Saving Seafood

Fishing boat captain braves rough waters to save crewman

July 27, 2017 — The captain of a fishing boat “didn’t hesitate” and jumped into choppy, 47-degree water to save a crewman after their commercial vessel capsized off the coast of Alaska.

Amid 17-mph winds and 5-foot seas in the Kupreanof Strait near Raspberry Island — about 250 miles southwest of Anchorage — the captain, Christian Trosvig, and three crew members aboard the Grayling starting taking on water at about 3:30 p.m. Monday, according to a statement released Tuesday by the Coast Guard.

A nearby vessel, the Calista Marie, spotted the Grayling in trouble and notified Coast Guard officials — who were nearby on a training mission and arrived just in time to see Trosvig leap into the perilous waters to help an overboard crewman.

“That fisherman didn’t hesitate,” said Lt. Kevin Riley, an MH-60 Jayhawk pilot. “It is a testament to how tough those fishermen are and how far they will go to help fellow Alaskans.”

The captain of the Calista Marie, Dale Pruitt, told the Alaska Dispatch News that he noticed “something was wrong with the Grayling” when its stern sunk below the water’s surface.

Read and watch the full story at the New York Post

ALASKA: Former DNR commissioner tapped for high Interior post

July 20, 2017 — Another Alaskan has found a spot in President Donald Trump’s administration.

The president nominated former Department of Natural Resources Commissioner Joe Balash to serve as assistant Interior Department secretary for land and minerals management on Wednesday.

A native of North Pole, Balash is currently chief of staff to Sen. Dan Sullivan, who preceded him as Natural Resources commissioner under former Gov. Sean Parnell. Balash was a deputy DNR commissioner from 2010 to 2013 prior to leading the department until late 2014.

“It’s been a long time since the (Interior) Department had an assistant secretary from Alaska, and the president’s nomination of Joe Balash further proves his commitment to Alaska and rural America as a whole,” Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said in a department release. “Joe is no stranger to the Department of the Interior having worked alongside the department on a number of projects in Alaska. He brings an incredible combination of state and federal experience to the table, and he will be very effective in helping the department work with Congress to do the work of the American people. I look forward to his speedy confirmation in the Senate.”

Zinke visited Alaska over Memorial Day weekend this year, repeatedly emphasizing that the state plays a primary role in the nation’s energy production.

Read the full story at the Alaska Journal of Commerce

WASHINGTON: Seattle fishing boat lost since February found on ocean floor

July 20, 2017 — A vessel on a scientific mission has made an important deep sea discovery, officials announced Thursday.

The fishing boat Destination, a Seattle-based vessel that sank in February with six crew members aboard, was found on the ocean floor in Alaska.

The ship that found the 98-foot fishing boat was a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) vessel.

People at Seattle’s Fisherman’s Terminal say the lives there were lost will be forever remembered.

“We want to know what happened,” Judy Hamick, mother of Destination crewman Kai Hamick, said. “This is a good boat. Why did this have to happen? Knowing that they found the boat is relief, but we know we still don’t have any bodies to recover.”

The Coast Guard hopes to provide those answers to the Hamicks and other families since NOAA has helped located the vessel off St. George, Ala. The boat was found not far from where it went missing on February 11 while fishing for snow crab.

Read the full story at KOMONews

Alaska’s Salmon Harvest Nears 48 Million Fish

July 18, 2017 — Preliminary harvest data show the catch in Alaska’s wild salmon fisheries is nearing the 48 million fish mark. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s (ASF&G) count includes 31.6 million sockeyes, 8.4 million chums, 7.6 million pinks, 198,000 silvers and 193,000 Chinook salmon.

More than 25 million of those sockeyes were caught in the Bristol Bay fishery, including 9.6 million in the Nushagak district, 8 million in the Egegik district, in excess of 4 million in the Naknek-Kvichak district and 2.2 million in the Ugashik district.

State fisheries biologist Tim Sands, Dillingham, Alaska, described the sockeye fishery in the Nushagak district as “gangbusters,” as fishermen there brought in a record 1.2 million salmon on July 3. It was the second time this year, and in the history of the Nushagak district, that the daily sockeye salmon harvest exceeded one million reds, Sands said.

Processors on the Lower Yukon have taken deliver of some 331,000 oil rich keta salmon, and another 66,000 keta salmon were caught on the Upper Yukon.

Processors in Prince William Sound have received 7.9 million fish, including 482,000 Copper River reds and another 417,000 sockeyes from the Eshamy District, 51,000 from the Coghill District, 33,000 from the PWS general seine fishery, 2,000 from the Bering River drift and 1,000 from the Unakwik District drift fisheries.

Read the full story at Alaska Native News

NOAA to Deploy Saildrones for Climate Study

July 18, 2017 — During the next four months, NOAA scientists will deploy Saildrone unmanned ocean vehicles to hard-to-reach locales such as the Arctic and the tropical Pacific with the goal of better understanding of how ocean changes affect weather, climate, fisheries and marine mammals.

