Saving Seafood

ALASKA: Council committee struggles with federal Cook Inlet salmon plan

April 18, 2019 — Two-and-a-half years after a federal court directed the North Pacific Fishery Management Council to develop a fishery management plan for the Cook Inlet salmon fishery, there is still a lot of work to do.

The commercial salmon fisheries of Alaska are primarily managed by the state, including in Cook Inlet, where part of the fishery takes place in federal waters. The North Pacific Fishery Management Council for years deferred management of the salmon fishery there to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, finally removing Cook Inlet completely from its FMP in 2012.

The United Cook Inlet Drift Association and the Cook Inlet Fishermen’s Fund sued, saying the federal government had a responsibility to manage that fishery to ensure it complies with the Magnuson-Stevens Act. In 2016, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, and the council reluctantly turned back to developing a management plan.

Many of the commercial fishermen there have a longstanding dissatisfaction with the Alaska Fish and Game and the Board of Fisheries, stemming from a belief that the department’s allocation decisions governed by the board are politically rather than scientifically motivated and that the escapement goals for sockeye salmon on the Kenai River are too high.

They sought to exercise federal influence over state management through the lawsuit, and now are running into roadblocks on federal authority to do so.

Read the full story at the Alaska Journal of Commerce

ALASKA: Cook Inlet sockeye forecast improves; kings closed in North

January 10, 2019 — After two disappointing sockeye seasons in a row, the 2019 season may look up for Upper Cook Inlet commercial fishermen.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s sockeye salmon forecast, published Jan. 4, predicts a total run of 6 million sockeye to Upper Cook Inlet stream systems, with an expected commercial harvest of 3 million and 1 million for sportfishing and subsistence harvest.

If the forecast proves true, the run will be nearly double the 2018 run of 3.1 million.

The Kenai River, the largest sockeye-producing river in the region, is projected to receive a run of about 3.8 million sockeye, the majority of which are the 1.3 age class (one year in freshwater, three years in saltwater).

The Kasilof River, the second-largest producer, is projected to see about 873,000 sockeye come back, with a slight majority in the 1.3 age class.

The Kenai’s forecast is greater than its 20-year average of 3.5 million, while the Kasilof’s is behind its 20-year average of 979,000 fish.

Read the full story at the Alaska Journal of Commerce

ALASKA: Work continues on federal plan for Cook Inlet salmon

December 28, 2018 — More than two years after a court ruling ordered the North Pacific Fishery Management Council to develop a management plan for the Cook Inlet salmon fishery, a stakeholder group has made a first set of recommendations.

The council convened a Cook Inlet Salmon Committee last year composed of five stakeholders to meet and offer recommendations before the council officially amends the Fishery Management Plan, or FMP, for the drift gillnet salmon fishery in Upper Cook Inlet, which occurs partially in federal waters.

The committee presented a report with three main findings: first, that the fishery be managed cooperatively with the State of Alaska; second, that the committee schedule another meeting before the April 2019 council meeting; and third, that fishery participants be prohibited from retaining groundfish.

The council went into rewriting the FMP for Cook Inlet unwillingly. The whole battle began in 2012 when the council voted unanimously to pass Amendment 12 to the existing Cook Inlet FMP, which essentially delegated all management authority for the fishery to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, along with the management of two other salmon fisheries in Prince William Sound and the Alaska Peninsula.

The Cook Inlet Fishermen’s Fund and the United Cook Inlet Drift Association, the trade group for the drift gillnet fleet in the area, sued the National Marine Fisheries Service to restore the FMP to the fishery. After losing in the U.S. District Court of Alaska, the groups prevailed at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in fall 2016.

Read the full story at the Alaska Journal of Commerce

ALASKA: Kenai asks the state to declare this year’s upper Cook Inlet fishery an economic disaster

October 23, 2018 — Wednesday night, the Kenai City Council unanimously voted to request that Gov. Bill Walker declare an economic disaster for the upper Cook Inlet fisheries region and support a recovery plan.

Clam Gulch resident David Martin spoke in support of the resolution. He’s the president of the United Cook Inlet Drift Association.

“I appreciate the city council bringing this resolution forward and I hope it’s unanimously supported,” Martin said. “I’ve fished here 47 years and this is probably the worst season I’ve seen. We need a little economic help from the state to carry the people through.”

Council member Bob Molloy, who co-sponsored the resolution, said a potential recovery plan could take many forms.

“The state could commit resources to assist permit holders who participate in the Commercial Fishing Revolving Loan Program to avoid default, and who may be unable to meet payment terms who may not be able to pay because of the poor season,” Molloy said.

