July 12, 2024 — Sockeye salmon fishing in Alaska’s Bristol Bay is, as predicted, off to a slower start this fishing season.
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G) 2024 Bristol Bay sockeye salmon forecast predicted a run of roughly 39 million sockeye salmon, down from the 54.5 million in 2023. AFD&G’s predicted run for 2023 was 49.7 million sockeye, and the state agency acknowledged that its preseason forecasts have generally under-forecast the actual run by 15 percent.
July 10, 2024 — Around Alaska, particularly in the Interior region, there are streams, creeks and rivers that were damaged by mining conducted as far back as the mid-19th century.
The Bureau of Land Management, a federal agency of the Department of the Interior, now has a new program intended to speed up work to fix those historic damages.
The agency has made final its systematic approach that is intended to avoid the need for full-scale environmental analysis of each proposed restoration project. The new program features a matrix of restoration techniques, ranging in intensity from planting vegetation by hand to use of heavy equipment to redirect waterways or rebuild streambanks. Those techniques are to be matched to individual projects’ needs and physical characteristics that include fish and wildlife habitat, geologic formations and levels of damage.
The idea is to complete projects as quickly as possible while adhering to requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act and other federal laws, said Matthew Varner, leader for fisheries and riparian resources in the BLM’s Alaska aquatic resources program.
“Restoration projects, like most federal agency actions on the ground, require environmental analysis consistent with NEPA,” Varner said. “And when you couple NEPA compliance with permitting associated with stream restoration, you know, that could take six months to a year to complete.”
July 8, 2024 — An electrical fire has damaged one of three spiral freezers aboard Northline Seafoods’ new floating fish processor Hannah, which is anchored in Bristol Bay’s Nushagak district this salmon season.
The vessel is currently operating at a reduced capacity after Sunday’s blaze, and other processors are taking on some of Northline’s fleet.
During a recent visit to the Hannah, a steady stream of frozen, whole fish emerged from a large spiral freezer. Each fish landing on a conveyor belt was whisked away to the next stage in the production line.
These frozen fish were some of the first sockeye salmon deliveries of the season from Bristol Bay fishing vessels to the Hannah, Northline’s brand-new floating freezer barge in the region.
From there they made their way to grading belts, where they were sorted by size and then placed into cold storage for processing later in the year.
“So it goes through a spiral freezer, where it goes in the bottom, exits out the top, gets graded, and that goes into a box,” said Northline CEO Ben Blakey.
Blakey said it just takes a few hours for the spiral freezers to bring the fish down to their desired core temperatures. The idea is that freezing fish at these ultra-low temperatures — and freezing quickly — makes a big difference in maintaining quality.
July 8, 2024 — Mike Dunleavy, the governor of the U.S. state of Alaska, has once again vetoed a bill funding the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute (ASMI).
ASMI, which works to promote Alaska seafood, is supported by state funding, but Dunleavy used a line-item veto in the state’s 2025 budget bill to deny it USD 10 million (EUR 9.2 million) on 4 July. Dunleavy indicated he may seek to restore the funding via a supplemental budget bill if ASMI submits a detailed spending plan.
July 3, 2024 — A public interest law firm in Sacramento, California has filed suit against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on behalf of two Alaska Native corporations over the agency’s veto of permits needed for the proposed Pebble mine in Southwest Alaska.
Litigation was filed on June 25 by the Pacific Legal Foundation on behalf of Iliamna Natives Limited and the Alaska Peninsula Corporation, which represent Native shareholders in South Naknek, Port Heiden, Ugashik, Kokhanok, and Newhalen.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Anchorage, contends that the EPA exceeded its authority by vetoing the copper, gold and molybdenum mine proposed for construction in land in Southwest Alaska abutting the Bristol Bay watershed, home of the world’s largest run of wild Alaska sockeye salmon. The Bristol Bay fishery, now underway for the 2024 season, is a multi-million dollar commercial and sport fishery that provides thousands of jobs for harvesters, processors, the transportation industry and other businesses engaged in contractual relations with the fishing industry. It also provides sustenance for subsistence harvests and extensive wildlife, including bears, eagles and more.
July 3, 2024 — Alaskan and West Coast fishery stakeholders are still in the dark as to who will represent them on their regional fishery management councils.
The appointments of 22 new and returning members to six of eight of the nation’s councils were announced on June 28 by the US Dept. of Commerce. The Secretary of Commerce appoints council seats from state governors’ lists of nominees. Each serves three-year terms.
“Appointments to the Pacific and North Pacific fishery management councils will be announced later this summer,” the Commerce press release said.
