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

State and tribes agree on fishing season; plan still awaits federal approval

May 27, 2016 — EVERETT, Wash. — After a nearly monthlong stalemate, the Department of Fish & Wildlife and Native American tribes have come to an agreement on a recreational fishing season for Puget Sound.

The agreement reached Thursday afternoon follows extended negotiations between state and tribal fisheries managers after they failed to reach an agreement earlier this spring.

The state and tribes must now obtain a joint federal permit in order to open the fishing season in Puget Sound waters.

“We plan to re-open those waters as soon as we have federal approval,” said John Long, salmon fisheries policy lead for Fish & Wildlife. “We anticipate getting the new permit within a few weeks.”

Approval of the permit is expected by mid-June. In the meantime, a closure of recreational fishing that was enacted May 1 remains in effect.

The season includes a hatchery chinook season on the Snohomish River from June 1-July 30. A sockeye season on Baker Lake also is planned starting in mid-July, with a maximum take of 4,600 fish for the season.

Read the full story at the Everett Herald

Community-supported fish delivered to your door from the fisherman

May 10, 2016 — There was excitement last year on North Haven when fisherman Matt Luck arrived with fresh sockeye salmon. Caught far away in the chilly waters of Alaska’s Bristol Bay, why were islanders cheering?

“If you are going to buy salmon from Maine, it’s farmed salmon. This is very different. Everyone got to meet Matt, which is why people wanted to buy in the first place,” said Cecily Pingree, owner of Calderwood Hall restaurant and market on the island. She purchased enough sockeye to last her all year.

It’s a funny scenario. Fish from Alaska arriving by skiff to a tiny island in Maine by a bearded commercial fisherman from away. In Brunswick, 40 people welcomed Luck in the same fashion.

This year shares of Luck’s catch can be reserved beginning May 18 from his company Pride of Bristol Bay. Buying a 20-pound case of vacuum-packed fillets may sound excessive, but it’s a more sustainable way to shop. You lock in freshness and price, and “it encourages people not to get in their car when they think, ‘What’s for dinner tonight?’” Luck said. “The technology [for flash-freezing fresh fish] allows us to preserve this product.”

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

Finding Refuge for Salmon, Cold Water Preferred

December 11, 2015 — PORTLAND, Ore. — When Lewis and Clark first encountered the Columbia River in 1805, they wrote about nearby streams so thick with salmon that you could all but walk across on their backs.

Last summer, those streams looked very different. As a torrid heat wave settled over the Pacific Northwest, the salmon heading up the Columbia River from the ocean in their ancient reproduction ritual started dying en masse, cooked in place by freakishly hot water that killed them or made them vulnerable to predators. Sockeye died by the hundreds of thousands.

“It was a peek at the future,” said Jim Martin, a former chief of fisheries for Oregon, who now works on conservation issues for a fishing tackle company, Pure Fishing. “This is exactly what is predicted by climate-change models.”

Other salmon experts, though, said the future was not that clear. Even as the sockeye here were dying, they said, pink salmon were exploding in number, especially in the Puget Sound area around Seattle. Alaska, which actually supplies most of the wild-caught salmon eaten in Portland, Seattle and other coastal cities that have their identities tied to fish, had its own good-news story this year, with a near-record harvest.

Read the full story at the New York Times

With court date on ballot measure looming, Kenai setnetters ponder their future

August 2, 2015 — KENAI, AK — This summer, just as they have done for generations, setnetters are working the shores of the western Kenai Peninsula, stringing out nets and hauling in hundreds of thousands of fish from the abundant sockeye salmon runs of Southcentral Alaska.

But along with those sockeyes, the setnetters also pull thousands of king salmon from the waters of Cook Inlet. And it’s those kings — Alaska’s best-known, most-marketable fish and one that has seen increasingly troublesome declines in recent years — that have made setnetters the target of a statewide ballot initiative that could eliminate the longtime fishery.

Last month, the Alaska Fisheries Conservation Alliance submitted 43,000 signatures to the Alaska Division of Elections to certify an initiative that would ban setnets in Alaska’s urban areas. If approved by voters, the initiative would outlaw setnets in the five designated urban areas of Alaska, including Valdez, Ketchikan, Fairbanks — and the Kenai Peninsula.

At its heart, the ballot initiative is about the same thing that most fishery disputes are about in Alaska: the merits of sport-versus-commercial fishing, and how fish that both of those groups target are managed. Sport fishermen say it’s the setnetters threatening the kings of Southcentral; setnetters say it’s the other way around.

In the case of the declining kings, as the runs dwindle, both sides of the debate are losing something. And if the setnetting ban passes in 2016, one group says they stand to lose everything.

Read the full story at Alaska Dispatch News