Saving Seafood

ALASKA: Forecast predicts another poor sockeye season

January 26, 2021 — Upper Cook Inlet fishermen should expect another below-average sockeye salmon run this year.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game forecasts a return of 4,370,000 sockeye to Upper Cook Inlet in 2021, according to a report released Friday.

Brian Marston, Fish and Game’s area manager for UCI commercial fisheries, says the projections aren’t surprising.

“We have seen lower-than-average runs, or right around the 4.3 million mark, which is what we’re predicting this year,” he said. “So it’s not too different from recent numbers, but it is below average.”

The inlet’s 20-year average is nearly 6 million sockeye. But runs over the last few years have been lower.

Read the full story at KDLL

Pebble asks Army Corps to reconsider its mine plan in Southwest Alaska

January 25, 2021 — Pebble Limited Partnership has filed an appeal with the Army Corps of Engineers, asking the agency to reconsider its application to build an open-pit gold mine upstream from Bristol Bay.

In November, the Army Corps rejected the application, saying the mine would not comply with the Clean Water Act. The mine would be built on state land, but dredging and filling in federal waters and wetlands requires a permit from the Corps.

Pebble Chief Executive John Shively says the decision was rushed, coming just days after the company submitted its final document — a plan to compensate for damage to the area.

Read the full story at KTOO

ALASKA: ‘Everybody’s worst nightmare’: Bering Sea fishermen on edge after COVID-19 closes second plant

January 25, 2021 — One of North America’s largest fish processing plants is shutting down as a COVID-19 outbreak grows and owner Trident Seafoods struggles to test its 700-person workforce.

The plant, on the isolated island of Akutan, is the second in the Aleutians to shut down this year, just as the billion-dollar Bering Sea pollock fishery was set to kick off.

Now, fishermen and industry leaders are anxious that they might not have places to offload their catch and that their plants might be the next to close down, said Dan Martin, who manages a fleet of nine pollock trawlers for a company called Evening Star Fisheries.

“Any hiccups like this, you really have to reshuffle the deck and try to figure out, ‘Okay, what’s the next step?’” said Martin, a retired skipper. He called the shutdowns “everybody’s worst nightmare.”

The winter fishery for Bering Sea pollock, which goes into products like McDonald’s fish sandwiches, officially opened Wednesday. But two of the region’s largest processors are both shut down: the Trident plant in Akutan, and the UniSea plant located 35 miles to the southwest in the Aleutian port town of Unalaska.

Read the full story at KTOO

COVID-19 closes a third Aleutian plant, stranding Bering Sea fishermen at the dock

January 25, 2021 — A third seafood processing plant has shut down in the Aleutian Islands amid a COVID-19 outbreak, threatening to further derail lucrative winter fisheries in the region.

In the Aleutian port town of Unalaska, at least five local boats are stuck at the dock with nowhere to deliver their cod after the shutdown of the Alyeska Seafoods processing plant, according to a crew member on one of them, Tacho Camacho Castillo.

Alyeska closed its plant Friday “based on a cluster of positive cases” identified through “surveillance testing,” the City of Unalaska said in a prepared statement.

“There’s two days and this fish starts to spoil,” Camacho Castillo, a crew member on the 58-foot Lucky Island, said in an interview Friday. “Am I going to be throwing out fish into the ocean? It’s going break my heart, for real, if I throw all this fish away.”

The plant closures are setting off a scramble among fishermen, industry leaders and political officials involved in the Bering Sea cod, crab and pollock fisheries, which are worth more than $1 billion and support thousands of jobs.

Read the full story at KTOO

Ask a Highliner: Bob Dooley talks fishing, bycatch reduction, safety and more

January 22, 2021 — How much firewood does it take to build a new 52-foot salmon troller? Bob Dooley has the answer to that and just about any other question about West Coast and Alaska fisheries you can throw his way.

When Brian Hagenbuch profiled Dooley as a 2017 NF Highliner, the title of his feature was “Community champion,” and that’s been Dooley’s story through every decade of his nearly 60-year career.

Starting as a deckhand on a salmon troller out of his home town of Half Moon Bay, Calif., at the age of 11, Dooley ended his fishing career on Bering Sea and West Coast pollock and whiting trawlers. In his years on the water, he witnessed the inception of the Magnuson Act and the 200-mile limit, joint-venture fishing, observer coverage, Coast Guard safety regulations, and perhaps the biggest change in fishing in his lifetime — bycatch reduction.

