Saving Seafood

ALASKA: King crab fishery approved in Southeast AK

February 13, 2025 — Crabbers in Southeast Alaska could soon be able to harvest red king crabs after the Alaska Board of Fisheries approved a proposal enabling regulators to open a small, limited commercial king crab fishery.

Previous regulations banned officials from opening a commercial king crab fishery in Southeast Alaska unless the estimated biomass of legal male red king crab exceeds 200,000 pounds. The requirement has made it nearly impossible for regulators to open a season in the region; Southeast Alaska has only authorized three commercial red king crab seasons over the last 20 years.

The Alaska Department of Fish & Game (ADF&G) and commercial fishers argue that the requirement was based on an outdated claim that it wasn’t financially viable for crab processors to open for anything less than a harvest based on that 200,000-pound threshold.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

ALASKA: Alaska Board of Fisheries rejects hatchery production cuts

February 12, 2025 — A proposal to slash hatchery production of pink and chum salmon in Southeast Alaska was rejected by the Alaska Board of Fisheries over the weekend.

The measure, known as Proposal 156, aimed to cut hatchery egg takes by 25 percent but failed to gain majority support from the seven-member board, Intrafish reported.

The proposal sparked a heated debate, with commercial fishermen, sport fishing interests, and aquaculture advocates warning of the economic fallout. The Sitka Sound Science Center, which runs Alaska’s oldest salmon hatchery, was among those opposing the measure, citing its role in training and education.

Proponents of the reduction argued that hatchery-raised salmon creates too much competition in the ocean for food resources, potentially harming wild king salmon populations. With ongoing king salmon closures and growing user conflicts, some groups pushed for lower hatchery production as a precaution.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

ALASKA: Board of Fish rejects proposal to cut SE hatchery production of chum by 25-percent

February 11, 2024 — The hatchery debate touches on the biggest unknown in salmon ecology: What occurs in the ocean between a salmon’s birth, and when it returns to spawn?

Proposal 156 was submitted to the Board of Fish by Virgil Umpenhour, a member of the Fairbanks Region Fish & Game Advisory Committee, and some form of this same idea has come before the board at least four previous times. Umpenhour believes that the millions upon millions of chum and pink released into the wild by hatcheries in Southeast Alaska every year are affecting the marine environment, to the detriment of wild stocks of other species, like chinook in Western Alaska. He proposed that the Board of Fish cut back hatchery releases in Southeast by 25-percent.

Stakeholders in Southeast packed the board’s meeting last week (2-7-25) to oppose the plan. “Just line up, folks, because we got a long room,” said member Mike Wood as chair of the “Committee of the Whole.” This committee allows the  board to step away from the agenda for a bit to take a deeper dive into related proposals. Proposal 156 generated only ten favorable comments from the public, and 400 opposed.

Sitka troller Jacquie Foss was one of them.

“Like any operation, you need diversification in order to be profitable,” said Foss. “And this would take a major pillar from our ability to be profitable.”

The short story is that while king salmon make the headlines, hatchery-produced chum salmon have become an economic mainstay in the Southeast troll fishery. They’ve increased significantly in value over the last decade or more, and some of the returns have been just staggering – millions of chum returning to a release site in West Crawfish Inlet in 2018, was a bonanza for trollers from around the region.

Many stakeholders objected that someone from Fairbanks would try to roll back this kind of economic opportunity.

“Heather Bauscher, Petersburg, AC,” Heather Bauscher formerly chaired the Sitka Advisory Committee, but has since moved to Petersburg. “We were in unanimous opposition to this. Initial concerns were that the proposer is not from this region and doesn’t understand the impacts that this would have for communities.”

And communities are pushing back, in any way they can. In an extraordinarily rare move, a member of the Alaska Legislature testified before the Committee of the Whole. Rep. Jeremy Bynum (R-Ketchikan) joined the House of Representatives about a month ago, representing Ketchikan. He and three other legislators signed a letter opposing the proposal, including Sen. Jesse Kiehl (D-Juneau), Rep. Andi Story (D-Juneau), and Rep. Sara Hannan (D-Juneau). Rep. Rebecca Himschoot (I-Sitka) wrote a separate letter with similar concerns.

Read the full article at KCAW

ALASKA: Alaska board rejects proposal for new magister armhook squid fishery

February 11, 2025 — The Alaska Board of Fisheries has declined to establish a new squid fishery, despite claims from some fishers that the species is abundant and marketable enough to justify a commercial fishery.

Submitted by Richard Yamada, the owner of a sportfishing lodge in Southeast Alaska and a commissioner on the International Pacific Halibut Commission, Proposal 230 would have created a directed jig fishery for magister armhook squid (Berryteuthis magister) in the waters of Southeast Alaska. According to Yamada, squid is an underutilized species living in Alaska waters that could be harvested to meet an emerging global demand for squid.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

ALASKA: The last skipper in Ouzinkie: How Gulf of Alaska villages lost their Native fishing fleets

February 10, 2025 — On an early, foggy summer morning, Nick Katelnikoff steered his boat through the treacherous waters off Kodiak Island’s Spruce Cape and chuckled.

“Trust a blind guy through the rock pile?” he asked.

Katelnikoff, 76, is a veteran fisherman — the kind of guy who, friends say, can call his catch into his boat.

He’s made a career chasing the bounty of the North Pacific, building up a storehouse of knowledge about his maritime backyard that allows him, even with failing eyesight, to confidently steer his 38-foot craft away from rocks that have sunk other vessels.

