Saving Seafood

Alaska Anticipates Limited Salted Salmon Roe Production and Air Freight to Japan

May 17, 2022 — The Copper River salmon fishery, which is the start of Alaska salmon fishing season in Alaska, opened today, May 16, which is one day earlier than last year.

According to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, the first day of the season opener is set from 7 am for 12 hours on May 17, and fishing restrictions continue for king salmon as usual for resource protection, Suisan Keizai reports.

According to the previous forecast, the Fish & Game said that the number of sockeye salmon fishing in the Copper River area would increase to 1,432,000 fish this summer, including the returning to the hatchery, which is more than double the previous year’s level, but 34% less than the average of the past 10 years. Last year, the actual catch was 404,653, 68% less than the 10-year average of 1,250,000 fish.

Read the full story at Seafood News

ALASKA: Record 74 Million Sockeye Run Forecast for 2022, Low Return for Pinks, as Expected

April 26, 2022 — Alaska’s Department of Fish and Game has released their final “Run Forecasts and Harvest Projections for 2022 Alaska Salmon Fisheries and Review of the 2021 Season” and once again Bristol Bay is outdoing its own record of consistently massive returns.

The forecast for the statewide total salmon return is lower than last years by 800,000 salmon, but it doesn’t detract much from the forecasted run in the Bay.

The 2021 inshore Bristol Bay sockeye salmon run of 67.7 million fish is the largest total run on record — 64% above the 41.3 million average run for the latest 20-year period. It was also the third time on record that the sockeye run exceeded 60.0 million fish. Last year’s 42.0 million harvest was 15% above the 36.4 million fish preseason forecast and the third largest harvest on record. It was also the third time in the last 4 years that landings  exceeded 40.0 million fish.

Read the full story at Seafood News

ALASKA: An epic forecast for Bristol Bay salmon has industry leaders worried it will be too much to handle

April 7, 2022 — Alaska biologists are forecasting another massive run of sockeye salmon in Bristol Bay this summer, raising questions in commercial fishing circles about whether the industry in the Southwest Alaska region will be able to keep up.

The Bristol Bay Regional Seafood Development Association, representing the area’s commercial driftnet fleet, is urging processors to boost their capacity to maximize the fishery’s value and prevent harm to future runs if too many salmon return.

“We’re in unprecedented territory as far as what is forecast, so we never had a test like this to see how it would go,” said Andy Wink, executive director of the association.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game predicts that a record 75 million fish will return to Bristol Bay rivers this summer, with 60 million available for harvest, according to the agency’s commercial fisheries division.

But the agency reported early this year that 15 main commercial processors said they expect to buy 52 million Bristol Bay salmon, according to a survey. That amount of purchased fish would also be a record.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

Salmon travel deep into the Pacific. As it warms, many ‘don’t come back.’

March 30, 2022 — During a typical fall, almost a million chum salmon pour into Alaska’s Yukon River, a torrent of wild fish that has sustained the economy and Indigenous culture in the far north for generations. Last year, that run collapsed, with salmon trickling upstream at a 10th of normal levels, forcing the state to airlift frozen fish from other regions to feed the population.

About 400 miles to the south, in Bristol Bay, the world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery set a record last year, with more than 66 million salmon returning to the rivers in the watershed. That total is expected to be broken again this year.

Salmon in the Pacific Ocean face dramatically different fates from one river system to the next. As the planet warms, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, scientists say changes in ocean conditions are helping drive these wild swings and collapses of key stocks. These North Pacific fish account for most of the world’s wild-caught salmon, and their survival has implications for economies and cultures around the Pacific Rim.

During her three decades as a government scientist, as climate change has intensified, Laurie Weitkamp has watched these fluctuations in salmon numbers become bigger and the models that predict how many salmon will return from sea become more unreliable.

“Salmon will go out, in what we think is a really good ocean, and then it collapses,” said Weitkamp, a fisheries biologist with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration based in Oregon. “They don’t come back.”

Read the full story at The Washington Post

Cook Inlet fishermen are gearing up for weak sockeye and king runs again. They worry about the future of the fishery.

February 14, 2022 — A weak run is again forecasted for Upper Cook Inlet sockeye, continuing a trend of poor runs that has fishermen worried about the future of the fishery.

“It unfortunately may be a harbinger of the future,” said Ken Coleman, a setnetter and vice president of the Kenai Peninsula Fishermen’s Association, which represents eastside setnetters. He’s among the commercial fishermen disappointed with the report released by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game Monday.

The forecast projects a run of 4.97 million sockeye in 2022. About 2.97 million of those fish, the forecast said, will be available for harvest by all users.

The forecasted run is weak by historical standards. The inlet’s 20-year average is about 6 million fish.

But runs over the last few years have been below that. The sockeye run in 2020 was so bad that the U.S. Secretary of Commerce declared it a disaster, along with several other Alaska fisheries.

Read the full story at Alaska Public Media

 

Bristol Bay, Alaska sockeye riding high on strong market, big runs, and bigger forecast

December 13, 2021 — Values continue to rise for the sockeye salmon fishery in Bristol Bay, Alaska as a record string of runs coincides with a strong sockeye salmon market.

According to final figures released by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADFG) this fall, last season’s run – the largest ever in Bristol Bay – topped 71 million fish, with a catch of over 42 million sockeye.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

 

In one place, for one fish, climate change may be a boon

October 7, 2021 — On a mid-July afternoon, when the tide was starting to come in on the Naknek River, the Bandle family’s commercial fishing nets lay stretched across the beach, waiting for the water to rise. With the fishing crew on break, Sharon Bandle emerged from a tar-paper-sided cabin that serves as kitchen and bunkhouse with a plate of tempura salmon and a bowl of cocktail sauce. Everyone dug in.

