KFSK - Petersburg

Winter has arrived in Southeast Alaska, bringing freezing temperatures and enough snow to break daily records for some communities.

Jeff Garmon is a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Juneau.

“I don’t think anybody escapes having to, you know, just make sure that we’re ready for arctic temperatures,” Garmon said. “Typically what’s over in British Columbia, we’re getting. It didn’t stop at the mountains. It decided to come for a visit in Alaska.”

Last weekend, Juneau broke its daily record for Dec. 6 with 9.6 inches of snow, the most snow recorded for that date, according to decades of data maintained by the National Weather Service.

Though there’s no consistent record of snowfall data for Wrangell, the community got over 18 inches of snow earlier this week.

And on Mitkof Island, over 15 inches of snow fell in Petersburg. The town got 7.8 inches on Monday alone, breaking the daily record for Dec. 8 by 3.8 inches. Another 7.5 inches of snow fell on Tuesday, which was a couple inches shy of that date’s daily record — a whopping 9.9 inches that fell during a historic storm in 1946.

Garmon said the average amount of snowfall for a single day is around half an inch.

“It was a significant snowfall,” said Garmon.

Looking ahead, he said freezing temperatures are forecasted throughout the region, and more snow could fall this weekend and early next week.

Back in May, National Marine Fisheries Enforcement Officer Jerod Cook responded to a call from Petersburg’s police department about a stranded baby seal at the Libby Straits, south of town.

“He was just hanging on to the beach there,” Cook said. “We never did see a mother for it.”

He moved the seal to a safer location, then came back to check on it the next day.

“It was obvious that something, a decision, needed to be made,” Cook said.

After several weeks of treatment at the Alaska SeaLife Center in Seward, that seal returned home on Oct. 23. Over a hundred people gathered at Sandy Beach to see the nearly five-month-old Bravo get released back into the wild.

Among the excited crowd was coach Matt Pawuk’s middle school basketball team. He admitted that they should have been at practice.

“I like to say it’s because they’re gonna get extra credit in their science class,” Pawuk said. “But mostly I’m doing it out of selfish reasons, because I really want to see this.”

Nearby, members of Petersburg’s outdoor child care program gathered along the water.

“We love watching the seals when they’re here,” Kinder Skog co-founder Katie Holmlund said. “So it’s really exciting to get to see one released back into the wild.”

In May, after rescuing the baby seal, Cook sent it on that morning’s jet to Seward.

“His mother hadn’t come to him, and so I checked with the sea life center. They said they’d take him,” Cook said.

Jane Belovarac is the wildlife response curator with the Alaska SeaLife Center. She said they estimated Bravo was about three days old when he was found.

She said there are a number of reasons why a baby could get separated from its mom, but they don’t know what happened with Bravo.

The Alaska SeaLife Center is the only licensed marine mammal rehabilitation center in the state, and they got straight to work getting Bravo ready to go home.

“When this guy first came to us, he was about 16 pounds,” Belovarac said. “He now weighs over 50 pounds, so he is at a really good weight to go back out into the wild and start hunting on his own.”

In addition to helping Bravo pack on the pounds, the center also had to prove that he could hunt on his own and that he would have more than a 50% chance of surviving in the wild.

“We definitely feel very confident that this guy is going to do well,” Belovarac said.

Among the gathering at Sandy Beach, Jonas Banta was waiting for the seal’s arrival. Banta had already gotten a sneak peek of Bravo because he flew in on the same jet. Banta came to Petersburg to go deer hunting, but when he heard about the seal’s release, he came to check it out.

He said flying on the same plane as a seal was “actually very exciting,” and that the smell of the seal was also pretty prominent.

“It was smelly,” he said. “It smelled just like herring.”

Bravo arrived in a kennel in the back of a pickup truck and was promptly swarmed by children, eager to see him. He was soon carried past the excited crowd and brought to the water.

The crowd quieted down as Belovarac told Bravo’s story from the shoreline.

“He hasn’t seen the ocean in a very long time, and he’s never seen this many people. So we don’t want to scare him,” she said, asking the gathering to give the seal space.

Cook opened the door to the kennel, and Bravo hopped out into the waves. He came back to the beach once before heading off into the water, where other bobbing seal heads were waiting.

