Saving Seafood

ALASKA: Back to Bristol Bay project

July 9, 2021 — This past weekend, a crew assembled to raise the sail on a traditionally restored Bristol Bay double-ender.

The boat was part of the Fourth of July parade in Homer but the plan is to sail it back to Bristol Bay where it served as salmon gillnetter in the early 1900s.

The crew of the Back to the Bay project is rigging a wooden double-ender with a spritsail in Nomar’s parking lot on Pioneer Avenue in Homer. Bumpo Bremiker is splicing line to make loops to hold the rings that will secure the sail while Dave Seaman explains.

“…splicing up some eye splices in the sheet attachment point on the sail. John Breiby, a nautical historian on Alaska wrote a little pamphlet called Rigging the Bristol Bay Double-ender.  We’ve approximated the best we can,” said Seaman.

This year the boat is on a trailer, preparing to sail down Homer’s Fourth of July Parade route. Next year they hope to put out from Homer harbor, travel under sail –  west across Cook Inlet to Williamsport. Then, they’ll take the 26 mile portage to Iliamna Lake, sail the lake and the Kvichak River, visiting a series of villages on the way to their destination, Fishtival 2022 in Naknek.

Read the full story at KBBI

Promising prices, record landings for Bristol Bay sockeye

July 7, 2021 — Alaska’s Bristol Bay salmon season is off to a strong start in what is expected to be another harvest hovering around all-time highs for both catch and value in the world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery.

Fish were already pouring in to at least two of Bristol Bay’s four major river systems. As of July 1, the bay had produced 9.02 million commercial sockeye landings — 46 percent above the five-year average — on a preseason prediction of more than 36 million sockeye, according to area biologist Tim Sands with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

By Tuesday, July 6, that total was above 14 million sockeye.

While early returns look good, test fishing indicates the run should sustain for a relatively long period of time, which should help the fishery avoid bottlenecks in fishing and processing.

Last season’s compressed run, coupled with covid-19 complications, strained Bristol Bay’s fishermen and processors. The Bristol Bay fishery also slogged through the pandemic last season with a disappointing base price of just $0.75, but got early, unexpected news that Peter Pan Seafoods will pay a base price of $1.10.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

New app lets Alaska mariners report real-time changes in the marine ecosystem

July 7, 2021 — Fishermen are the ears and eyes of the marine ecosystem as a changing climate throws our oceans off kilter.

Now a new phone app is making sure their real-life, real-time observations are included in scientific data.

The new Skipper Science smartphone app, released June 18, comes from the Aleut Community of St. Paul Island in the Bering Sea as a way “to elevate the thousands of informal-yet-meaningful environmental observations by fishermen and others into hard numbers for Alaska’s science-based management,” said Lauren Divine, director of ecosystem conservation for St. Paul’s tribal government whose team created and owns the dataset for the app.

“How do we take what has historically been called anecdotal and create some structure around it that is rigorous and has scientific repeatability?” Divine told KCAW in Sitka.

“There is a vast body of deep knowledge that fishermen hold from their experience on the water, indigenous and non-indigenous alike, that they use for decision making and risk evaluation and to execute a likelihood on the water. And we have very much underutilized that knowledge for years, especially here in the North Pacific,” she added in a phone interview.

The free app, which works on or off the internet, is an offshoot of an Indigenous Sentinels Network started 16 years ago at St. Paul Island to monitor wildlife and the environment in the Bering Sea.

To broaden its reach, St. Paul partnered with advocacy group SalmonState’s Salmon Habitat Information Program. Through its surveys and other outreach, SHIP quantifies what’s regarded by scientists as fishermen’s “informal observations” and shares the information with managers and decision makers.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

Texas captain dies after F/V Pneuma capsizes in Alaska’s Bristol Bay

July 7, 2021 — Record-breaking salmon hauls in Bristol Bay were met with tragedy on July 1, when the captain of the F/V Pneuma died after the gillnetter capsized in the Nushagak District fishery, sending the whole crew overboard.

Lance Eric Norby, 45, of Texas, was identified as the captain, according to the Alaska State Troopers.

“Pneuma was stuck on a sandbar when a large wave knocked the entire crew overboard. The F/V Fortress, and tenders Provider and Last Frontier responded to the call,” said OBI Seafoods in a statement released over the weekend.

The Alaska Wildlife Troopers reported that they received a call just before 6 a.m. on July 1 that a commercial fishing boat was taking on water on the South end of Nushagak Bay. All three crew members went into the water, and two troopers patrolling the area in a skiff immediately responded. They were able to pull one of the survivors to safety aboard the skiff. The good Samaritan commercial fishing boats pulled the other deckhand and Norby from the water.

“Poor weather combined with an uneven fish load is likely what caused the vessel to capsize,” said Austin McDaniel spokesman for the troopers, based on the agency’s preliminary investigation.

A Coast Guard rescue swimmer assisted with initial medical care for the crew. Despite extensive life-saving efforts, the captain was declared deceased by Coast Guard personnel at about 9:40 a.m.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Authorities identify man who died after fishing boat sinks in Nushagak

July 6, 2021 — A commercial fisherman has died after a vessel sank in the south end of Nushagak Bay on Thursday morning with three people on board.

Authorities on Friday identified the deceased as Lance Eric Norby, 45, of Arlington, Texas. He captained the F/V Pneuma. Norby’s next of kin has been notified.

Alaska State Troopers report receiving a call around 5 a.m. Thursday morning that a commercial vessel was taking on water. Two wildlife troopers responded immediately. Before they got there, they heard reports that the three people on board were in the water.

