December 20, 2014 — Initiative sponsors claim conservation as their goal but this initiative isn’t about saving fish, it’s about putting more king salmon in the river for the sport fishery to catch. That’s not conservation. It’s greed.
This selfish effort to ban setnets hits home for me: My wife is my business partner; my two teen-age children are members of our commercial-fishing crew. Our business, our income, our investment in boats, motors, equipment, land, shore leases and gear would all be rendered valueless because a small group of well-financed, dishonest people want all the fish. It has taken the joy out of fishing and replaced it with fear for the future of this valuable, rich and colorful fishery.
In 2013, the average king harvested in the East Side Setnet fishery was very small; more than 75 percent weighed about 10 pounds or less. These three- and four-year-old kings are not valued by the sport fishery, which targets and retains only large kings.
That same year, the ESSN fishery harvested 2,988 king salmon. According to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s genetic stock identification studies, approximately 2,300 of these were Kenai River late-run king salmon. Only 715 were large kings the sport fishery desires.
Based on data from 1986-2011, the Kenai River sport fishery harvests about 22 percent of the total annual king run. If the ESSN fishery had been eliminated and those additional 715 large kings had entered the Kenai River, only about 157 fish would have been caught by sport-fishermen.
Read the full opinion piece at the Peninsula Clarion