December 20, 2023 — The total amount of pollock allowed to be scooped up by trawlers in the Bering Sea will stay the same in 2024. In its Dec. 9 meeting in Anchorage, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council moved to keep the total allowable catch for pollock at its current level of 1.3 million metric tons, a move that has generated criticism from conservationists, tribes and the trawling industry alike.

Alaska’s pollock fishery is responsible for the vast majority of salmon bycatch in the region. And amid alarming declines in returns of multiple species of salmon to Western Alaska rivers, the pollock trawl fishery has faced increasing criticism for its perceived role driving the crisis. But federal fisheries managers and the trawling industry pushed back, asserting that the claims are unfounded.

Trade organizations representing the trawl industry said during testimony at the council meeting that the decision to hold the pollock quota steady is misguided.

Stephanie Madsen, executive director of the At-Sea Processors Association, told the council the move could lead to missed opportunities to harvest increased numbers of mature pollock in the Bering Sea.

“We can’t bank them like some fish species. They will age out of the system and they will be not available to the fishery,” Madsen said.

Madsen also told the council that the industry request for a modest increase to the pollock quota, which was ultimately denied, was already a compromise.

“I would just remind you that the Russian fishery in the Sea of Okhotsk and the Western Bering Sea take more pollock than our Eastern Bering Sea pollock,” Madsen said. “So a 20,000 metric ton increase in the Eastern Bering Sea is likely to have very little impact on a global situation.”

Read the full article at Alaska Public Media

October 23, 2023 — Michael Cleveland’s job is resuscitating the equipment essential to village life.

On a morning in late summer, inside a modest engine repair shop, Cleveland was juggling jobs fixing the transom of an aluminum skiff and stripping a four-wheeler down to the guts.

Mechanics here fix snowmachines, boat motors, the occasional car, dirt bikes and anything else with an engine. In a part of Alaska without roads, these are the vehicles vital to everyday life — getting to the airstrip, going hunting and fishing, traveling to other communities across the flat terrain of the Kuskokwim Delta.

Cleveland, 33, grew up in this predominantly Yup’ik part of Southwest Alaska and has been employed at the shop for around two years.

“For me, I’m learning while I’m working,” he said.

Read the full article at Anchorage Daily News 

October 16, 2023 — The North Pacific Fishery Management Council approved options for limiting the Bering Sea pollock fleet’s take of chum salmon during an October meeting that displayed the fault lines separating the pollock industry and Western Alaska tribal representatives.

The council motion approved Sunday calls for consideration of caps ranging from a low of 200,000 chum to as many as 550,000 annually that could be incidentally taken by trawl vessels targeting pollock. It will be sent out for study along with a broader set of alternatives.

The council will be required to select an alternative and take a vote by December 2024.

Many Western Alaska communities have been buffeted by weak returns of salmon that have brought a sense of crisis as some commercial fisheries have been shut down and subsistence fishing opportunities have been reduced or in some cases eliminated.

Their tribal representatives backed a proposal to study a much lower range of caps for the trawl fleet — from 0 to 280,000 chum annually. That amendment was rejected by a council advisory panel and did not make it into the final council motion.

Read the full article at Anchorage Daily News

October 16, 2023 — Some 400 miles northwest of Dutch Harbor, Bering Sea pollock congregated in spectacular fashion.

In the wheelhouse of this factory trawler, Captain Jim Egaas scanned a sonar displaying a dense red band that represented millions of fish in a school that stretched for miles.

He could see the pollock up close on another screen that relayed images from an undersea camera stitched in the mesh of a quarter-mile-long net. The video feed showed swarms of them deep in the funnel-shaped trap.

Once pulled on board, the tail end of the net bulged with more than 220,000 pounds of tightly packed pollock. A crewman unstitched a seam. Raised by a powerful winch, the net spewed a silver avalanche of fish into below-deck holding tanks to await processing in a plant primed to operate 24 hours a day.

Egaas was in hurry-up mode. Even before the last of this catch was shaken from the webbing, he called for crew members to unfurl a second net from a giant reel.

Read the full article at Anchorage Daily News