Katelnikoff describes his heritage as Aleut; he’s one of the Indigenous people who have been pulling fish out of these waters for millennia. Their catches helped sustain trading networks long before white people arrived on Kodiak and began setting up fish traps and canneries — businesses that were supplied, in part, by the harvests of Katelnikoff’s more recent ancestors.

When Katelnikoff was still beginning his career in the 1970s, he was one of a dozen or so skippers in Ouzinkie — a small Indigenous village on an island just off Kodiak’s coast.

But today, that tradition is all but dead: Katelnikoff is the last skipper running a commercial fishing boat from Ouzinkie’s harbor.

Read the full article at Anchorage Daily News

Bristol Bay data show widening gap in fishermen’s earnings

February 7, 2025 — Last year’s lower-than-average Bristol Bay salmon harvest likely went a long way toward long-term polarization of the drift fleet between fishermen earning the highest and lowest revenues. As a trend, drift fishermen with the highest production in the fleet typically made double the earnings of fishermen with the lowest production.

More recently, however, a dwindling number of top producers have been earning five times more money than fishermen at the bottom of the scale, A more dispiriting trend is how an increasing number of fishermen are falling from the middle into the bottom tier when it comes to their seasonal earnings. 

“The Bristol Bay fishermen we’ve spoken with seem to have done very well or very poorly, with not much in the middle,” says Sharon Lechner, president and CEO of the Commercial Fishing and Agriculture Bank (CFAB) in Anchorage.

For those not familiar with fisheries economic tools, the State of Alaska’s Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission (CFEC) keeps tabs on earnings in many state-sanctioned fisheries including salmon via data sets known as quartile tables. The tables break out the number of permit holders comprising the top 25 percent, the upper and lower middle 50 percentiles and the lowest 25 percent of the season’s revenues.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

WASHINGTON: Coastal Dungeness crab season kicks off after months of testing

February 7, 2025 — The state’s coastal commercial Dungeness crab season is underway, following months of test fishing and data gathering by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW).

This year’s season opened Jan. 15 from Klipsan Beach on the Long Beach Peninsula south to Cape Falcon, Ore., including the Columbia River and Willapa Bay, and will start Feb. 11 from Klipsan Beach north to the U.S.-Canada border, including Grays Harbor, according to a news release from WDFW.

The Washington, Oregon and California fish and wildlife departments decide season openers each year as part of a tri-state agreement signed in the 1990s to cooperatively manage the West Coast Dungeness crab fishery. Per the agreement, the season can open as early as Dec. 1, but opening dates vary and are based on test fishing to determine crab condition.

Over the fall and early winter, WDFW biologists and scientific technicians collected and measured crabs aboard commercial fishing vessels the Department contracts with for test fishing. They also observed seafood processing plants as workers picked out and packed crab meat.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

Aleutian Islands state-waters Pacific cod season opens

February 6, 2025 — The Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G) has announced the opening of the Aleutian Islands Subdistrict (AIS) state-waters Pacific cod season, along with the closure of the parallel season for all state waters west of 170° W longitude, effective Feb.1, 2025.

The state-waters Pacific cod season opened at 12:00 p.m. AKST on Feb. 1 for vessels 100’ or less in overall length (OAL) using pot gear, vessels 60’ or less OAL using nonpelagic trawl or jig gear, and vessels 58’ or less OAL using longline gear. Simultaneously, the parallel Pacific cod season closed for all gear types in the AIS west of 170° W longitude.

All harvested Pacific cod must be retained. The daily harvest limit per vessel is set at 150,000 pounds (round weight), with a maximum of 150,000 pounds of unprocessed cod allowed onboard at any time. The ADF&G statement noted that any overages must be reported, with proceeds surrendered to the state. Bycatch limits from the parallel Pacific cod season will remain in effect during the state-waters season.

Read the full article National Fisherman

 

ALASKA: Myriad commercial halibut fishing areas will see total allowable catch decreases this year

February 5, 2025 — Stakeholders in the commercial halibut fishery have been allocated a total of 19.7 million pounds of harvest for the 2025 season – down 18% from the 24.03 million pounds a year ago.

The decision to reduce the harvest came during the International Pacific Halibut Commission’s (IPHC) 101st annual meeting, held from Jan. 27-31 in Vancouver, British Columbia. The commission said the decision was consequence of reports of the lowest spawning biomass of halibut in 40 years.

Area 2A, which includes the California coast north to Washington state, got a 7.23% boost in its harvest quota – from 83,000 pounds in 2024 to 89,000 pounds in 2025. However, all other IPHC areas saw a quota cut.

Read the full article at The Cordova Times

ALASKA: Biologists predict strong area sockeye, pink, chum runs; low Chinook returns

February 4, 2025 — Fisheries officials are predicting a mixed bag of salmon returns in the Copper River and Prince William Sound this year.

State biologists are forecasting strong runs of sockeye salmon into the Copper River and pink and chum salmon in Prince William Sound, but a weak run of wild Chinooks into the Copper River.

The forecasts – released by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game on Jan. 23 – calculated total runs for Copper River sockeye and Chinook salmon, Gulkana hatchery sockeye salmon, Coghill Lake sockeye salmon, and wild Prince William Sound pink and chum salmon.

For the Copper River, the forecast is for a range of 2.2 million to 2.9 million red salmon, which would be 55% above the 10-year average of 1.6 million fish. The Copper River Chinook run is forecast at 25,000 to 51,000 kings – or 25% below the 10-year total run average of 48,000 fish.

Read the full article at The Cordova Times