Vice Mayor Tim Navarre noted that offering relief to the fishing families here will encourage them to stay here and continue their work.

“If they are given some leeway they will stay in the fishery and work,” Navarre said. “That’s really what it’s all about. This isn’t a welfare program. There’s some real relief here and opportunity for people to benefit from it and continue with their livelihood.”

Mayor Brian Gabriel excused himself from the vote, at the advice of city attorney Scott Bloom, who said it could be a potential conflict of interest since Gabriel is a commercial set-netter and could potentially benefit from the passing of the resolution.

Read the full story at The Peninsula Clarion

ALASKA: Board of Fish agenda heavy with hatchery issues

October 16, 2018 — The Alaska Board of Fisheries will kick off its annual work session in Anchorage Monday and salmon hatcheries will once again be a prominent topic of discussion. The board will consider whether to add issues surrounding production levels to future agendas and it will kick off a broader discussion on the hatchery industry Tuesday.

Disagreements over salmon hatcheries have been roiling over the past few years, and those arguments have played out at Board of Fish meetings.

Hatchery opponents want the Alaska Department of Fish and Game to conduct more studies on the effects of hatchery fish spawning with wild populations and to start examining potential ocean carrying capacity issues. The department is currently in the midst of a large hatchery-wild spawning study.

Hatchery operators point to that as an example of due diligence by the department. Operators like Cook Inlet Aquaculture Executive Director Gary Fandrei say they’re ready for the board’s broad discussion on the state of hatcheries Tuesday afternoon, which may touch on some of those issues.

“We’re prepared for it. The hatchery programs are based on good sound science and we follow those principals,” Fandrei said. “They’re well regulated by the Department of Fish and Game, and we believe we are above board with everything we’re doing.”

An emergency petition back in March sparked the board’s discussion. The petition asked the board to look into Prince William Sound pinks that have been straying into lower Cook Inlet streams.

Valdez Fisheries Development Association Executive Director Mike Wells thinks the discussion will help the public better understand how hatcheries operate.

Read the full story at KBBI

Alaska razor clam harvest expected to dip

October 11, 2018 — Cook Inlet clammers dug on a quota of more than 350,000 pounds as the season got underway in May. The diggers arrive at Polly Creek in spring, put up semi-permanent camps and hit the low tides each morning in search of razor clams, which are lugged back up the beach, where the sands are solid enough to land small airplanes. The planes ferry them from the west side of the inlet to a processing plant at Nikiski, which is north of Kenai on the Kenai Peninsula.

Clam meat recovery runs 40 to 50 percent. In 2016, the clammers dug 284,800 pounds of razors, and the harvest fell to 177,147 pounds in the 2017 season. Preliminary harvest data for 2018 suggests the harvest will wind up around 175,940 pounds, down sharply from the 380,912 pounds that diggers dug just five years ago.

The decline in production could be tied to a couple of factors, according to Pat Shields, a regional management biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game in Soldotna.

“There are fewer diggers working for the company now,” said Shields. “They used to average around 20 to 22 diggers per year, and now they’re down to something like 14 to 15.”

Most of the product winds up in retail markets along the West Coast. Diggers are paid 90 cents a pound for food-grade clams and 60 cents for those with broken shells, which are used for bait.

According to Shields, 2018 revenues tallied up to $175,624 for food-grade clams and $2,344 for bait.

Meanwhile, Alaska’s fleet of just two scallop dredgers worked on a statewide guideline harvest level of 265,000 pounds (shucked meat) The majority of the 145,000-pound GHL for the 2018-19 season has been set for harvest areas near Yakutat, with another 85,000 pounds available for harvest areas surrounding Kodiak. The Cook Inlet harvest area has been closed in an effort to conserve dwindling biomass.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

NOAA marks second annual whale count

September 21, 2018 — Citizen scientists of all ages turned out on Sept. 15 to help NOAA Fisheries count endangered Cook Inlet beluga whales and learn more about the importance of healthy marine habitat.

The second annual beluga whales count drew over 2,000 people to 14 scientist-manned viewing stations along Cook Inlet from Homer to the Matanuska-Susitna Valley in the morning and the afternoon beluga festival at the Alaska Zoo in Anchorage.

Both events were free and open to the public as part of NOAA Fisheries’ effort to increase public awareness and stewardship of Cook Inlet belugas, who were listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act in 2008.