Belovarac says if you see a marine mammal that you think needs help, you can call the 24-hour NOAA statewide hotline at (877) 925-7773, or the Alaska SeaLife Center 24-hour hotline at (888) 774-7325.

The Petersburg Borough Assembly passed a resolution on Sept. 15 calling on state and federal authorities for help dealing with rising sea otter populations. Petersburg now joins Wrangell and Haines in asking for stronger otter management.

The Petersburg resolution urges authorities and stakeholders to collaborate in creating a sea otter management plan. It also asks the federal government to loosen regulations for how Alaska Native subsistence hunters can use harvested sea otters. Currently, hunted sea otters can only be used as “authentic Native handicrafts.”

Multiple Assembly members voiced their support, including Rob Schwartz.

“I crabbed commercially for 35 years,” Schwartz said. “One of the reasons I got out is because we know we’ve seen this over the decades, the exponential increase in the population of the sea otters.”

Sea otters were once wiped out in Southeast Alaska due to the fur trade, but their population has skyrocketed since reintroduction to the region in the 1960s. Those sea otters consume a lot of shellfish, putting them at odds with fishermen.

Proponents for sea otter management say otters are causing trouble for the local economy and ecology because they’re depleting the shellfish resource and taking harvest from fisheries.

While this resolution doesn’t change state or federal law, it asks for disaster assistance for crab and dive fisheries in Southeast.

Both Mayor Mark Jensen and Vice Mayor Donna Marsh offered to recuse themselves for potential conflicts of interest. Jensen currently holds a commercial Dungeness crab permit. Marsh’s husband is a commercial crabber, and she has also previously held a crab permit. The Assembly allowed both Jensen and Marsh to vote on the resolution.

Marsh proposed an amendment to broaden who could legally take sea otters. Currently, sea otters are federally protected under the U.S. Marine Mammal Protection Act, and can only be hunted by people who are one-quarter Alaska Native or an enrolled member of a coastal tribe.

The amendment, reviewed by the borough’s attorney, says that the Assembly would support regulations allowing sea otters to be taken by any Alaska resident with a valid hunting license.

The resolution with the added amendment passed 4-1, with Assembly member Jeigh Stanton Gregor opposed. He said he could not support the new amendment.

“I am definitely in favor of this resolution. I think action is needed on a variety of levels involving the sea otter population,” said Stanton Gregor. “But as far as I can tell, this resolution, if we include that amendment, would be in violation of federal law for the Marine Mammal Protection Act.”

This resolution is not legally binding; it’s a request for federal and state authorities to take action.

For about a decade, Scott Jackson had a system. He was the owner of Rocky Pass Tannery in the village of Kake on Kupreanof Island, where he and his team tanned sea otter pelts.

He can still recite the steps in precise detail. Pressure wash the fat off the pelts for four hours. Put the pelts in a pressurizing machine called an auto-tanner for three hours. Hang the pelts until they swell. Shave them with a circle beaver fleshing knife. Put in a citric acid bath for three days. Neutralize with baking soda. Oil. Dry.

“It takes a lot more than you realize to make a good, soft, supple, sewing hide,” Jackson said.

About a year and a half ago, he closed the tannery. Jackson said trying to keep up with the high demand was unsustainable. At one point, Jackson said they tanned 187 hides in a month with fewer than a dozen employees.

“Pretty soon it becomes stress, and pretty soon it becomes unhealthy,” he said.

When Rocky Pass Tannery shuttered, that left their customers throughout Southeast Alaska with few options to continue their traditional cultural practices of hunting and skin-sewing sea otters.

Access to tannery services is just one of many barriers facing sea otter hunters. Federal rules restrict sea otter hunting to those who are a quarter or more Alaska Native or an enrolled member of a coastal tribe. Federal regulations also say that hunted sea otters must be converted into “authentic Native handicrafts.” These barriers are making it more difficult for hunters to tackle sea otter overpopulation, which is threatening shellfish populations in Southeast Alaska.

Shipping out-of-state

Now, many sea otter craftspeople ship their pelts to the only sea otter tannery outside of Alaska — in southern Idaho.

