Saving Seafood

EPA takes next step on Bristol Bay protection

December 3, 2022 — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency made a key move Dec. 1 toward prohibiting development of the proposed Pebble Mine in Alaska’s Bristol Bay watershed – one more step toward a “final determination” by the agency that would block the mine.

“If affirmed by EPA’s Office of Water, this action would help protect salmon fishery areas that support world-class commercial and recreational fisheries and that have sustained Alaska Native communities for thousands of years, supporting a subsistence-based way of life for one of the last intact wild salmon-based cultures in the world,” said Casey Sixkiller, EPA’s Region 10 administrator, in a statement announcing his recommendation to agency leadership.

Sixkiller transmitted a recommended determination “to prohibit and restrict the use of certain waters in Alaska’s Bristol Bay watershed as disposal sites for certain discharges of dredged or fill material associated with developing the Pebble Deposit.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

ALASKA: Board of Fisheries to consider 15 options to protect Bristol Bay’s Nushagak king salmon runs

December 1, 2022 — The Alaska Department of Fish and Game published a draft plan last week to address the struggling Nushagak king salmon run.

At the statewide Bristol Bay finfish meeting this week, the Board of Fisheries will decide which of those tools to put into an action plan. There could be significant restrictions to fishing in the Nushagak District, and that could have widespread impacts on the entire fishery.

The Nushagak River is on the west side of the commercial fishery. It’s the last place in Bristol Bay where the state still counts king salmon. In recent years, sockeye runs have boomed while king runs have dropped. That’s created a problem for managers, who are tasked with providing fishing opportunity for sockeye and controlling that escapement while also preserving the kings.

The plan organizes potential actions into three sections: commercial, sport and subsistence.

The actions range from continuing management under the status quo to closing the fishery until a certain date. The department lists the benefits and downsides of each action. The commercial fishing division says several of its recommendations could protect kings but that fishermen would lose out economically. It also says some actions could push fishermen into other districts in the fishery.

In October, the state designated Nushagak king salmon as a stock of concern because it has failed to meet the in-river goal of 95,000 fish for five of the last six years. This action plan is the result of that listing. If the king salmon run meets its minimum escapement goal for three years in a row and is expected to continue, the department can remove the designation.

The public will have the chance to weigh in on the plan during the Board of Fish meeting, which started Tuesday at the Dena’ina Center in Anchorage. The meeting is also livestreamed.

Read the full article at Alaska Public Media

ALASKA: Bristol Bay’s boom year

November 21, 2022 — The 2022 sockeye salmon harvest from Bristol Bay broke all records, a flood of fish that far surpassed the last record season in 1995.

“There’s been a lot of good years, but nothing like 2022,” said Andy Wink, executive director of the Bristol Bay Regional Seafood Development Association, said at the Washington Maritime Economic Forecast Breakfast session Friday at the Pacific Marine Expo in Seattle.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

ALASKA: House candidates agree bycatch is a problem. They have different approaches to solving it

November 2, 2022 — Salmon was a hot topic in Wednesday night’s debate among candidates for Alaska’s sole U.S. House seat. When asked what they would do to address declining salmon stocks, all candidates pointed to bycatch as a continued threat to salmon and crab across the state.

Republican and former Gov. Sarah Palin began her answer with a shout-out to Bristol Bay and her time in the region.

“Near and dear to my heart: The fish issues, having for years set netted on the Nushagak in Bristol Bay,” she said.

Palin said the state is doing a good job with management and that it follows the “maximum sustainable yield” mandate outlined in state law. But she said the federal government needs to step up.

“It’s the feds who lack the enforcement, the bycatch laws that too many people are getting away with — especially foreign trawlers,” she said. “They’re not allowing those salmon to get back to where they need to be to spawn. We need to bust these people who are doing these illegal activities. You take their vessels, you take their gear, you take their permits, and we start teaching them a lesson.”

Read the full article at KTOO

ALASKA: Backers of Pebble Mine ‘tried to trick regulators,’ says new report

October 31, 2022 — Backers of a proposed copper and gold mine in Southwest Alaska “tried to trick regulators by pretending to pursue a smaller project with the intention of expanding” after the project was approved, a report released Friday by a U.S. House panel says.

