Saving Seafood

ALASKA: Big sockeye runs and struggling kings leave Bristol Bay managers with a complicated balancing act

April 2, 2021 — Fifty-one million sockeye are forecast to return to Bristol Bay this summer.

If that holds, commercial fishermen will be able to harvest around 37 million reds. That’s 13% more than the average harvest of the past decade.

But concerns remain about the numbers of chinook salmon in the Nushagak District on the west side of Bristol Bay — which leaves the biologists who manage the fishery with a complicated balancing act.

Faced with another huge sockeye run this summer, managers in the Nushagak District say they will try to allow fishermen to harvest the sockeye and also conserve chinook.

Tim Sands, the district’s area management biologist, describes the job as trying to walk a fine line between “getting as many kings up the river as we can, but still provide opportunity to harvest sockeye salmon.”

For years, biologists around the state have wrestled with declining numbers of chinook, fish that are central to subsistence ways of life across Alaska, and also targeted by sport fishermen. Since 2007, the state’s chinook runs have consistently declined, forcing managers to restrict or close fishing in certain areas.

Read the full story at KTOO

2020’s Southeast salmon harvest among worst on record, according to Alaska Fish & Game data

April 1, 2021 —  Last year’s salmon harvest across all species in Southeast Alaska was one of the worst in 50 years. Here’s what Southeast’s regional commercial fishery supervisor had to say about the terrible season, and about his hopes for the coming year.

A special report released in March paints a stark picture of 2020’s salmon harvest in Southeast Alaska.

“Overall, it was one of the lowest harvests we’d seen, I think since the ’70s,” says Lowell Fair. He’s the Southeast regional supervisor for the commercial fisheries division of Alaska Department of Fish and Game. It was already clear from preliminary reports that last year’s salmon season was a rough one. But just how rough?

For sockeye, the harvest was the second lowest since 1962 — that’s just a couple of years after the Department of Fish & Game was formed and started collecting data.

King harvest was in the bottom five harvests since the early 1960s as well.

Coho and pink harvests came in stronger than kings and sockeye, but were still among the lowest years in recent memory, ranking 48th and 53rd since 1962, respectively.

Read the full story at KNBA

ALASKA: ADF&G Commissioner Addresses Disaster Relief, Cook Inlet Closure, Large Salmon Forecast for 2021

April 1, 2021 — Alaska’s Governor Mike Dunleavy has received 11 requests for fisheries disaster declarations, said Doug Vincent-Lange, Alaska’s Commissioner of Fish and Game, in an update at the Kodiak Chamber of Commerce’s ComFish Expo.

Noting the good news of over half of Alaska’s population now vaccinated, and shots now available for anyone over 16, Vincent-Lange said, “I don’t see why you wouldn’t all be able to fish this year.”

Read the full story at Seafood News

A Rising Tide Lifts All Fishers

April 1, 2021 — In the summer of 2013, a male captain was accused of raping and assaulting a female fisher multiple times during their week-long isolation in Prince William Sound, Alaska.

This horrific encounter points to a sobering problem for female fishers: the specter of sexual assault. Harassment and abuse aren’t necessarily more common in the fishing industry, but several factors make the situation on boats unique. For one thing, fishing involves spending weeks in a confined workplace, often in remote regions with no cellphone service. For another, many fishing vessels constitute their own small businesses, with no human resources department or codified policy that workers can turn to. And as with workers in other rural industries such as forestry and agriculture, who have fewer support systems to access than employees in urban areas, fishers tend to experience and grapple with abuse on their own.

That’s why Bristol Bay, Alaska, fisher Elma Burnham is asking her colleagues to sign a safety pledge that she created in 2017. To date, more than 500 captains, deckhands, processors, and tenders have signed the pledge, promising to uphold an understanding of consent and to work toward abolishing abuse in the industry; to intervene against harassment; to provide a safe place to work; and to pay, teach, and actively promote fishers who aren’t cisgender men.

Burnham grew up in an oystering family off Long Island Sound in Connecticut and now works as a Bristol Bay set-netter, fishing for sockeye salmon during the summer. She started developing her pledge after the 2016 US presidential election, which for her felt like a symbol of entrenched misogyny. She wanted to see what she could do on a local level, so she started Strength of the Tides, a group that brings female, transgender, and nonbinary fishers together to network, support one another, and ask for boat owners to sign the pledge. Although organizations like this are more common in commercial fishing, shipping, and other maritime sectors, says Burnham, they are rare to nonexistent in the world of small-scale fisheries.

Although Burnham says that she’s never faced harassment or abuse on the job, she knows “that’s not the case for everyone.”

Read the full story at Hakai Magazine

Climate Change Raises Risk of Prey Mismatch for Young Cod in Alaska

March 30, 2021 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

For a young Pacific cod, first feeding is a life-or-death moment. Cod larva are nourished by a yolk sac after they hatch. Once the yolk sac is depleted, they must find food within days in order to survive. If there is no prey available during that critical window for first feeding, young fish face starvation.

