July 5, 2018 — Preschool teacher Hannah Hendrickson said there are two distinct duties for catch samplers working at salmon processing plants around Bristol Bay.
“People oftentimes nickname this job as the pickers and the lickers, so I said, ‘I’m not a licker. I’m only a picker!’ ” she said.
The licker is her colleague Deven Lisac. Across the table at Peter Pan Seafoods in Dillingham, Lisac was snipping off bits of fins and plucking out fish scales. Saliva’s a good enough adhesive to stick fish scales on the thick cards for their journey to the Department of Fish and Game laboratory in King Salmon.
“Grab the tweezers, and then you just give it a lick,” Lisac advised. “And that was fish No. 4, so it goes on slot four.”
The pair are part of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s seasonal crew tasked with sampling 240 sockeye a day from each district in the bay. They also sample 200 chums and 200 kings a week.
March 2, 2018 — A third straight year of low king salmon runs is expected to deliver another blow to one of the North Coast’s most iconic and lucrative fisheries, wildlife managers indicated Thursday, as both regulators and fishermen faced the prospect of a federally mandated plan to reverse the trend and rebuild key stocks.
The grim news comes amid a dramatic, yearslong decline in the state’s commercial salmon landings, which are down 97 percent last year from their most recent peak, in 2013, when they hit 12.7 million pounds.
The full picture for commercial and sport seasons won’t be clear for several more weeks, but spawning projections show Sacramento River salmon — historically the largest source for the state’s ocean and freshwater harvests — have fallen so low that they’re now considered by regulators to be “overfished.”
Wildlife officials acknowledged that term minimizes the many factors that have led to this point, including shifting conditions in the ocean and years of low river flows during the drought, all of which have pummeled stocks.
The outlook is dire enough to mandate development of new regulations expected to further limit where and when anglers can drop their lines and what their size and catch limits will be.
Read the full story at The Press Democrat
January 24, 2018 — The Alaska Board of Fisheries has passed an “action plan” to help conserve struggling king salmon stocks on Southeast rivers during their last day of deliberations Tuesday in Sitka.
The plan will keep troll, sport and gillnet fishermen on the docks for significant parts of the fishing season. Commercial trollers, who made about half of their money fishing Chinook, had their pocketbooks significantly affected.
It was the best and most equitable solution the board and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game could come up with under dire circumstances for Chinook stocks on the Unuk, Chilkat, Taku and King Salmon rivers.
All six of the voting board members voted for the plan.
“Nobody is going to be happy with the end results, I am not happy with it. Everyone is feeling the crunch and the pain,” board member Israel Payton said.
The board heard three days of public testimony on finfish proposals. A majority of that testimony was heard on controversial herring proposals, but salmon came in close second.
Public testimony prompted changes to the action plan and the board held the vote until the last day of the meeting to allow public review of those changes.
The action plan combines ideas in several other proposals aimed at conserving Chinook stocks.
Troll fishermen will have their fishing areas and dates significantly cut back and won’t be allowed to fish the last six weeks of winter king salmon fishing.
Read the full story at the Juneau Empire
January 11, 2018 — The Alaska Board of Fisheries will meet for the next two weeks to decide on fishing regulations for the Southeast and Yakutat regions.
Unlike most years, the Alaska Board of Fisheries is joining both the shellfish and finfish hearings together for a two-week-long meeting in Sitka.
While finfish, such as king salmon, account for a majority of the meeting, the board will start with proposals on shellfish.
The board will consider a proposal regarding Dungeness crab seasons in Southeast.
Proposal 235 would repeal a management plan that’s been in place since 2000. The current plan sets the summer and fall seasons based on catch from the first two weeks of each season.
Last year, that meant the seasons were reduced by half. The proposal would set both seasons at two-months each.
“This seems like a good plan to update the fishery due to the loss of are due to sea otters,” said Joel Randrup, vice chair of Petersburg’s Fish and Game Advisory committee.
Committee chair Max Worhatch recommended the proposal to the Board of Fisheries.
The Petersburg committee voted in support of this proposal, as did Wrangell’s Advisory committee.
“If you have a two-month season, and if you only take the males and only 6-and-a-half inches you still leave enough breeding males on the ground to replenish the population,” said Wrangell chair Chris Guggenbickler.