The Associated Press obtained a copy of the report ahead of its release. The report makes several recommendations, including environmental review process changes to “ensure holistic review of cumulative impacts of projects.”

A message seeking comment was sent to Friday a spokesperson with the Pebble Limited Partnership, which is seeking to develop the Pebble Mine.

The proposed mine is in Alaska’s Bristol Bay region. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has said the region supports the largest sockeye salmon fishery in the world and that it also contains significant mineral resources.

Read the full article at Alaska Public Media

ALASKA: After a record 2022 sockeye harvest, Bristol Bay focusing on getting fish to market

October 18, 2022 — With a record sockeye season in the books for Bristol Bay, the largest salmon fishery in the U.S. state of Alaska, industry players are now focusing on getting this year’s harvest to market.

Preliminary data from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADFG) recorded a run of 79 million fish – 8 percent over the preseason forecast of 73.4 million fish. The fishery caught 60.1 million sockeye salmon, surpassing the previous record of 44.3 million sockeye set in 1995.

“I was pretty amazed this year that the fish came in such large numbers,” Andy Wink, executive director of the Bristol Bay Regional Seafood Development Association (BBRSDA), told SeafoodSource. 

Even with the record number of fish caught, Wink said operations moved smoothly over the two-harvest period in what are the world’s most-abundant sockeye fishing grounds.

Wink said he wasn’t aware of any reports of fishermen being put on limit, which can occur when there are backups at processing plants.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

ALASKA: Salmon season winds down with ‘middle of the road’ statewide harvest

October 7, 2022 — Despite record-breaking sockeye harvests in Bristol Bay, data and experts point to an overall mediocre salmon harvest in Alaska for the 2022 season.

According to data provided by the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute in its latest update, the statewide preliminary harvest is estimated to be more than 153 million salmon — across all species — caught during the 14 weeks spanning mid-June to mid-September that the data was analyzed.

That means the harvest is expected to be around 35% less than last year’s harvest, which capped at a total of 233.8 million salmon according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. However, this year’s harvest fulfilled 96% of what the ADFG had originally forecast for this season.

Forrest R. Bowers, ADFG Division of Commercial Fisheries’ division operations manager, said he would consider this year to be “a little better than average” and said fishing is still going on and ADFG won’t be releasing its preliminary harvest summary until early November.

Read the full article at Juneau Empire

ALASKA: Bristol Bay’s sockeye runs are breaking records, but the fishery’s growth has left many locals behind

October 7, 2022 — This summer, 79 million sockeye returned to Bristol Bay. It was the largest run on record. But over the past half-century, there has been a dramatic shift in who fishes commercially in Bristol Bay. Local permit ownership has declined sharply, and research shows that’s due in part to a regulatory change to Alaska’s fishery management from the 1970s.

Propelled by years of low salmon returns and more people coming to the state to fish, Alaskans voted in 1972 to amend the state’s constitution and implement a limited entry system. This system restricted the number of commercial fishing permits in areas around the state, including Bristol Bay.

Its purpose was to reduce pressure on the state’s fisheries and help financially sustain fishermen who depended on them. The original permit applications were also meant to favor rural residents. But since limited entry began, local permit ownership in Bristol Bay has declined by 50%. Residents now own around one-fifth of drift permits.

William P. Johnson finished his sixty-second year captaining his own boat last summer. He grew up commercial fishing with his mother in Igushik. He worked on drift boats before he eventually bought his own. He said fishing in the 1960s and 70s was tough — the runs were low and there was steep competition. Limited entry was meant to address some of those problems, and supporters say it did. But it also fundamentally changed how local people were involved in the industry — and how the industry affected communities closest to the state’s fisheries.

“In the early years, there were many people who were participating in a fishery,” said Johnson, who lives in Dillingham and is a member of the Curyung Tribe. “They hired their local people from their village to participate with them. And with the out-migration, you can see the effect that it has on the monetary return to individual village people through their commercial fishermen.”

