Saving Seafood

ALASKA: Sockeyes are silver lining in an otherwise miserable year for Alaska salmon

August 22, 2016 — Alaska’s 2016 pink salmon fishery is set to rank as the worst in 20 years by a long shot, and the outlook is bleak for other salmon except sockeyes, too.

“Boy, sockeye is really going to have to carry the load in terms of the fishery’s value because there’s a lot of misses elsewhere,” said Andy Wink, a fisheries economist with the Juneau-based McDowell Group.

The peaks of the various salmon runs have passed. The pink salmon catch so far has yet to break 35 million during a year when the forecast called for 90 million fish. Last year, 190 million were harvested.

Weekly tracking through Aug. 15 shows:

— The king salmon harvest (341,000) down 42 percent from last year in net fisheries (though the troll-caught catch is strong);

— Silvers (fewer than 2 million) down 20 percent;

— Chums (12 million) down 25 percent. “We’re probably looking at the second-worst harvest in the past 10 years,” Wink said.

Read the full story at the Alaska Dispatch News

ALASKA: Despite better early king numbers, Kenai fishermen head for sockeye

July 8, 2016 — Every square inch of shelf space is occupied in Ken’s Alaskan Tackle, and much of the walls, too.

Pegboards covered in different types of fishing flies, racks of lures and lines of hooks holding myriad different kinds of line greet the customers who drop in. Overhead hang reproductions of different Alaskan fish, the largest being a toothy king salmon that watches haughtily over the shop.

But most from the road recognize it for the enormous sockeye salmon that looms over the roof.

Though the Kenai River is famous worldwide for its king salmon, sockeye are increasingly becoming a target fish. Mary Glaves, an employee at Ken’s Alaskan Tackle, said most people who have come in this season are looking for sockeye, though the Kenai River is open for king salmon retention, albeit with no bait.

“Fishermen may just be out of the habit,” she said.

Part of it may be strategy. The Kenai River is wide and has had high water levels so far this season, making it difficult to bank fish for king salmon, which tend to run more toward the middle of the river. However, another part may be a set of years with weaker runs and more restrictions on Kenai River kings, some say.

For the past few years, poor counts on the early- and late-run kings have triggered management restrictions, either on bait or retention. This year, early signs show more late-run kings entering the river — 1,923 had passed the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s sonar at river mile 14, as of Monday — in addition to more than 9,800 early-run kings passing the sonar, according to Fish and Game’s data.

Though anglers could keep king salmon from the rivers after Fish and Game managers issued an emergency order June 18, participation has remained low. Catch rates have been low as well, possibly due to poor water conditions. Catch rates have been improving as the water clarity does.

Read the full story at the Peninsula Clarion

A Canadian Threat to Alaskan Fishing

January 23, 2016 — SITKA, Alaska — From fall through spring, the fleet of commercial fishing boats here in the panhandle of Alaska stalk winter king salmon. In the mornings prisms of ice sparkle beneath the sodium lights of the docks, where I live on a World War II tugboat with my wife and 8-month-old daughter. This winter I’ve been out a few times fishing on the I Gotta, catching pristine wild salmon, torpedoes of muscle. But the work is slow, five fish a day, and my skipper recently traveled down to Reno, Nev., for knee surgery.

Carpeted in rain forest and braided with waterways, southeast Alaska is among the largest wild salmon producers in the world, its tourism and salmon fishing industries grossing about $2 billion a year. But today, the rivers and the salmon that create these jobs — and this particular way of life, which attracted me from Philadelphia to Sitka almost 20 years ago — are threatened by Canada’s growing mining industry along the mountainous Alaska-British Columbia border, about a hundred miles east of where I now write.

At least 10 underground and open-pit copper and gold mining projects in British Columbia are up and running, in advanced exploration or in review to be approved. These operations generate billions of tons of toxic mine tailings stored behind massive dams, creating an ecological hazard at the headwaters of Alaska’s major salmon rivers — the Stikine, Unuk and Taku, which straddle the border with Canada.

Despite being subjected to the environmental and health risks of these upstream mining projects, Alaskans have no say in their approval. Which is why fishermen, Alaska native tribes, local municipalities, tourism businesses, our congressional delegation and thousands of individual Alaska residents have been clamoring for the State Department to refer this issue to the International Joint Commission, an American and Canadian advisory body established in 1909 to ensure that neither country pollutes the waters of the other.

Read the full opinion piece at The New York Times