Saving Seafood

Funding for Alaska’s commercial fisheries division in good shape, with $300K going to chinook project

April 30, 2018 — A shuffle in some funding leaves Alaska’s commercial fisheries division in good shape to manage the resources and target important projects across the state.

At first glance, the $69 million operating budget for FY19 appears to be down slightly from last year’s $72.3 million, but that’s not the case.

“Most of that difference is a sort of ‘cleanup’ in authority we no longer had funding for, such as the Alaska Sustainable Salmon Fund, test fishing and some interagency items. The rest is due to (a) $1.1 million shortfall in Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission revenue, which was made up from other department funds,” said Scott Kelley, commercial fisheries division director.

Added to the budget was a nearly $1 million unrestricted increment offered by Rep. Dan Ortiz of Ketchikan, which got the nod from Alaska lawmakers.

The extra money will be distributed among 11 projects in four regions: Southeast, Central, Westward and the Arctic-Yukon-Kuskokwim, or AYK.

 The biggest project focuses on research to help determine the causes of declining chinook salmon.

“It’s a $300,000 project for a juvenile chinook marine survey in the Bering Sea,” Kelley said. “Almost the first thing I get asked at meetings around the state is what’s going on with king salmon. That project looks at the early marine survival, which is where we think these mortality events are most affecting the species. It’s the only project in the state that really gives us a first look at what’s going on there.”

Other projects back on the funding track include Southeast and Togiak herring research, westward salmon weirs, Southeast sablefish research and Prince William Sound Tanner crab.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

 

Alaska: Fish Board cuts king salmon fishing

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

 

Southeast Alaska squid fishery shot down

January 18, 2018 — Declining king salmon stocks are playing a role in the Alaska Board of Fisheries decisions for other commercial fisheries.

On Sunday, the board voted down a proposal for a new fishery in Southeast Alaska for market squid.

The proposal sought to allow purse seining for the squid, a species that can grow to 7-and-a-half-inches long and ranges from Mexico to Alaska.

Salmon seiner Justin Peeler of Petersburg told the board he’s also fished for squid in California.

“As somebody that had a background in fishing squid I got reports from other fishermen during various times of the year of seeing squid, biomass is showing up, water temperature is warming a little bit and we’re seeing changes of that in our other fisheries and after seeing it grow and kind of more and more sightings and the density of the schools and the sightings growing I decided well I should put this proposal in,” Peeler said.

Peeler thought the fishery could be opened to other gear types as well. He saw squid as an opportunity for fishermen but also a potential threat to other species.

“They’re eaters,” Peeler said. “In a short period of time they have to eat grow and spawn and that’s the fear I have is that these could move in in a very rapid rate and we could see a huge change in some of our other fisheries due to us not realizing that this is somewhat of an invasive species as oceans warm. Our local inside waters may stay cool enough that they might hold ‘em off a little bit but if it’s warm out in the deep they’re gonna come up and they’re going to spawn and they’re going to be in our waters as their population booms.”

Alaska Department of Fish and Game issued what are called “commissioners permits” in 2014 and 2017 to Peeler and others interested in testing whether they could catch squid.

Read the full story at KTOO Public Media

 

Alaska: Board of Fisheries votes down change in Southeast Dungeness crab season

January 17, 2018 — On Saturday, Alaska Board of Fisheries voted down a proposal to change commercial Dungeness crab seasons in Southeast Alaska.

Crabbers were seeking set season lengths and no option for shortened fishing time like they experienced in 2017.

Crabber Max Worhatch proposed the change and successfully got the board to add the proposal to the meeting after missing the deadline for regulation changes.

“I would like to seriously consider this,” Worhatch told the board. “I put a proposal in, just like this three years ago, didn’t get anywhere. The department felt like they had to have something to manage the fishery when it got to the low end. But in my experience and just from what I’ve seen in Oregon, California and Washington, size sex and season for Dungeness crab works and it works extremely well. It’s kind of an autopilot thing, doesn’t take a lot of work.”

Size, sex and season are a management tool for regulating the catch of crab, with a minimum size, allowing crabbers to only keep male crab and only during a set season.

While that’s part of the management in Southeast Alaska, since 2000 the Alaska Department of Fish and Game also has set the season length based on the catch from the first week of the season.

In 2017, a low commercial catch in that first week led to shortened summer and fall seasons in most of the region.

The board considered an amended proposal for set seasons, with the same starting and ending dates already used around region but deleting the language in the management plan that allows for early closure with low catches.