Guggenbickler said sea mammals, mostly otters, are eating the crabs, reducing the stock. And regulations have responded by limiting areas to crabbers.
Read the full story at KTOO Public Media
November 28, 2017 — Cornell University, New York Sea Grant, and charter boat captains have teamed up on a high-tech mission to learn more about the behavior of King Salmon in the Lake Ontario ecosystem. They’re already getting valuable information from pop-off satellite tags attached to the fish.
New York Sea Grant Fisheries and Ecosystem Health Specialist Jesse Lepak narrated a video that shows the tagging process with the help of charter captains. It took about a month to tag 10 fish starting in early July.
“Once the fish are landed, they’re put in a Styrofoam cradle to help keep them calm, and lake water is pumped across their gills so they can breathe. The fish are then tagged with a monofilament harness that connects the tag to the fish. The harness is crimped, and the excess monofilament is cut off. The tagged fish is ready to go.”
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.
July 8, 2016 — Every square inch of shelf space is occupied in Ken’s Alaskan Tackle, and much of the walls, too.
Pegboards covered in different types of fishing flies, racks of lures and lines of hooks holding myriad different kinds of line greet the customers who drop in. Overhead hang reproductions of different Alaskan fish, the largest being a toothy king salmon that watches haughtily over the shop.
But most from the road recognize it for the enormous sockeye salmon that looms over the roof.
Though the Kenai River is famous worldwide for its king salmon, sockeye are increasingly becoming a target fish. Mary Glaves, an employee at Ken’s Alaskan Tackle, said most people who have come in this season are looking for sockeye, though the Kenai River is open for king salmon retention, albeit with no bait.
“Fishermen may just be out of the habit,” she said.
Part of it may be strategy. The Kenai River is wide and has had high water levels so far this season, making it difficult to bank fish for king salmon, which tend to run more toward the middle of the river. However, another part may be a set of years with weaker runs and more restrictions on Kenai River kings, some say.
For the past few years, poor counts on the early- and late-run kings have triggered management restrictions, either on bait or retention. This year, early signs show more late-run kings entering the river — 1,923 had passed the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s sonar at river mile 14, as of Monday — in addition to more than 9,800 early-run kings passing the sonar, according to Fish and Game’s data.
Though anglers could keep king salmon from the rivers after Fish and Game managers issued an emergency order June 18, participation has remained low. Catch rates have been low as well, possibly due to poor water conditions. Catch rates have been improving as the water clarity does.
January 23, 2016 — SITKA, Alaska — From fall through spring, the fleet of commercial fishing boats here in the panhandle of Alaska stalk winter king salmon. In the mornings prisms of ice sparkle beneath the sodium lights of the docks, where I live on a World War II tugboat with my wife and 8-month-old daughter. This winter I’ve been out a few times fishing on the I Gotta, catching pristine wild salmon, torpedoes of muscle. But the work is slow, five fish a day, and my skipper recently traveled down to Reno, Nev., for knee surgery.
Carpeted in rain forest and braided with waterways, southeast Alaska is among the largest wild salmon producers in the world, its tourism and salmon fishing industries grossing about $2 billion a year. But today, the rivers and the salmon that create these jobs — and this particular way of life, which attracted me from Philadelphia to Sitka almost 20 years ago — are threatened by Canada’s growing mining industry along the mountainous Alaska-British Columbia border, about a hundred miles east of where I now write.
At least 10 underground and open-pit copper and gold mining projects in British Columbia are up and running, in advanced exploration or in review to be approved. These operations generate billions of tons of toxic mine tailings stored behind massive dams, creating an ecological hazard at the headwaters of Alaska’s major salmon rivers — the Stikine, Unuk and Taku, which straddle the border with Canada.
Despite being subjected to the environmental and health risks of these upstream mining projects, Alaskans have no say in their approval. Which is why fishermen, Alaska native tribes, local municipalities, tourism businesses, our congressional delegation and thousands of individual Alaska residents have been clamoring for the State Department to refer this issue to the International Joint Commission, an American and Canadian advisory body established in 1909 to ensure that neither country pollutes the waters of the other.
Read the full opinion piece at The New York Times
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