Warming Alaska waters are increasing the risk of prey mismatch and starvation for cod larvae, a new study finds.

NOAA Fisheries scientists collaborated with our partners to look at how temperature shifts affected first feeding Pacific cod larvae in two large ecosystems: the southeast Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska. The models made predictions for 1998–2019, a period that encompassed warm and cool years, including a series of extreme heatwave events beginning in 2014.

“Warming can increase the metabolic demands of fish and shift the timing of their food production. So you have temperature unravelling the system, moving food around. And you have fish needing food now. When mismatched prey timing and increased metabolic demand line up, it can be pretty disastrous,” said Ben Laurel, NOAA Fisheries scientist at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center, who led the study. “The better we can understand and predict these effects, the more effectively we can manage them now and in the future.”

Read the full release here

By plane, boat and man basket, COVID-19 vaccines flow to Alaska’s Aleutian seafood workers

March 30, 2021 — Thousands of Alaska seafood workers are getting vaccinated for COVID-19 three months after outbreaks swept through Aleutian plants, shuttering some just as the lucrative Bering Sea fishing season began.

The effort is taking different forms, ranging from clinics in Sand Point to a one-day mass event in the Unalaska gym and aboard Dutch Harbor boats that vaccinated about 1,500 plant workers and deep-sea fishermen.

Probably the most only-in-Alaska method involved Eastern Aleutian Tribes community health aide Joe McMillan, who on Thursday clambered into a small man basket suspended in the air to swing aboard two large processing vessels and vaccinate more than a hundred people on each.

The doses now going into seafood worker arms are coming from a federal allocation provided to Eastern Aleutian Tribes rather than from state supplies of vaccine.

They came via a Biden administration plan to expand vaccine availability to community health centers in underserved communities. The Eastern Aleutian Tribes is one of just two tribal entities in Alaska participating in that program as of March 22.

The tribal health organization has probably given out 2,500 shots in the past week and 4,000 since January, according to CEO Paul Mueller, who described one chartered flight Wednesday to deliver food and vaccine that skipped from Nelson Lagoon to Cold Bay, False Pass, Sand Point, Dutch Harbor and King Cove.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

ALASKA: With Fishing Slowed By Pandemic, Bering Sea Crabbers Push For Extended Season

March 29, 2021 — A group of Bering Sea crabbers say the pandemic has slowed their fishing season, and they want more time to catch their quota before the state shuts down their season next week.

But the Alaska Department of Fish and Game has denied their request for an extension, citing low population numbers and an upcoming mating season.

For the few boats fishing bairdi crab this year, there could be a lot at stake if they don’t have time to catch their full quota.

“I’m thinking they don’t quite understand what we’re going through out here,” said Oystein Lone, captain of the 98-foot crab boat Pacific Sounder, which is based out of Dutch Harbor.

Until recently, Lone’s been fishing in the Bering Sea for snow crab, also known as opilio. But right now, he and his five-person crew have switched to fishing for a different type of crab called bairdi, which is also known as tanner crab.

Both bairdi and snow crab seasons open in October. But Lone recently switched to fishing for bairdi because that season is nearly over — even though as of Wednesday, only 46% of the total quota had been caught.

Read the full story at KUCB

Slow start, higher prices for Alaska halibut season

March 24, 2021 — Halibut prices for Alaska fishermen for 2021 started out significantly higher than last year, despite sluggish demand and transportation logjams in some regions.

The Pacific halibut fishery opened on March 6 and two weeks later only 80 deliveries were made, 46 at Southeast ports and 34 from the Central Gulf totaling 355,524 pounds. Most landings appeared to be small lots that were purchased on consignment.

The first fish typically fetches higher prices and then drops off as the season progresses. No Alaska ports reported paying under $5 per pound, whereas the 2020 price to Alaska fishermen averaged $4.

Early prices at Sitka and Juneau, where there is daily air service, were reported at $5.50-$5.75 a pound, up by $1 from last year, and deliveries at Petersburg paid out at $5.75 straight. No ferry service and high costs for airfreight bit into buying at nearly all Southeast ports, where major processors said they aren’t purchasing halibut until April or May.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

New Economic Study: 2.2 Billion Reasons to Protect Bristol Bay

March 22, 2021 — A report titled “The Economic Benefits of the Bristol Bay Salmon Fishery” shows the fishery’s economic benefits exceeded $2.2 billion in 2019, generating more than 15,000 jobs while feeding hundreds of thousands of people. Produced by McKinley Research Group and released by the Bristol Bay Defense Fund, the recently gathered data will help quantify the importance of protecting Bristol Bay from the proposed Pebble Mine.

Bristol Bay produces 57% of the world’s sockeye salmon catch and is a $990 million economic engine in Alaska alone. Economists estimate the induced impacts for the Pacific Northwest at $800 million.

Read the full story at Seafood News