Saving Seafood

ALASKA: All major Bering Sea crab stocks are down alarmingly this season, surveys indicate

September 14, 2021 — Alaska’s Bering Sea crabbers are reeling from the devastating news that all major crab stocks are down substantially, based on summer survey results, and the Bristol Bay red king crab fishery will be closed for the first time in over 25 years.

That stock has been on a steady decline for several years, and the 2020 harvest dwindled to just 2.6 million pounds.

Most shocking was the drastic turnaround for snow crab stocks, which in 2018 showed a 60% boost in market-size male crabs (the only ones retained for sale) and nearly the same for females. That year’s survey was documented as “one of the largest snow crab recruitment events biologists have ever seen,” said Bob Foy, director of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council’s Crab Plan Team.

Again in 2019, the “very strong” snow crab biomass was projected at over 610 million pounds, and the catch was set at a conservative 45 million pounds for the 2020 fishery. No Bering Sea crab surveys were done that year due to the COVID pandemic, but the 2021 results indicated the numbers of mature male snow crab had plummeted by 55%.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

 

Biden administration moves to protect key Alaska watershed

September 10, 2021 — The Biden administration said on Thursday it will relaunch a process that could permanently protect a vital Alaskan watershed from development of the contentious Pebble Mine project that has been pursued for more than a decade.

The Department of Justice asked in an Alaska federal district court filing that the court vacate a 2019 decision by the Trump-era Environmental Protection Agency to remove protection of the Bristol Bay watershed.

If the court grants the request, it would automatically reinstate the EPA’s Clean Water Act Section 404 review process. The agency could then resume an effort to protect certain waters in the Bristol Bay watershed, whose streams, wetlands, lakes and ponds are home to North America’s most productive salmon fisheries of five types of salmon: coho, Chinook, sockeye, chum and pink.

Read the full story at Reuters

Biden Administration Moves to Protect Alaska’s Bristol Bay

September 9, 2021 — The Biden administration on Thursday took the first steps that would allow it to begin the process of protecting Alaska’s pristine Bristol Bay, one of the world’s most valuable sockeye salmon fisheries that also sits atop massive copper and gold deposits long coveted by mining companies.

The administration filed a motion in the United States District Court for Alaska to quash a Trump-era decision that had stripped environmental protections for Bristol Bay, about 200 miles southwest of Anchorage. If the court agrees, the administration could begin crafting permanent protections for the area.

In a statement, the Environmental Protection Agency argued that the administration of President Donald J. Trump acted unlawfully in 2019 when it rejected concerns that a proposed massive gold and copper mine would threaten the fisheries, withdrawing federal protections from Bristol Bay.

The move will have little immediate effect because the Trump administration ultimately denied an essential permit for the project, known as Pebble Mine, in 2020. That happened after President Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. and the Fox News personality Tucker Carlson, both of whom enjoyed hunting and fishing in the region, joined environmental activists and Native tribes to oppose the mine in an unlikely coalition.

Read the full story at the New York Times

 

Bering Sea crabbers talk shutdown, facing biomass disaster head on

September 7, 2021 — The Alaska Department of Fish and Game announced on Friday, Sept. 3, that the Bristol Bay red king crab fishery would be closed for the 2021-22 season, for the first time in 25 years. The announcement came in advance of the management decision-making process, providing the crab fleet time to make any possible adjustments.

“While this isn’t the news we wanted to hear, we appreciate knowing as soon as possible for our business planning purposes,” said Jamie Goen, executive director of the trade group Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers. “It helps us to know now so we can notify our crews, plan where our vessels are going to go next, plan shipyard time between seasons, and batten down the hatches on our finances.”

The announcement on Friday also reported on data that shows all major Bering Sea crab stocks are down, and the majority of the Bering Sea opilio crab stock seems to have moved or disappeared.

“We had hoped the Bristol Bay red king crab stocks would have rebounded by now, after several years of reduced and conservative harvest levels, but that is simply not the case,” said Gabriel Prout, a third-generation fisherman on the F/V Silver Spray. “Coupling this closure with the fact that snow crab harvest levels could be reduced as well, even after positive levels of recruitment in previous years, has the makings for a very frustrating and trying time for crab fishermen and the industry as a whole.”

Read the full story at National Fisherman

 

ALASKA: Net migration: Young commercial fishermen ship out of Cook Inlet

August 19, 2021 — The Cook Inlet salmon fishery was once an economic engine for Kenai.

But the fishing there is no longer lucrative. Many fishermen with deep ties to the inlet are retiring — or moving elsewhere.

The F/V Nedra E is smaller than the other boats bobbing at the dock in Naknek.

Thor Evenson didn’t have Bristol Bay in mind when he designed the boat for his parents, Nikiski homesteaders Jim and Nedra Evenson. Until last year, she’s been a Cook Inlet boat, captained by Jim, then his nephew, and now his grandson, 32-year-old Taylor Evenson.

Taylor grew up hearing about the heyday of Cook Inlet fishing from his dad and his friends.