Authorities credit Good Samaritans on the scene with helping in the rescue. Among those was skipper Caleb Mikkelsen, who said his crew was getting ready for an opener when he got a call from a friend that there was a vessel in distress on the VHF radio.

“We could hear that there were two boats and a skiff trying to help this vessel that was sinking out on those Snake River flats there,” he said.

The people at the scene said they still needed help. So Mikkelsen piloted his boat, the F/V Fortress, about seven miles to help.

Read the full story at KDLG

ALASKA: More of the same a good thing as Bristol Bay gets underway

June 30, 2021 — Early indicators are pointing to yet another strong year in the massive Bristol Bay sockeye fishery, which is contrasted against the continued struggles in many of the state’s other large salmon fisheries.

Just more than 3.2 million sockeye had been harvested through June 27, according to Alaska Department of Fish and Game figures, with the Nushagak District accounting for more than half of the catch so far at nearly 1.7 million fish. The 3.2 million-fish harvest to-date this year is between the comparable totals for recent years; 1.2 million sockeye were harvested through June 27 last year, while more than 4.4 million were caught by the same day in 2019.

With sockeye harvests of more than 40 million fish and total runs greater than 56 million sockeye, both of the last two years have been among the most productive in the history of the Bristol Bay fishery.

Dillingham Area Management Biologist Tim Sands said early June 29 that he’s confident there are a lot of fish still making their way to the head of Bristol Bay based on catches in the Port Moller test fishery.

He noted that returns to the Egegik River down the Alaska Peninsula have been particularly strong, with a harvest of more than 1.2 million fish and a total return estimated at more than 1.7 million sockeye through June 27, several-fold more than last year in each category.

Read the full story at the Alaska Journal of Commerce

A tiny Alaska town is split over a goldmine. At stake is a way of life

June 23, 2021 — For 2,000 years, Jones Hotch’s ancestors have fished Alaska’s Chilkat River for the five species of salmon that spawn in its cold, clean waters. They have gathered berries, hunted moose and raised their families, sheltered from the extremes of winter by the black, saw-toothed peaks of the Iron Mountain.

Now Hotch fears a proposed mining project could end that way of life.

Hotch has an infectious, boyish laugh – but there is no mistaking how worried he is about plans to build a mine where millions of pounds of zinc, copper, lead, silver and gold are buried, beneath the valleys’ mountains. We arejust miles from the headwaters of the Chilkat, the glacial river that serves as the main food source of the Tlingit, the region’s Indigenous people, as well as the inhabitants of Haines, the nearest port town.

“You guys might have your Safeway,” he says, waving his arm across the valley. “There’s ours all around here.”

Hotch, a tribal leader, lives in Klukwan, a village that takes its name from the Tlingit phrase “Tlakw Aan” – “the village that has always been”. It is the hub of an ancient trading route – later known as the Dalton Trail – that runs from Haines to Fort Selkirk in Canada.

Here in south-east Alaska, the consequences of the climate crisis are already visible. “Our mountains used to be snow-capped all year round,” Hotch said. “Two summers ago, our mountains were almost totally bare.” In Haines, hardware stores sold out of box fans because it was so hot.

Read the full story at The Guardian

Peter Pan posts USD 1.10 per pound for Bristol Bay sockeye

June 21, 2021 — Peter Pan Seafood shook up the world’s largest wild salmon run on 19 June with the announcement it will pay a base price of USD 1.10 (EUR 0.84) per pound for sockeye salmon in Bristol Bay, Alaska.

The price upholds reports of a strong market for wild sockeye and is a welcome development for Bristol Bay fishermen, who were disappointed by last season’s base price of USD 0.75 (EUR 0.63).

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Ninth Circuit Revives Fight Over Mining Plans in Pristine Alaskan Bay

June 18, 2021 — Home to the greatest wild salmon fisheries in the world, Bristol Bay in southwest Alaska also lies near prized natural resources long sought by a mining enterprise. To protect the pristine Alaskan frontier, the Obama administration’s U.S. Environmental Protection Agency sought to restrict a proposed mining operation in 2014 — a move later dumped by the Trump administration.

Conservationists sued, but a federal judge found the Trump EPA’s decision unreviewable and dismissed the case.

On Thursday, a Ninth Circuit panel ordered the case remanded to determine if the EPA’s about-face was “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or contrary” to federal law.

The legal history surrounding this pristine slice of Alaskan wilderness stretches back to 2014, when the EPA announced it would seek to restrict mining operations in Bristol Bay under the authority of the Clean Water Act. The proposed Pebble Mine operation would extract copper, gold and other minerals and would be the largest of its kind in North America. The operation’s toxic waste pits could sit at the headwaters to Bristol Bay, and any type of collapse would likely contaminate the region’s watershed.

But in 2019 the Trump EPA withdrew its proposed determination. Several lawsuits followed including a complaint filed by Trout Unlimited, a nonprofit advocacy group, in the District of Alaska. The group challenged the agency’s withdrawal decision as a violation of the Clean Water Act and the implementing regulations.

Read the full story at the Courthouse News Service

Pebble: Appeals Court revives case challenging EPA’s removal of watershed protection

June 18, 2021 — A panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has revived a lawsuit aimed at blocking construction of the Pebble Mine in Southwest Alaska.

The lawsuit, filed by environmental groups, tribes and other mine opponents, challenged a 2019 Environmental Protection Agency decision to remove protection for the Bristol Bay watershed.

U.S. District Judge Sharon Gleason ruled last year courts could not review the decision because the Clean Water Act did not specify what legal standard applied. The appeals panel agreed the law did not include that standard — but said EPA’s regulations do.

Read the full story at Alaska Public Media