Crabbers said they needed the assurance of scheduled fishing time, especially with the fleet fishing in smaller areas with competition from sea otters.

Part of the Southeast Alaska summer commercial crab fishing season overlaps with the time when male Dungeness molt, or shed their shell and grow a new one.

Read the full story at KTOO Public Media

 

Alaska budget deadlock would spell disaster for state’s fisheries

June 12, 2017 — Want a fishing license to crew on a salmon boat this summer? Got friends or family visiting who want to wet a line for a prized Alaska catch? Don’t count on it.

If the Alaska legislature continues to defy its constitutional obligation to pass a budget, those opportunities will be lost because there won’t be any state workers to issue fishing licenses. Layoff notices went out on June 1 to thousands of state employees who will be off the job at the July 1 start of the fiscal year.

That’s just one of the lesser impacts of the legislative impasse, hundreds of which are now being outlined by the governor and state agencies as the deadline approaches.

Here’s an overview of potential fishery related impacts from various divisions:

The Commercial Fisheries Division, which receives nearly all its management money from the state general fund, will be hit the hardest. The budget deadlock would bring all state fisheries to a screeching halt, and thousands of processing workers who live in or come to Alaska each summer would suddenly find themselves out of a job.

The biggest punch, of course, would be felt by the salmon fisheries — and the harm could extend well beyond this year.

Field staff at remote weirs, towers and salmon sonar counting projects from Southeast to Kotzebue will be pulled, said Scott Kelley, division director with the Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game.

“A ballpark count is 40-50 projects for commercial fisheries. That doesn’t include projects operated by Sport Fish which are oftentimes equally important for overall salmon assessment, as well as aerial and foot surveys,” he said.

The stall means that managers’ ability to forecast future salmon escapement goals and collect other critical data also would be significantly compromised.

Cancelled harvests also could force too many salmon to head upstream and exceed the carrying capacity of food and oxygen in their home lakes or streams.

“That entirely depends on the strength of a given run,” Kelley explained. “In rearing limited systems, where the more spawners we put in the more fry we get, we could see significant impacts in terms of future yields. If we put a big number of sockeye into a system above the upper end of an escapement goal, the result could be reduced yield when that brood year returns over 3 to 5 years. If there are more fry than feed, they could have reduced in-lake survival, reduced marine survival because they leave freshwater smaller and less fit than normal. Prey densities also take a hit and take a while to recover.”

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Alaska’s $10 Million Cut to its Fisheries Budget Expected to Ripple Across the Commercial Industry

April 26, 2016 — SEAFOOD NEWS — The $10 million cut to Alaska’s fishery budget for the 2017 fiscal year is expected to have widespread ramifications for the state’s commercial industry.  Last year’s budget cuts resulted in 109 fishery projects getting axed. Now another 65 are on the cut list for the upcoming fiscal year that begins on July 1. The slimmer budget means resources are more limited for fishery stock surveys and scientific research in addition to other fishery management needs.  “With cuts of that magnitude, everything is on the table,” said Scott Kelley, director of the Commercial Fisheries Division at the Dept. of Fish and Game.

We ran an opinion piece from D.B. Pleschner, the Executive Director of the California Wetfish Producers, that points to the recent scientific evidence that suggests West Coast sardine stocks are actually rebuilding. Pleschner writes how recent recruitment reports show the fishery’s young fish stocks are trending very close to how they looked prior to the 2007 population peak.  She also discusses how these scientific findings have gained little attention from the media and NGOS, who have instead blamed overfishing and lack of management for the stock’s declines.

In other news, China added lobster, crab and coldwater shrimp imports to a list of E-commerce items that are eligible for expedited cross-border clearance and lower taxes. The list an effort by China to reduce the cross-border tax paid by consumers, and to close a loophole that allowed parcel shipments to avoid taxes when resold, for instance, when they are imported by wholesalers.

Vietnam expects a 12 percent hike in exported shrimp revenues to push its overall earnings in seafood shipments past $7 billion this year. Shrimp is on track to account for about half of this year’s earnings.

Finally, Vinh Hoan will debut a line of untreated, premium pangasius fillets to the market at its booth number 5-553 during the Seafood Expo Global in Brussels this week. “People today want more natural food options with minimal processing and our untreated Premium Pangasius fillets provide that along with a delicious dining experience,” said Nguyen Ngo Vi Tam, Vinh Hoan Sales and Marketing Director. “With Vinh Hoan’s long-established commitment to sustainable practices, it just makes sense we would lead the way with this untreated option.”

This story originally appeared on Seafoodnews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.