Saving Seafood

As Copper River salmon season opens, Alaska gears up for big runs in 2022

May 17, 2022 — The salmon-fishing season in the U.S. state of Alaska officially began Monday, 16 May, with the opening of the Copper River fishery.

The first 17,200 pounds of Copper River salmon arrived in Seattle, Washington, U.S.A. on an Alaska Airlines flight at around 8:30 a.m. local time on Tuesday, 17 May, according to Lusamerica Director of Communications and Sustainability Peter Adame. Lusamerica is the parent company of the Monterey Bay Seafood brand.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

 

Biden signs Fisheries Advisory Committee Act into law

May 13, 2022 — U.S. President Joe Biden has signed a bill into law that establishes an industry-led panel to help federal officials oversee grant awards for fisheries.

The American Fisheries Advisory Committee Act was sponsored by U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) and was signed by Biden on Thursday, 12 May, 2022. The law will create the American Fisheries Advisory Committee, a 22-member panel representing six regions across the country. Regional members will be selected from the seafood processing, commercial, and recreational sectors, and from experts in regional fishery science. At-large members will include a representative of the foodservice sector, someone from both the commercial and recreational fishing industries, and a NOAA Fisheries representative with a background in research.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

 

Murkowski’s ‘BLUE GLOBE’ initiative advancing in the US Senate

May 9, 2022 — Senator Lisa Murkowski, co-chair of the bipartisan Senate Oceans Caucus, released a statement after her legislation, the BLUE GLOBE Act, advanced one step closer to becoming law.

BLUE GLOBE stands for “Bolstering Long-Term Understanding and Exploration of the Great Lakes, Oceans, Bays, and Estuaries.”

“The BLUE GLOBE Act is one step closer to becoming law, which is great news for Alaska’s fisheries and coastal communities.

Read the full story at KINY

 

Alaska to get nearly $132 million for fisheries disasters

May 9, 2022 — The U.S. Commerce Department is allocating $131.9 million to Alaska for fisheries disasters that occurred between 2018 and 2021, according to Alaska’s U.S. senators.

States may request federal assistance for fisheries after hurricanes, oil spills and other types of natural and manmade disasters that harm a commercial fishery.

The funding for Alaska is for a series of fisheries disasters, including for the Yukon River salmon fishery the last two years.

Read the full story from the Associated Press

 

US House pays tribute to Don Young by passing salmon task force bill

April 28, 2022 — The U.S. House of Representatives honored the late Don Young on Tuesday, 26 April, by passing legislation the longtime Alaska Republican congressman sponsored.

Young first won the state’s only House seat in 1973. He was the “Dean of the House,” a term given to the longest-tenured member in Congress. He died at age 88 on 18 March while traveling back to the state from Washington, D.C.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

 

ALASKA: Record 74 Million Sockeye Run Forecast for 2022, Low Return for Pinks, as Expected

April 26, 2022 — Alaska’s Department of Fish and Game has released their final “Run Forecasts and Harvest Projections for 2022 Alaska Salmon Fisheries and Review of the 2021 Season” and once again Bristol Bay is outdoing its own record of consistently massive returns.

The forecast for the statewide total salmon return is lower than last years by 800,000 salmon, but it doesn’t detract much from the forecasted run in the Bay.

The 2021 inshore Bristol Bay sockeye salmon run of 67.7 million fish is the largest total run on record — 64% above the 41.3 million average run for the latest 20-year period. It was also the third time on record that the sockeye run exceeded 60.0 million fish. Last year’s 42.0 million harvest was 15% above the 36.4 million fish preseason forecast and the third largest harvest on record. It was also the third time in the last 4 years that landings  exceeded 40.0 million fish.

Read the full story at Seafood News

Bering Sea crabbers and communities are struggling with Alaska’s snow crab decline

April 21, 2022 — Bering Sea crabbers and communities in the region are struggling with a steep decline in snow crab this year, likely the result of climate change.

That caused the crab fleet to push farther north than usual and forced places like St. Paul to consider major budget shortfalls, because the Pribilof Island city depends on taxes from fish and crab processing.

The snow crab crash and its impacts are the subject of a recent reporting collaboration between the Seattle Times, the Anchorage Daily News and the Pulitzer Center’s Connected Coastlines reporting initiative.

As part of the “Into the Ice” series, Seattle Times reporter Hal Bernton and ADN photographer Loren Holmes spent two weeks in January aboard a crab boat called the Pinnacle, one of the biggest in the fleet at 137 feet.

Read the full story at KTOO

Southeast Alaska gillnetters are part of a national study on commercial fishing and sleep

April 21, 2022 — Researchers from New York were in Petersburg, Sitka, Juneau and Cordova last week gathering information on salmon gillnetters as part of a study on sleep deprivation.

The research organization is the Northeast Center for Occupational Health and Safety. It’s a non-profit that’s funded through the Centers for Disease Control to come up with solutions for work-related issues with fishermen, farmers and forestry workers.

Right now they’re studying the relationship between commercial fishermen’s sleep and health.

The research team is on the tail end of their data gathering. They’ve already collected information from scallop fishermen in Massachusetts, Dungeness fishermen in Oregon and salmon gillnetters in Alaska. As a control group, they’re studying inshore lobster fishermen because they just go out on day trips.North

Julie Sorensen is the director of the research center. She says they hope to finish analyzing the data this summer and be able to share some of the findings in the fall.

Read the full story at KTOO

ALASKA: Anti-Pebble super PAC will support candidates against the proposed mine

April 20, 2022 — A new super PAC that has amassed $600,000 from a single group says it will back federal candidates who support protections for Bristol Bay and who oppose the proposed Pebble mine project in Southwest Alaska.

Alaskans for Bristol Bay Action said Monday that it will focus on additional fundraising to support candidates in the upcoming election cycle.

Former Alaska Senate President Rick Halford, a Republican and longtime opponent of the proposed mine, is senior adviser for the new political action committee.

The committee was created in February, according to the Federal Elections Commission.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

ALASKA: Snow crab decline hits Bering Sea island community of St. Paul

April 11, 2022 — The Trident Seafoods plant tucked inside this island’s small port is the largest snow crab processor in the nation.

On a cold clear day in January, three Trident workers, within the hold of the Seattle-based Pinnacle, grabbed bunches of the shellfish, and placed them in an enormous brailer basket for their brief trip across a dock. The crab were fed into a hopper to be butchered, cooked, brined and frozen.

Few of the 360 people who live on St. Paul, largest of the four Pribilof Islands, have opted to work in the plant. Instead jobs are filled with recruits from elsewhere.

But the plant still remains a financial underpinning of this Aleut community. Trident pays taxes that help bankroll the expansive services of a city government, which rents apartments, leases construction equipment and even provides plumbers and electricians to make repairs.

This year, the snow crab harvest dropped nearly 90% in a body blow to the city’s budget and to its efforts to keep people from moving away.

City officials estimate the decline in the snow crab harvest, along with the cancellation of the 2021 fall king crab harvest, will result in a loss of $3.25 million in tax revenue. That amount is equal to nearly half of this year’s budget, so city officials in 2023 will have to decide what services to maintain and what they might have to cut back or give up.

Read the full story at The Seattle Times