Here in southwestern Alaska’s Bristol Bay, the Bandle family has fished by setnet for nearly 40 years, anchoring nets hundreds of feet long on the beach, then stretching them perpendicularly into the river’s current. The webbing hangs like a curtain from a line of softball-size corks, intercepting sockeye salmon as they swim upstream to their spawning grounds. Crews of two or three in small aluminum skiffs pick the salmon from the nets; processing plants on the far side of the river head and gut the catch, then ship the bulk of it to China and elsewhere for additional processing.

Bristol Bay’s sockeye harvest has long made up about half of the global catch of this species, in a seasonal blitz as short as it is enormous: The fishery lasts a mere six weeks. Each summer, 15,000 seafood processors, boat-based fishermen, and setnetters—including families such as the Bandles—gather here to support an industry worth more than $2 billion in 2019. Some fishermen will net enough cash to live on until the fish come back the next year. And this year, Bristol Bay outdid itself, notching the largest sockeye run in the region’s recorded history with an astonishing 66 million returning fish. Even more astonishing, this season capped nearly a decade of extraordinarily high salmon returns in Bristol Bay, where sockeye harvests have reached more than 50 percent above the most recent 20-year average.

But such riches are localized. Outside of Bristol Bay, salmon fisheries are failing, including those on British Columbia’s famed Fraser River, on Alaska’s Chignik and Copper Rivers, and in Cook Inlet. Five hundred miles north of Bristol Bay, Yukon River salmon runs have totally collapsed.

Scientists believe that climate change is boosting salmon numbers here in Bristol Bay, even as warming temperatures and other factors seem to be driving the fish to extinction elsewhere. For salmon and humans across the North Pacific, rapidly warming temperatures are creating both winners and losers. As fish totes fill to bursting in Bristol Bay, people elsewhere are left holding empty nets.

But even as more salmon are returning to Bristol Bay, some fishermen here worry that it might be time for a bust.

Read the full story at The Atlantic

 

Court case is final hope for Inlet drifters

August 27, 2021 — A late-season bumper run of sockeye salmon has pushed the Kenai River to its highest escapement in more than a decade.

Unfortunately for the commercial fishermen in Upper Cook Inlet, they have had to watch many of them go by.

Over the course of the season, Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologists upgraded the estimate for the run’s escapement multiple times, upping the in-river bag limits for the sportfishery and opening some additional time for the drift gillnet fleet.

With the setnet fleet out of the water after July 20 because of poor king salmon returns to the Kenai, controlling sockeye escapements to the Kenai and Kasilof fell on the drift fleet and on the in-river dipnet and sportfisheries. Both rivers are ending their seasons significantly greater than the upper end of their escapement goals.

ADFG is projecting a final escapement in the Kasilof of 519,000 sockeye compared to the top end of the escapement goal of 320,000; the sustainable escapement goal for the Kenai River has a top end of 1.3 million and ADFG is projecting an in-river run of about 2.4 million sockeye.

Unless something changes, the drift fleet is likely to lose a major chunk of their fishing area at the end of this year, too.

The National Marine Fisheries Service is currently working its way through the regulations review process for a new fishery management plan amendment that will close the federal waters of Cook Inlet to salmon fishing. That section, known as the Exclusive Economic Zone or EEZ, covers the section of Cook Inlet that’s three nautical miles and farther offshore; drifters typically harvest half or more of their salmon from there during the season.

“For most of the fleet, the EEZ is the preferred area for fishing,” said Erik Huebsch, a drifter and vice president of the United Cook Inlet Drift Association. “Without access to the EEZ, the drift fleet cannot harvest enough salmon to meet expenses and cannot afford to operate.

Read the full story at the Alaska Journal of Commerce

ALASKA: Sockeye run overescaped by 1 million fish

August 25, 2021 — Nearly 2.5 million late-run sockeye are projected to pass through the Kenai River by the end of the month, overescaping the river by over one million fish.

Those numbers concern fishermen like Joe Dragseth, a drift-netter in Kenai. He said he worries about the health of the river. And he said it’s unfair commercial fishermen have been restricted while so many fish have made it up the river.

“Basically, they’re taking the living away from us,” he said.

Alaska Department of Fish and Game sets both in-river and sustainable escapement goals for the run each season. The philosophy is returns will be best if the run falls between those goalposts.

Read the full story at KDLL

Record Salmon in One Place. Barely Any in Another. Alarm All Around.

August 16, 2021 — This summer, fishers in the world’s largest wild salmon habitat pulled a record-breaking 65 million sockeye salmon from Alaska’s Bristol Bay, beating the 2018 record by more than three million fish.

But on the Yukon River, about 500 miles to the north, salmon were alarmingly absent. This summer’s chum run was the lowest on record, with only 153,000 fish counted in the river at the Pilot Station sonar — a stark contrast to the 1.7 million chum running in year’s past. The king salmon runs were also critically low this summer — the third lowest on record. The Yukon’s fall run is also shaping up to be sparse.

The disparity between the fisheries is concerning — a possible bellwether for the chaotic consequences of climate change; competition between wild and hatchery fish; and commercial fishing bycatch.

“This is something we’ve never seen before,” said Sabrina Garcia, a research biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. “I think that we’re starting to see changes due to climate change, and I think that we’re going to continue to see more changes, but we need more years of data.”

The low runs have had ripple effects for communities along the Yukon River and its tributaries — the Andreafski, Innoko, Anvik, Porcupine, Tanana and Koyukuk Rivers — resulting in a devastating blow to the people relying on salmon as a food staple, as feed for sled dogs and as an integral and enriching cultural tradition spanning millenniums.

Read the full story at The New York Times