April 6, 2021 — Fifty-one million sockeye are forecast to return to Bristol Bay this summer.
If that holds, commercial fishermen will be able to harvest around 37 million reds. That’s 13% more than the average harvests of the past decade.
April 6, 2021 — Fifty-one million sockeye are forecast to return to Bristol Bay this summer.
If that holds, commercial fishermen will be able to harvest around 37 million reds. That’s 13% more than the average harvests of the past decade.
April 6, 2021 — OBI Seafoods will not process salmon at its cannery in Excursion Inlet this summer. The Haines Borough is preparing for a dramatic reduction in raw fish tax revenue as a result.
OBI Seafoods will continue to buy salmon from local fishermen for its plant in Petersburg.
Last year, weak salmon returns and the pandemic led to a quiet summer at the Excursion Inlet plant. This year, they won’t be processing salmon at all.
OBI Seafoods public affairs manager Julianne Curry said the decision was made based on forecasted salmon returns for this summer.
“The company took a really careful look at the State of Alaska salmon run predictions for the 2021 season and we made the really difficult decision to shut down salmon buying at our Excursion Inlet facility this year,” Curry said.
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game has forecast a return of 28 million pink salmon to Southeast Alaska. That’s a little bit lower than the 10-year average but better than the most recent years.
April 6, 2021 — It’s a big year for Alaska roe herring fisheries – but lackluster interest by both harvesters and processors is an ongoing issue.
The fishery at Sitka Sound opened on 27 March after a stall last year and a limited fishery in 2019, resulting from small fish and a weak market. The seine fleet this year has a harvest of 33,304 metric tons (MT) – nearly 67 million pounds – but managers predict low participation and limited processing capacity.
April 6, 2021 — The following was released by Seafood Analytics:
Sustainable seafood company Envisible is teaming up with Certified Quality Foods, Inc. (dba Seafood Analytics) to capture product quality data on Envisible’s blockchain-enabled Wholechain traceability system. The initiative is starting with sockeye salmon coming from Northline Seafoods in Bristol Bay, Alaska, demonstrating an innovative commitment to transparency in seafood supply chains.
Northline is capturing product quality metrics at the point of harvest using Seafood Analytics’ handheld Certified Quality Reader (CQR), which measures the salmon’s electrical properties. Electrical properties are measured at the cellular level and are related to degradation, heat abuse and quality. The resulting quality data is then seamlessly uploaded into Wholechain, which logs this and other supply chain data on Mastercard’s provenance blockchain from the source all the way to grocers nationwide under a private label brand available at over 12 regional stores.
While the entire line of Envisible’s Frozen Seafood launched in 2019 is fully traceable and sustainably sourced, Northline’s sockeye salmon is the first of its kind to take traceability a step further with transparent quality readings. In fact all three companies – Seafood Analytics, Envisible and Northline Seafoods – have been recognized for their leadership in sustainable seafood at the Fish 2.0 Global Innovation Forum held at Stanford University.
About Northline Seafoods. Northine Seafoods, which is Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certified, has been lauded for innovations such as ultra-low freeze technology used on its floating processor directly on fishing grounds, and began utilizing the CQR method in 2019. Seafood Analytics feeds the objective quality measures into a customized data dashboard for its customers, enabling food companies to take actionable steps to improve their products and processes. The method has been implemented beyond seafood in poultry cultivation, and in many cases allows companies to bypass expensive and inefficient lab testing.
About Envisible. Envisible brings this technology and story to market with its robust distribution channels and focused mission of bringing traceability and transparency to traditionally opaque food systems. In addition to the Quality Index, Envisible has also committed to capturing Key Data Elements outlined by the Global Dialogue on Seafood Traceability, an industry-wide standard launched in 2020 to eliminate environmental and labor abuse in seafood supply chains. Not only does the technology ensure responsible sourcing, but Wholechain’s storytelling feature means a QR-code at the point of sale educates consumers about the sustainability and quality initiatives behind their seafood.
About Seafood Analytics. Seafood Analytics provides state of the art technology to measure and monitor seafood quality. The objective, science based technology measures science based technology measures fish quality instantly and provides a cloud based data platform that enables users to track quality and build supplier report cards. Seafood Analytics is based in Dallas Texas. For more information – info@certifiesqualityfoods.com.
April 5, 2021 — Pacific cod stocks have begun to rebound in the Gulf of Alaska, but the TAC for 2021 remains low at 17,321 metric tons. Last year managers curtailed the fishery in federally managed waters after stock assessments put the biomass near the bottom of the threshold for conducting the fishery.