Fred Torrisi came to Dillingham as a lawyer with the state’s legal services in the 1970s. He said before limited entry, anyone could fish as long as they had a gear license.

“Limited entry was a major switch in that you got [the permit] once, based on your past performance and economic reliance on the fishery. And then it was sort of like a piece of property: You could transfer it to somebody else, or you could use it, but without one you couldn’t fish,” he said.

Read the full article at KTOO

ALASKA: Both sides dig in as EPA’s final decision on Pebble Mine nears

October 4, 2022 — Environmental advocates, Alaska Natives and commercial fishermen say they are at once confident and anxious as they wait for the EPA to announce a final ban on mining wastes in Bristol Bay, Alaska — home to one of the world’s largest salmon fisheries — that would effectively kill a gold and copper mine estimated to be worth $350 billion.

The Pebble Mine has endured a decadeslong fight spanning three administrations, all of which have moved to block the mine to protect the fishery. The developers, Canada-based Northern Dynasty Minerals Ltd. and other investors doing business as the Pebble Limited Partnership, are still determined to keep the project alive.

It would be unusual for the EPA to reverse its preliminary decision to ban mining wastes from Bristol Bay under a provision of the Clean Water Act, but the Pebble Limited Partnership won’t be reluctant to take the EPA to court to secure the permits it needs, according to a spokesman.

Meanwhile, Delores Larson, who lives in the Native Village of Koliganek, Alaska, on the Nushagak River, says the possibility of the Pebble Mine getting a green light is terrifying. There are no grocery stores where she lives, she said, no lettuce, bananas or any other imported foods. But there are native berries, moose and other wildlife, including the salmon that begin their northern journey to spawn about 125 miles downstream in the Bristol Bay fishery.

Her people are “salmon people,” she said in an interview in Washington last month as she scrolled through pictures of bright pink catch drying in a shed back home in Koliganek and the dark, glossy fillets of her famous salmon jerky. “Salmon is gold to us.”

Larson had traveled over 3,000 miles to pressure the EPA to finalize its “proposed determination” announced in May to “prohibit and restrict the use of certain waters in the Bristol Bay watershed (South Fork Koktuli River, North Fork Koktuli River, and Upper Talarik Creek watersheds) as disposal sites for the discharge of dredged or fill material associated with mining the Pebble Deposit.” The agency says the project would threaten the bay’s salmon fishery, which this year produced more than 76 million sockeyes, an all-time record harvest.

“Honestly, we would cease to exist as a people,” she said with a sigh, considering what would happen if the Pebble Mine was built. “It’s our whole life. We depend entirely on our salmon.”

But developers aren’t keen on letting the EPA strike down a multibillion-dollar project that would tap into what geologists say is one of the world’s largest reserves of gold, copper and other minerals. They hold that their plan to contain the wastes is sound, despite what the EPA has said in various reports.

“The record EPA has tried to create for this action is baseless,” said Mike Heatwole, vice president of public affairs for the partnership. “No matter the outcome, we will continue to press our case for this important mineral project.”

A final decision had been expected this month after the EPA received a flood of public comments mostly supporting the plan for banning waste. But the agency announced on Sept. 6 that it would postpone the final determination until December so it could fully review all the comments — though it hasn’t escaped notice that it means there will be no announcement before the midterm elections.

And the inevitable legal battle ahead would prolong an already lengthy fight for the project.

Read the full article at Roll Call

ALASKA: Fish for Families completes salmon distributions to communities experiencing record-low salmon returns

September 29, 2022 — In July and August, the Fish for Families project delivered more than 14,000 pounds of Bristol Bay sockeye salmon to families in the Chigniks and Yukon River regions where communities saw record-low wild salmon returns and subsistence fisheries were shut down.

In response to the summer’s low salmon returns and the growing demand for donated salmon throughout Alaska, the Alaska Sustainable Fisheries Trust collaborated with the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association and small-boat fishermen around the state to launch the Fish for Families initiative.

Read the full article at Ketchikan Radio Center