Aanutein Deborah Head is a skin-sewing teacher from Craig on Prince of Wales Island and one of Jackson’s former customers. She’s an experienced sea otter hunter and skin-sewer. But she never learned how to tan.

“I could have said, ‘Grandma, show me how to tan it so the hide doesn’t fall off of it,’” Head said. “I didn’t, and that’s lost to me.”

It was more convenient when she could send her sea otters to Kake, Head said. In particular, it costs her a lot more in shipping to send the skins on a thousand-plus-mile journey to southern Idaho.

Kootink Heather Douville learned how to skin-sew from Head while growing up in Craig. Now, she’s an avid hunter. Like Head, she also sends her sea otter pelts to Idaho so she can make and sell handicrafts like hats, pillows and fur ball earrings.

From the time she spots a sea otter in the water and aims for its head to when she finishes the last stitch on a handicraft, just about every part of the process is either expensive or time-consuming. She hunted 200 otters last year and about 120 this year.

“For me, it’s not just an investment as far as money goes, it’s your time,” Douville said. “I think that’s why we have so few hunters out there, in addition to the blood quantum limitations through the federal agencies.”

An alternative approach

In Klawock, just six miles north of Craig, Anthony Charles has found another way to save on tanning costs — by doing the tanning himself. He’s been running a sea otter product business for about seven years with his father. He used to ship to Rocky Pass Tannery before it closed, but decided to tan himself to save on shipping. Even though Kake is significantly closer than Idaho, it’s still about 100 miles by air from Klawock.

A couple of years ago, Charles bought tanning equipment and set it up under a tent. When his setup was destroyed in a windstorm, he was faced with a difficult decision.

“I almost kind of walked away from it after that,” he said.

Instead, he decided to rebuild and keep his tanning operation going.

“I had to really bite down,” he said. “It was worth it.”

But tanning in-house doesn’t work for everyone. Douville tried tanning on her own at one point, but felt that it didn’t produce a high enough quality pelt for sewing. She also prefers to focus her time on hunting and sewing.

“If I were to hunt and tan my own pelts, I would have a big stack of pelts, but no time to convert them and sell them,” she said.

Impact on sea otter overpopulation

Jackson said that since he’s closed the tannery, it seems like sea otter hunting has slowed down in Kake.

Douville said she feels like she’s not making much of a difference in the sea otter populations.

“They’re multiplying at a much faster rate than I can hunt them,” Douville said.

Despite the barriers, Douville remains committed to hunting and sewing as a way to connect to her Lingít culture. As she learned more about sea otter overpopulation and its threat to shellfish, she says it became even more meaningful for her.

“The last bucket of clams my dad dug was in 2011 and the last sea urchins we got was when I was a little kid,” she said. “When you remove access to a traditional food, you’re removing the ability to pass on that knowledge to the next generation on how to hunt or collect the food.”

The future of tanneries

Jackson, the former tannery owner, is unsure what the fate of local tanneries will be.

“Are we going to have tanneries around forever? I don’t know,” said Jackson. “I know that we all don’t live forever, and eventually we got to tap out.”

He’s not sure if he’ll reopen the tannery in Kake, but Jackson said he’d like to go to other towns and teach people how to set up a sustainable tannery.

“I think tanning would be number one, and teaching them how to sew is number two,” he said. “We got to open up our minds a little bit and say, let’s have a tannery in every community.”

Petersburg’s police chief and his employer, the Petersburg Borough, have officially resolved a lawsuit over his statements during the COVID-19 pandemic with a $70,000 out-of-court settlement.

That means the remaining claim about Chief James Kerr’s First Amendment rights will not go to trial this summer.

Kerr testified against enforcing a masking mandate during a fall 2021 borough Assembly meeting. He said he was speaking as a private citizen.

This ultimately snowballed into a multi-year legal battle between Kerr and the borough.

In the months following his testimony, Kerr told the borough he had become the subject of retaliatory harassment and intimidation by two Assembly members. The borough hired legal counsel to look into the matter, and the investigation’s findings did not favor Kerr.

