mine in an unlikely coalition.

Read the full story at the New York Times

 

Winter red king crab fishery in Alaska’s Bering Sea canceled

September 9, 2021 — Low stocks have prompted the U.S. state of Alaska to cancel the red king crab fishery in Alaska’s Bering Sea for winter 2021-2022 season.

After a review of the final bottom-trawl survey by the National Marine Fisheries Service, Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADFG) ADFG made the announcement Friday, 3 September, saying the stock was “below the regulatory threshold for opening a fishery.” ADFG said more details about the closure will be provided during the TAC meeting in early October.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

 

Alaska governor nominates Pebble Mine opponent to state Board of Fisheries

September 8, 2021 — It took freedom of information requests, weeks of queries to administrators and more than three months past a legal deadline for Gov. Mike Dunleavy to finally release his choice for a Board of Fisheries seat.

Dunleavy announced last Friday his appointment of Indy Walton of Soldotna to fill the vacant seat on the seven-member Board that directs management of subsistence, personal use, sport and commercial fisheries in state waters out to three miles. The vacancy came 115 days after the Alaska Legislature on May 11 rejected his choice of Abe Williams, a regional affairs director for the Pebble Mine.

Alaska law states that the governor must submit a new name to the Legislature within 30 days for confirmation, but Dunleavy moves to his own legal drummer and 15 candidates remained under wraps from the public although all applied for the BOF seat in June.

In a statement, the governor said Walton has 37 years of commercial salmon fishing experience at both Kodiak and Bristol Bay. He is a partner at Last Cast Lodge in Igiugik and has worked as a financial adviser with Edward Jones Investments for 19 years.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

 

Bering Sea crabbers talk shutdown, facing biomass disaster head on

September 7, 2021 — The Alaska Department of Fish and Game announced on Friday, Sept. 3, that the Bristol Bay red king crab fishery would be closed for the 2021-22 season, for the first time in 25 years. The announcement came in advance of the management decision-making process, providing the crab fleet time to make any possible adjustments.

“While this isn’t the news we wanted to hear, we appreciate knowing as soon as possible for our business planning purposes,” said Jamie Goen, executive director of the trade group Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers. “It helps us to know now so we can notify our crews, plan where our vessels are going to go next, plan shipyard time between seasons, and batten down the hatches on our finances.”

The announcement on Friday also reported on data that shows all major Bering Sea crab stocks are down, and the majority of the Bering Sea opilio crab stock seems to have moved or disappeared.

“We had hoped the Bristol Bay red king crab stocks would have rebounded by now, after several years of reduced and conservative harvest levels, but that is simply not the case,” said Gabriel Prout, a third-generation fisherman on the F/V Silver Spray. “Coupling this closure with the fact that snow crab harvest levels could be reduced as well, even after positive levels of recruitment in previous years, has the makings for a very frustrating and trying time for crab fishermen and the industry as a whole.”

Read the full story at National Fisherman