The Saildrone is wind and solar-powered research vehicle resembling a sailboat, capable of performing tasks at sea such as met ocean data collection, environmental monitoring and fish stock analysis, autonomously or under remote control. For NOAA, the vehicles will soon travel thousands of miles across the ocean, reaching some areas never before surveyed with such specialized technology.

In mid-July, scientists will send off the first unmanned, wind and solar-powered vehicles from Dutch Harbor, Alaska, with two sailing north through the Bering Strait into the Arctic Ocean and another transiting the Bering Sea. Traversing Alaska’s inhospitable waters, the remote-controlled vehicles will track melting ice, measure carbon dioxide in the ocean and count fish, seals and whales.

For the first time, the vehicles will journey through the Bering Strait into the Arctic with a newly adapted system to measure CO2 concentrations.

We want to understand how changes in the Arctic may affect large-scale climate and weather systems as well as ecosystems that support valuable fish stocks,” said Jessica Cross, an oceanographer at NOAA Research’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, who is using the unmanned system to study how the Arctic Ocean is absorbing carbon dioxide.

Read the full story at Marine Technology News

ALASKA: Large salaries, small workload for state fisheries commission

July 18, 2017 — Two state commissioners are making big money even though they don’t have much work left to do. That’s the story recently reported by Nathaniel Herz with the Alaska Dispatch News, who investigated the state’s Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission.

“There are some inefficiencies and what some would call dysfunction at this agency that have been very clearly and specifically documented in the past two or three years that no one has been able to fix,” Herz said. “That starts at the top.”

The commission was created in the 1970s in order to limit the number of boats that can participate in certain commercial fisheries and conserve the stocks.

Herz wrote in an article this past weekend that they haven’t limited a fishery since 2004 and have processed fewer than five applications per year since 2012.

“Basically, the core work that the commissioners have done in the past doesn’t really exist anymore at anything near the level it once did,” Herz said.

Despite this, commissioners Ben Brown and Bruce Twomley are each still earning $130,000 per year.

Legislators and Gov. Bill Walker have made attempts to change the structure and cost of the commission and make it more efficient, but Herz reported that their efforts have failed, in part because of steps taken by commercial fishing interests.

“There’s a real concern that you if you just wrap the Commercial Fisheries Entries Commission up under Fish and Game that somehow it could be subject to the whims of the Fish and Game commissioner,” Herz said. “It could lose its political independence, it could become less responsive.”

Read the full story at KTOO

Wasted Fish – What to Make of Recent Data Showing 10% of Fish are Discarded at Sea?

July 12, 2017 — A paper published last week titled, Global marine fisheries discards: A synthesis of reconstructed data, concludes that commercial fishermen have thrown away (discarded) about 10% of catch over the past decade. Researchers, led by Dirk Zeller, used catch reconstructions – estimates of how many fish were caught – to approximate that around 10 million tons of fish are discarded at sea per year. This number is down from a high of 18 million tons in the 1990s.

Zeller et al. 2017  suggest that the decline in discards are a result of declining fish stocks, though they acknowledge that gear and management improvements could also play a role. Indeed, worldwide fish stocks have remained relatively stable since 1990s, indicating that perhaps management and gear technology have played a larger role in reducing discards than researchers propose.

Previously, we have featured an in-depth analysis of discard policy in the EU by Philip Taylor & Griffin Carpenter.

In the below comments we offer 3 different perspectives on fishing discards and the recent Zeller et al. 2017 paper.

Comment by Bill Karp, Affiliate Professor, University of Washington

The recent paper by Zeller et al highlights challenges associated with estimation of discards and interpretation of overall estimates and trends. Their work builds on an extensive body of research, most notably earlier global discard estimates published in 1994 and 2005, and relies heavily on the Sea Around Us database and catch and discard estimation methods outlined by the authors.

Unwanted fish results from almost all fishing . Fishers generally target a species or group of but fishing gear is not perfectly selective for species or size. Regulations may preclude landing of some species and sizes (usually smaller fish), or economic factors may favor retention of larger fish or higher-value species  If the undesired fish are not retained and marketed in some form (e.g. as fish meal for aquaculture feed, or fertilizer) they are generally returned to the sea as discards. This issue is not unique to fishing, waste is a concern in all types of food production. In the United States, roughly 7% of all crops are wasted at the farm (i.e. never harvested), with estimates up to 40% of food waste through the supply chain.

In recent years, waste associated with fisheries discard has become a major public policy issue in some regions, with partial discard bans being implemented in Norway, the European Union, and elsewhere. At the same time, regulatory and operational innovations have resulted in lower discard rates in some fisheries, and demonstrated the potential for broader improvement. Fisheries discard can be reduced by development and use more selective fishing methods, developing markets for unfamiliar species or products, and by regulatory approaches which provide incentives for improved selectivity and/or utilization or even prohibit certain types of discarding.