After KFSK reported a story in summer 2022 with information about the investigation and a statement from the borough, Kerr’s supervisor, Borough Manager Steve Giesbrecht, asked that Kerr submit any future public statements to him for prior review, noting that community members might conflate Kerr’s personal views with official borough positions due to his occupation.

Kerr maintained that he was speaking only as a community member, not as chief of police, when he testified against the masking mandate. He took issue with the borough’s actions and how the legal situation was explained to the public, and he filed a lawsuit in state court to seek reparations. The defendants — the borough and its manager — moved the case to federal court. By then, it had been nearly two years since Kerr’s initial testimony.

Kerr’s lawsuit claimed that the borough defamed him, portrayed him in a false light, and that the borough’s policy limited his speech and violated his constitutional First Amendment rights. In March, a federal court in Juneau ruled in favor of the borough on most of the claims. For the remaining claim regarding the police chief’s free speech rights, the court granted the borough manager immunity, but ruled the verdict would be better determined by a jury trial in August or for the parties to settle through mediation.

The two sides gave mediation a try in June, and the borough emailed a short press release announcing they’d reached a settlement: The borough’s risk pool insurance will pay Kerr $70,000 as part of the agreement.

According to the release, the parties believe that it’s important for borough officials to work well together and that settling the case is what’s best for the public. It said both sides made compromises, but it didn’t provide any specific detail and no clarification was given by either party when asked. They’ve also agreed not to comment further publicly about the settlement.

The borough’s attorneys did not respond to multiple requests for clarifying information, including questions about the “concessions” made by each party. Kerr’s attorneys also did not provide clarification or answers about any potential changes in policy they were seeking.

The parties reached the settlement agreement on June 11. The case officially closed in court July 2, with all of Kerr’s claims against the defendants formally dismissed.

Sport fishing for wild king salmon in Southeast Alaska is now more restricted for some people.

Nonresident anglers can no longer fish for king salmon in the region. State managers closed the sector because of harvest projections.

However, harvesting hatchery king salmon is still allowed in certain areas with special fishing regulations near Juneau, Ketchikan, and Petersburg because hatchery fish don’t count toward the amount of wild king salmon anglers can harvest. That includes the Juneau designated saltwater hatchery area, Herring Bay near Ketchikan, the City Creek release site near Petersburg and the Blind Slough-Wrangell Narrows terminal harvest area.

Patrick Fowler is the regional fisheries management coordinator for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. He said sport fish anglers have been catching more king salmon than expected so far this season, indicating they’d exceed the allowed harvest limit by about 4,000 fish. So the department took restrictive action.

“We need to keep the sport fishery within its allocation. And following the management plan that the Board [of Fish] gave us, we have to close the nonresident fishery in order to keep the sport fishery within allocation while protecting that resident opportunity,” he said.

The Alaska Board of Fisheries gave the department new directions for managing the king salmon fishery, allowing them to change fishing rules during the season as necessary so anglers only catch the amount of wild fish they’re allowed to take this year. That allocated amount is part of an agreement between the U.S. and Canada, called the Pacific Salmon Treaty, which ensures both countries get some fish.

Alaska residents get priority for sport fishing king salmon. Fowler said it’s still unknown how the resident harvest will add up, and the nonresident sector could reopen later in the season if further projections allow.

“We’re not ruling out that the fishery won’t reopen,” he said. “But we need to watch how the resident harvest materializes.”

In other restrictive action, all anglers —including residents— are prohibited from taking wild king salmon in the zone outside of state waters, called the exclusive economic zone. Fowler said very few anglers harvest king salmon in that area, which begins just over three miles from the outer coast.

“We estimate about 1% of the Chinook (king salmon) harvest happens in the exclusive economic zone,” Fowler said. “The vast majority of, you know, sport fish harvest and effort occurs within state waters.”

According to state law, sport fish violations have a base fine of $100, and there’s an added $150 fine per each fish taken illegally.

According to Alaska Wildlife Troopers, which is the agency that enforces the law, sport fishing charter businesses that retain fish in violation of the law garner heavier fines —including misdemeanor charges— and gear like rods, poles and vessels could be seized.

Any king salmon caught should be released and returned to the water immediately and unharmed, according to Fish and Game.

The regulations went into effect July 7 and will last through the end of September.