Participating educators at the zoo included Rick Rowland, land and natural resources manager for the Tyonek Native Corp., who said the corporation’s presence there was to remind people that there is still an interest in subsistence hunting, but that won’t happen again until the beluga population increases. The tribe decided 14 years ago to cease those subsistence hunts because of the low population of whales, Rowland said. More research is needed to determine why the population is so low and what needs to be done to assure recovery, he said.

Read the full story at The Cordova Times

 

Alaska: Pink salmon harvest below forecast, slightly up from 2016

August 31, 2018 — Though pink salmon harvests are ahead of what they were in 2016, the last comparable run-size year, they are still significantly below the forecast level.

As of Aug. 28, Alaska’s commercial pink salmon harvest was 38.2 million fish, about 4 percent ahead of the harvest in 2016. Pink salmon have a two-year life cycle, with large runs in even years and smaller runs on odd-numbered years, so the harvests are compared on every other year as compared to year-over-year like other species. Two years ago, the pink salmon runs returned so small that the U.S. Secretary of Commerce declared a fishery disaster on the Gulf of Alaska pink salmon fisheries.

The total harvest so far is slightly more than half of the forecasted 69.7 million fish for this season. Cook Inlet’s fishermen have harvested about 965,000 pinks, significantly more than the 465,000 in 2016. The vast majority of those — about 838,815 pinks — have been harvested in Lower Cook Inlet, largely the southern district bays around the lower edge of the Kenai Peninsula south of Kachemak Bay. The Port Graham Section alone has harvested 345,648 and the Tutka Bay Special Harvest Area has harvested 269,165, both of which have pink salmon hatcheries nearby.

Pink salmon harvest varies in other areas of the state. Kodiak’s harvest of pinks so far is behind the forecast but significantly better than in the 2016 disaster year. The Alaska Peninsula and Aleutian Islands and Bristol Bay are both behind both their forecasts and the 2016 harvest. Southeast’s pink salmon is about 67 percent below its normal even-year harvest, with about 7.3 million pinks harvested so far compared to the 18.4 million harvested in 2016.

Read the full story at the Peninsula Clarion    

 

ALASKA: Federal council names 5 commercial fishermen to committee

July 20, 2018 — A committee of five fishermen, four of whom live on the Kenai Peninsula, will help provide advice to the council that will write a new management plan for Cook Inlet salmon fisheries in federal waters.

The North Pacific Fishery Management Council, the federal board that regulates fisheries in federal waters in of the North Pacific Ocean, announced the membership of a Cook Inlet Salmon Committee at its June meeting in Kodiak. The committee will provide feedback to the council on the formation of a new plan to manage salmon fisheries in the federal waters of Cook Inlet.

The council passed an amendment to its fishery management plan in 2013 that delegated management of salmon fisheries in federal waters in Cook Inlet, the Copper River area and part of the Alaska Peninsula to the state, but Cook Inlet drift gillnet fishermen objected. The United Cook Inlet Drift Association, which represents the drifters, sued over the decision, and in September 2016, a federal court overturned an earlier court decision in the state’s favor and sided with UCIDA. The council began the process of revising the plan in April 2017.

Read the full story at the Peninsula Clarion

ALASKA: Cook Inlet salmon task force off to bumpy start

June 14, 2018 — The fisheries group established to try to defuse some of Cook Inlet’s salmon wars is off to an uncertain start.

Gov. Bill Walker issued Administrative Order 291 forming a Cook Inlet Salmon Task Force on June 4, meant to address some of the notoriously fraught salmon allocation political issues in the Cook Inlet region, the most densely populated area and heavily used fisheries in the state. However, the group had already met twice before the administrative order was issued, and at the last meeting, the group suspended meetings for the summer because of the busy fishing activities of the summer in Alaska.

A variety of people attended the initial May 9 meeting, noted as “work group members” in the notes published on Fish and Game’s website. Among them were multiple United Cook Inlet Drift Association members, commercial set gillnet fishermen, sportfishermen and representatives of the Mat-Su Borough Fish and Wildlife Commission. The 18 attendees were split up into three working groups to discuss fishery issues, according to the notes made by consulting firm Professional Growth Systems, which facilitated the meeting.

The mission statement and the membership aren’t pinned down yet, though, said Walker’s Press Secretary Austin Baird in an email.

“Formation of the task force has been postponed until after the fishing season to enable broad stakeholder participation. Exact dates have not yet been determined for meetings, and membership has not been finalized,” he said. “The task force itself will determine what observations or recommendations to make, and any suggestions will then go through more formal boards and advisory committee processes.”

Read the full story at the Peninsula Clarion