Though the recruitment of younger cod and the uncaught fish from last year have added to the abundance in most recent assessments, full recovery of the stock could take years. The warm-water blob of 2014 has been blamed for the crash.
The warming waters began in 2013 and precipitated a 79 percent decline in the stocks. Prevalent theories suggest that warmer waters raise the metabolic rates for the young cod. At the same time the forage species for young cod appeared to have higher concentrations of protein and lower concentrations of fat. More recent studies determined that the eggs of cod survive in a narrow range of temperature (3 to 6 degrees C, or 37.4 to 42.8 degrees F).
Stocks also continue to decline in the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands harvest areas. The 2021 TAC for the Bering Sea has been set at 111,380 metric tons with a TAC of 13,796 metric tons for the Aleutian Islands.
The 2020 TACs for the respective areas had been set at 141,799 metric tons and 14,214 metric tons.
April 2, 2021 — Fifty-one million sockeye are forecast to return to Bristol Bay this summer.
If that holds, commercial fishermen will be able to harvest around 37 million reds. That’s 13% more than the average harvest of the past decade.
But concerns remain about the numbers of chinook salmon in the Nushagak District on the west side of Bristol Bay — which leaves the biologists who manage the fishery with a complicated balancing act.
Faced with another huge sockeye run this summer, managers in the Nushagak District say they will try to allow fishermen to harvest the sockeye and also conserve chinook.
Tim Sands, the district’s area management biologist, describes the job as trying to walk a fine line between “getting as many kings up the river as we can, but still provide opportunity to harvest sockeye salmon.”
For years, biologists around the state have wrestled with declining numbers of chinook, fish that are central to subsistence ways of life across Alaska, and also targeted by sport fishermen. Since 2007, the state’s chinook runs have consistently declined, forcing managers to restrict or close fishing in certain areas.
April 2, 2021 — NOAA Fisheries highlighted a new study that indicates warming waters in Alaska are increasing the likelihood of prey mismatch and starvation for Pacific cod larvae.
The study was a collaboration between NOAA Fisheries scientists and partners to assess how temperatures impacted first feeding Pacific cod larvae in the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska through 1998-2019.
April 2, 2021 — The following was released by the Pacific Fishery Management Council:
The Pacific Sablefish Transboundary Assessment Team, in collaboration with the Northwest Fisheries Science Center, Alaska Fisheries Science Center, Department of Fisheries and Oceans, Alaska Department of Fish and Game, Pacific Fishery Management Council, and North Pacific Fishery Management Council, is holding a public workshop to solicit feedback on the ongoing range-wide sablefish management strategy evaluation (MSE). The Sablefish MSE Workshop is open to the public and will be held Tuesday, April 27, 2021 through Wednesday, April 28, 2021 beginning at 1:30 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time (PDT) and ending at 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday, reconvening at 9:30 a.m. on Wednesday and ending at 5 p.m. or when business for the workshop has been completed
Please see the Sablefish MSE Workshop notice on the Council’s website for details, including workshop attendee registration information and deadlines.
If you have additional questions:
April 1, 2021 — Last year’s salmon harvest across all species in Southeast Alaska was one of the worst in 50 years. Here’s what Southeast’s regional commercial fishery supervisor had to say about the terrible season, and about his hopes for the coming year.
A special report released in March paints a stark picture of 2020’s salmon harvest in Southeast Alaska.
“Overall, it was one of the lowest harvests we’d seen, I think since the ’70s,” says Lowell Fair. He’s the Southeast regional supervisor for the commercial fisheries division of Alaska Department of Fish and Game. It was already clear from preliminary reports that last year’s salmon season was a rough one. But just how rough?
For sockeye, the harvest was the second lowest since 1962 — that’s just a couple of years after the Department of Fish & Game was formed and started collecting data.
King harvest was in the bottom five harvests since the early 1960s as well.
Coho and pink harvests came in stronger than kings and sockeye, but were still among the lowest years in recent memory, ranking 48th and 53rd since 1962, respectively.
April 1, 2021 — Alaska’s Governor Mike Dunleavy has received 11 requests for fisheries disaster declarations, said Doug Vincent-Lange, Alaska’s Commissioner of Fish and Game, in an update at the Kodiak Chamber of Commerce’s ComFish Expo.
Noting the good news of over half of Alaska’s population now vaccinated, and shots now available for anyone over 16, Vincent-Lange said, “I don’t see why you wouldn’t all be able to fish this year.”