Zeller et. al. argue that high-grading (discarding of lower-value in favor of higher-value fish) and regulatory discard are major problems and shortfalls of individual transferable quota (ITQ) fisheries. While high-grading and regulatory discarding are substantive causes of discarding, ITQ-type of programs (catch share, rights-based) may include provisions for transferring of quota among participants as well as sharing information that can improve selectivity. These types of programs also reduce or eliminate the race for fish and thereby reduce levels of unwanted fish. They can also encourage accountability, a key to improved catch and discard data. Examples can be found in Alaska and elsewhere.

Read the full report at CFOOD

An Alaska fishing commission has worked itself out of a job. But its commissioners still make more than $130,000 a year

July 10, 2017 — At an obscure state agency in Juneau, two commissioners each earn more than $130,000 a year to oversee fewer than two dozen employees — about the same amount paid to the corrections, health and transportation commissioners, who supervise thousands.

The two political appointees, Ben Brown and Bruce Twomley, are being paid even though they’ve all but stopped doing the Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission’s most essential work: They haven’t limited access to a fishery since 2004, and they’ve resolved no more than three permit applications in each of the past five years, down from the dozens that were once processed annually.

A long-running project to upgrade the agency’s obsolete, 35-year-old computer system has stalled. One former employee, who lacked civil service protection, says he was fired after pushing for reforms and providing auditors with information that he said documented the commission’s inefficiency and dysfunction.

Meanwhile, several other longtime employees have been allowed to retire and collect state benefits while continuing part-time work for the commission in temporary positions. One, Doug Rickey — who left the agency last month — said he was doing about 20 percent of his work remotely from Las Vegas, where he lives part of the time.

The commission’s problems were laid out in painstaking detail in a pair of audits released in 2015 — one of which called for the commissioners to be reduced to part-time status. But efforts to fix the commission have gone nowhere, with commercial fishing interests and the commissioners themselves successfully fending off legislation and an administrative order from Gov. Bill Walker to restructure the agency.

Read the full story at Alaska Dispatch News

Is having a special week in Seattle enough to make Alaska herring cool again?

July 5, 2017 — Last week in Seattle, one kind of Alaska fish was served in dozens of restaurants around the city. It was in everything from pâté to tacos and piled high on open-faced sandwiches. One chef even used a pickled piece as a cocktail garnish. 

But it wasn’t Alaska’s famous wild sockeye salmon or Pacific halibut. It was Alaska herring — a small, oily fish — and it was all part of the third annual Alaska Herring Week in Seattle.

It’s part of an effort by a group of fishermen and the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute to try and revitalize a small Western Alaska fishery, which has been declining over the last decade.

Alaska Herring Week event coordinator Zachary Lyons said 54 restaurants and four grocery stores in the Seattle area participated in Herring Week this year. It started in 2015 with just eight restaurants, and 33 participated in 2016. This year’s event included The Whale and the Carpenter and Bar Melusine, restaurants both associated with Renee Erickson, winner of the 2016 James Beard Best Chef Northwest Award.

Lyons, who spent last week eating herring at up to five restaurants a day, said some consider the fish old-fashioned, destined to be canned or pickled on a shelf at the grocery store. But there are other culinary uses for the fish. Herring flesh cooks into a rich brown color and has a light fish flavor, similar to trout. No two herring dishes he ate during the week were alike, Lyons said.

“It’s really versatile,” he said. “It’s amazing to see what people are doing with it.”

Read the full story at Alaska Dispatch News

Is the Cook Inlet beluga population stable or in danger? Depends on whom you ask.

June 29, 2017 — Alaska’s most urban whales have yet to show any meaningful increase in numbers, evidence that recovery remains elusive for the endangered population despite numerous protective measures imposed in recent years. On the plus side, the Cook Inlet beluga population has not declined notably in the past two years, scientists say.

The latest survey of the small and endangered white whales estimates the population at 328 animals, within a range of 279 and 386, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports.

That represents barely any change from the previous estimate of 340 animals, from 2014, but far below the 1,300 belugas that scientists say were swimming three decades ago in the silty, salty water between Anchorage and the Gulf of Alaska.

“Cook Inlet belugas are still in danger of extinction because the population is so small,” said Paul Wade, head of Cook Inlet beluga research at NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service. “The population trend over the last 10 years has been relatively stable compared to the steep decline seen in the 1990s, but there is some evidence the population has continued to decline slightly. We are concerned that the population is not yet increasing towards its former abundance level,” Wade said in a prepared statement.

The newest population estimate comes from the latest in a series of regular aerial counts conducted by NMFS. The estimate is based on thousands of photographs taken from the air a year ago; analysis of those images is a laborious process, so the count that emerged required a full year of work and review, officials said.

Read the full story at Alaska Dispatch News