“We went from the wild, wild west of joint ventures to overcapitalization of the fleet with the advent of factory trawlers, particularly in pollock and the West Coast in whiting. And we basically had 200 percent catching capacity with the same amount of fish,” Dooley says, describing technological advancements and government programs that changed the way people went fishing.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

ALASKA: Borough to ask feds for fishery disaster declaration

January 21, 2021 — The Kenai Peninsula Borough Assembly voted Tuesday to ask the U.S. Secretary of Commerce to declare a sockeye salmon fisheries failure and economic disaster in the Upper Subdistrict of the Central District of Cook Inlet in response to a year that saw fewer and smaller fish, as well as lower-priced fish.

According to a memo to the assembly from Kenai Peninsula Borough Mayor Charlie Pierce, the borough has not received a response from the state regarding a request from the assembly last month for Gov. Mike Dunleavy to declare an economic disaster in the Upper Cook Inlet fisheries region.

The same memo says that a provision in the Magnuson-Stevens Act authorizes the U.S. Secretary of Commerce to determine whether or not there is a commercial fishery failure “due to a fishery resource disaster as a result of natural causes” or “man-made causes beyond the control of fishery managers to mitigate,” among others.

Read the full story at The Peninsula Clarion

COVID-19 outbreaks shutter two of Alaska’s biggest seafood processing plants during winter fishing season

January 21, 2021 — COVID-19 outbreaks at two of Alaska’s largest seafood processing plants, both in the Aleutian Islands, are shutting down operations just as lucrative crab and pollock seasons get underway.

The remote Trident Seafoods plant in the tiny community of Akutan, 35 miles east of Unalaska, is reporting four coronavirus cases — three processing workers and a galley employee — prompting concerns about additional infections that could be hard to contain.

A separate outbreak at the UniSea plant in Unalaska has the facility on lockdown after 55 workers tested positive for the virus since January, about two-thirds of them during travel quarantine, which is intended to catch positive cases. Forty-five workers were still considered infectious as of Tuesday.

The Trident outbreak is the first for the company’s closed-campus plant there, officials say.

Industry observers expected the start of this winter fishing season to bring a whole new set of coronavirus challenges compared to this time last year.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

Alaska sees nearly half-billion dollar loss in commercial fisheries revenue

January 20, 2021 — A federal agency has put some dollar amounts to the impact from the COVID-19 pandemic on commercial and charter fishing industries nationwide in the first part of last year.

On Friday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a report on the economic impact on the seafood catch and recreational fishing nationwide through last summer. NOAA Fisheries deputy assistant administrator for operations Paul Doremus called the report a snapshot of an industry in transition.

“We’re trying to account in great detail with the data and information in this report on the bearing of COVID-19 on the sector as a whole and provide this in a way that can help businesses and communities understand what has happened, where the losses have been concentrated and to inform long-term recovery and resilient strategies,” Doremus said during a conference call with reporters.

Nationwide, the commercial fishing industry started off 2020 with increases in revenue from seafood sales. But as the pandemic hit in March, that income dropped off 19% compared to the most recent five-year average. Those declines swelled to 45% by July.

Read the full story at KTOO

Trident Seafoods reports 4 COVID-19 cases at plant in Alaska

January 20, 2021 — A Seattle-based seafood company has reported that four workers at its Alaska seafood plant tested positive for COVID-19, including one who was taken to a hospital.

Trident Seafoods reported that the four employees were all roommates and have returned to work after undergoing a 14-day quarantine and testing negative, The Seattle Times reported.

The company said in a statement on Monday that it is assessing any potential operational impacts of COVID-19 spreading at the facility. Currently, the company is holding off on sending an additional 365 workers to the plant.

The Trident Seafoods’ plant is a processing center for Bering Sea harvests of pollock, crab and cod in Akutan, about 750 miles (1,200 kilometers) southwest of Anchorage. The plant is the company’s largest Alaska location. It currently employs about 700 workers.

Read the full story at The Columbian

Trident Seafoods scrambling to contain COVID-19 outbreak ahead of pollock A season

January 19, 2021 — Trident Seafoods is scrambling to contain a coronavirus outbreak at a plant on the Aleutian Islands on the eve of the pollock A season.

The Seattle, Washington, U.S.A.-based company announced on Monday, 18 January, that four roommates had tested positive at Trident’s plant in Akutan, Alaska, a processing center that takes in crab and cod as well as pollock from the Bering Sea fisheries.

Read the full story at Seafood Source