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USDA kicks off 2023 with USD 8 million salmon buy

January 19, 2023 — The U.S. Department of Agriculture is continuing its purchase of U.S. seafood products this year, awarding salmon contracts worth more than USD 8 million (EUR 7.4 million) in early January 2023.

Seattle, Washington, U.S.A.-based OBI Seafoods will supply the USDA with nearly USD 6.4 million  (EUR 6.9 million) in canned pink salmon and frozen salmon fillets, while Sitka, Alaska, U.S.A.-based Silver Bay Seafoods will supply nearly USD 1.7 million (EUR 1.6 million) the USDA said in a notice.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

ALASKA: Bristol Bay forecast indicates solid run with majority big fish

December 16, 2022 — Bristol Bay last season was complete madness. The final count on sockeye, including numbers from Area M on the South Peninsula, came in at over 82 million fish. And even more impressive, said University of Washington fisheries biologist and Bristol Bay savant Daniel Schindler, was the harvest.

“Obviously the total run was phenomenal, but the catch was even more incredible. To be able to catch and handle over 60 million fish is hard to believe,” Schindler said recently.

Just a few years ago a catch of 60 million fish was not even in the conversation. In fact, the total run in Bristol Bay eclipsed 60 million for the first time in 2018, and last year’s harvest was 170 percent above the average harvest since 1962.

The abundance is a boon for the industry, but it also comes with complications and a certain amount of chaos. Fishermen were taxed to the limit while processors, already struggling with labor shortages, faced logistical challenges from the massive number of fish. On the marketing end, the industry is now tasked with moving a far larger pack than normal.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

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’s salmon worth $720.4 million this year

November 11, 2022 — It looks like Alaska’s commercial salmon industry is pulling itself out of a pandemic rut. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game released its preliminary statewide summary for the year Nov. 10. The harvests for all five salmon species in all fisheries equaled $720.4 million. That’s $76.5 million more than last year and $425.2 million more than two years ago.

2020 saw a low of $295.2 million – one of the worst on record.

Sockeye salmon made up approximately 66% of the state’s total value this year. Most of that is due to the record-breaking Bristol Bay fishery at nearly 69.7 million fish.

Read the full article at KFSK

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: 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: 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

ALASKA: Unnamed investor offers up to $60 million for Alaska’s Pebble mine project

August 12, 2022 — An unnamed investor has agreed to inject up to $60 million into the embattled Pebble copper and gold project in Southwest Alaska, an infusion the owner hopes will allow it to reverse major federal permitting actions against the project.

Pebble owner Northern Dynasty Minerals of Vancouver, B.C., is not naming the investor, a private asset management company, in part because it is not required to, said Mike Westerlund, vice president of investor relations for Northern Dynasty. It announced the new investment July 27.

Northern Dynasty is also declining to name the investor out of concern that project opponents will publicly attack the company in an attempt to discourage its investment, he said. The investor can reveal its name if it chooses, Westerlund said.

“We are trying to create economic opportunities and jobs, and these funds will help us do that,” he said.

The Pebble mineral deposit is located about 200 miles southwest of Anchorage, near headwaters that support the valuable Bristol Bay salmon fishery. Pebble opponents have said pollution from the mine will harm what is the world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery, which is enjoying record runs again this summer. Northern Dynasty argues it can safely develop the project.

Read the full article at Anchorage Daily News

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