“My understanding is that the decision on those appointments have not yet been finalized,” said Julie Fair, Public Affairs Officer at NOAA’s Alaska Regional Office. “The appointments for Pacific and North Pacific Fishery Management Councils will be forthcoming later this summer, and we do not anticipate any lapse in voting during their September/October Council meetings,” Fair added.
July 3, 2024 — Despite granting emergency authorization to dipnets for commercial setnet fisheries in Cook Inlet and even indicating “the commission intends to make the emergency regulation permanent” in that decision, the Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission on Tuesday, June 25, decided not to approve dipnets as a permanent gear type for the fisheries.
Despite this move, the emergency approval will remain effective through the current fishing season before expiring in September.
The meeting comes as the conclusion to a regulatory process to add dipnets to the fisheries that began in May. That process, too, followed approval of dipnets for Cook Inlet commercial fisheries by the State Board of Fisheries in March. The board said that dipnets could be a more selective gear for harvest of sockeye salmon without killing king salmon.
Both the board and the commission needed to approve dipnets before they could be used in the fisheries, and the emergency approval allowed their use in the first opening of the season last weekend.
Commissioner Glenn Haight, in voting down the permanent proposal, said that the emergency regulation will remain active. If people try that fishery and want to have dipnets added as a permanent gear type, he said they should petition the commission again next year with more time to “take a good, hard look at it.”
June 28, 2024 — Justin Johnson surveyed his nets and the large net reel of his bowpicker the F/V White Night at the Cordova Harbor in early June, as he prepared for the next day’s opener.
“So a 20 pound king is a $300 fish or better, so you definitely don’t want to see it splash out of the net,” he said, gesturing to the dip net on hand to snap up the coveted Copper River king salmon.
The Copper River fishing season started on May 15, and marks the first salmon run of the year with the highest prices in the state, especially for kings. The Alaska commercial fishing season has been through an economic tailspin over the last year. Fishing crews grappled with historically low prices, and processors sold and closed down plants over the winter. The Prince William Sound fishery is one of the most productive in the state, but fishing crews are also feeling the pressure.
Back at the Cordova harbor, lifelong commercial fisherman Nick Nebesky took a break from boat engine repairs to share his concerns with market prices.
“It was rough. I’ve spent all winter redoing my finances, accounting everything, to try to get myself back where I need to be,” he said. “And it seems like this year could possibly make that happen. But last year was awful, it was a terrible price. There was good fish – the fish were beautiful, the fish were healthy, and I see them in the grocery stores. Seems like they’re the same price in the grocery stores, but we did not get paid as much.”
June 28, 2024 — During recent periods of unusually warm water in the Gulf of Alaska, young Pacific cod in near shore safe havens where they typically spend their adolescence did not experience the protective effects those areas typically provide, a new Oregon State University study found.
Instead, during marine heat waves in 2014–16 and 2019, young cod in these near shore “nurseries” around Kodiak Island in Alaska experienced significant changes in their abundance, growth rates and diet, with researchers estimating that only the largest 15–25% of the island’s cod population survived the summer. Even after the high temperatures subsided, the cod have yet to return to pre-heat wave size and diet.
The findings, published today in the journal Scientific Reports, may have broader implications for marine fish populations worldwide, as marine heat waves become longer and more frequent with climate change, the researchers said.
“These coastal habitats aren’t supporting fish in the same way that they used to as a result of marine heat waves,” said lead author Hillary Thalmann, a graduate student in OSU’s Department of Fisheries, Wildlife and Conservation Sciences. “That’s a novel finding, because we don’t always look at the nurseries as a place where size-selective mortality could be occurring rapidly.”
June 27, 2024 — As commercial salmon fishing gets under way in Southeast Alaska, projections for salmon returns are up. Troy Thynes is the regional finfish coordinator for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. He said as with any forecast, this one is only good until the fish start returning.
“Last year, with that 19 million forecast in the poor category, we ended up with a harvest of around 48 million pink salmon. So needless to say the forecast was a little off,” he said.
The purse seine fishery brings in the largest salmon harvest in the region because it’s primarily a pink and chum salmon fishery. Pinks are the most numerous salmon species in Southeast. The pre-season forecast is for 19.2 million fish. That’s just a little above last year’s harvest estimate of 19 million, but well under half of the actual harvest of 48 million fish.
Thynes said the seine pink salmon harvest probably could have been even higher last year, but market conditions got in the way. Processors dropped pink and chum salmon prices, and then quit buying early, saying the global salmon market was flooded.