“And just getting up in the morning every day and hearing their voices on the radio, voices I grew up with from the first time I was on the boat, I was 3 months old,” he said. “And particularly hearing my dad’s voice, going out and fishing with my dad … that’s why I never left the inlet, even though I always knew what was coming.”

Read the full story at KDLL

When Yukon Chum Stocks Suddenly Collapsed, Yukon River Residents Received Donations From Bristol Bay

August 13, 2021 — For eight years, Tanya Ives has been traveling up from Washington each summer to work at the Yukon River’s only fish processing plant: Kwik’Pak Fisheries. The plant sits outside of Emmonak at the river’s mouth. Normally at this time of year, Ives would be packing up chum salmon harvested by commercial fishermen along the Yukon River to sell around the world. But this summer, she’s doing the opposite.

Read the full story at KYUK

Wild Salmon Day: Alaska celebrates a mixed bag of returns

August 11, 2021 — This year, it’s complicated. Fishermen and other Alaska salmon stakeholders have some good reasons to celebrate of the fifth annual Wild Alaska Salmon Day on Tuesday, Aug. 10. But in some regions, the fleets are weighing their worries now that they’re just past the midpoint of the summer salmon season.

Overall, the state is seeing some bright spots in returns of pink, sockeye and silver salmon. But the success stories are stratified.

Both Bristol Bay and Prince William Sound are celebrating a big year.

As of the end of July, the Prince William Sound fleet had landed a 123 percent increase in pink salmon over the 2019 harvest (pinks tend to boom every other year), and sockeye, chum, silver and king returns were all up over the 2020 harvest. Though the bar was set low last year, healthy returns across the board are a welcome change after a downward trend over the last several seasons.

Not only is the Bristol Bay’s salmon return a significant record, closing in on 66 million fish (the last record was just under 63 million, set in 2018), but the base price is nothing to sneeze at either, coming out of the gates strong at $1.10 on a promise from Peter Pan Seafoods, and leaping up to $1.25, spurred by OBI Seafoods. That’s up from a covid-induced low of 70 cents last year.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Processor executives and biologists consider what smaller fish mean for Bristol Bay

August 6, 2021 — The average Bristol Bay sockeye this year is smaller. That’s part of a trend over the past four decades, as increasingly smaller fish have returned to the bay amid larger salmon runs and warming oceans. Processor executives and biologists now have to consider what smaller fish mean for Bristol Bay.

Bristol Bay is home to the largest sockeye run on the planet. But while the size of the run broke records, the fish are getting smaller.

Last year’s average weight for sockeye was 5.1 pounds. But the 2021 average was just 4.5 pounds, according to the McKinley Research Group.

Jon Hickman is the executive vice president of operations for Peter Pan Seafoods. He says the smaller fish play a role in how much time processors spend processing.

“Smaller fish are going to take longer to process,” he said. “So you’re handling a 4 pound fish or a 3 pound fish, as opposed to a 5 pound fish so every time you handle one there’s a two pound difference. There’s more labor going into those smaller fish. You get more labor into them, there’s more costs associated with those smaller fish.”

Hickman says he isn’t worried about how the smaller fish will play in Peter Pan’s markets — demand is good, and he’s comfortable with the market for fish big and small.

Read the full story at KDLG

Alaska’s Bristol Bay sees record return of sockeye salmon. The warming climate may have helped.

July 30, 2021 — Amid a fierce June storm that whipped up 8-foot waves, Robin Samuelsen told his four young crew members to let out the gillnets behind his 32-foot boat in the Nushagak district of Bristol Bay.

For the 70-year-old, a veteran of more than a half-century of fishing, this was a tough day to start the 2021 sockeye salmon harvest. But soon the crew, all of them his grandsons, were dancing on the back deck as they spotted splash after splash made by sockeye hitting the net’s mesh in a surprisingly strong display of abundance so early in the season.

In the weeks that followed, storms often returned to make fishing miserable, and at times dangerous. Through it all, the salmon kept surging back from their ocean feeding grounds in what — by this week — developed into a record return of more than 65.5 million sockeye to the Bristol Bay region.

“It was pretty rough out there. It was really rough out there,” Samuelsen said. “But it was a fabulous year here in the Nushagak.”

The massive return once again demonstrated Bristol Bay’s stunning sockeye productivity at a time when these fish are struggling in other parts of North America, in part due to climate change, which can increase the temperature of the rivers adults must navigate to their spawning grounds. It can also reduce food for them in the ocean.

Read the full story from The Seattle Times at the Anchorage Daily News

Alaskan processors dealing with COVID-19 outbreaks through salmon season

July 29, 2021 — The Alaska summer salmon season is riding another large catch of Bristol Bay sockeye and a recent spike in pink salmon harvests to decent overall harvest numbers, but surging numbers of COVID-19 cases have created some concern for the state’s seafood processors.

According to figures provided by McKinley Research, the summer’s total salmon harvest is already up 5 percent over last year, driven in part by a second straight week of good pink harvests after a slow start.

Read the full story at Seafood Source