Fisheries

Celebrating the first salmon of the season is a long and important tradition in Bristol Bay. Last Thursday, we turned Hannah Colton around on her way to work because we heard some boys had caught theirs on the beach and were going to take one to an elder. She followed along, and brought this report…

A text message from Robyn Chaney told me her boys had caught three kings on the morning tide. They and their grandpa were going to deliver them. Here’s Triston Cheney:

Yeah we caught three this morning… gave one to my mom, kept one, and then one to Ofi.

So why do you bring one to Ofi? — Cause we always give some of what we catch to elders. And then if you give some to elders then you’re gonna catch more. 

Hyalmer Ofi Olson is an elder who has left a mark on Bristol Bay as few have. He fished these waters for some five decades, starting as a kid in the sailboat days.

Among other leadership roles, Ofi was longtime director, CEO, and president of the Bristol Bay Native Corporation – but he’s retired from all that now.

Ofi is in bad health. His kidneys are failing, and these days it’s tough to get too far from the house.

He was sitting on the couch when the Chaney boys and his old friend Robin showed up with that king.

The boys caught you a king salmon! King Salmon? Yeah! Oh yeah, small one! We caught it this morning! Yeah yeah that’s alright…

He sized up the boys who brought him the fish and gave Robin a nod.

 “Okay Ofi, enjoy! Bye! – thank you Robin, boy, that’s gonna be a treat and a half – good, good…”

Later that evening, some old friends and fishermen came together to eat that fish with Ofi. They gathered around a humble table at Jerry Liboff’s house, off Chuthmok Road, named for Liboff and his patchy clothes.

Dave Bendinger grilled the fish for an hour on top of a cedar plank … and Ofi again asked for the recipe:

 “So you put the plank on the grill, wet it first, let it cook maybe ten minutes, then flip it so it’s charred, put the salmon on top skin side down….lid down, let it cook”

Set netter and Russian Orthodox priest Father Victor Nick stopped by for a bite and gave a blessing

 “Okay before we eat too much more, why don’t you bless the meal? ….prayer… You don’t want any? Oh, maybe a little bit…”

Ofi said the fish was small – but there was plenty of to go around. And it was the best.

“The first king melts in your mouth. Yeah…”

Liboff asked Ofi about the first kings when he was a kid…

 “That first king salmon was a big deal even then right? Your mama and grandma, how’d they cook it? — Well the head and the tail, and the eggs, they make chowder out of it. And out of the collars. And then you fry the steaks, either fried or boiled. Good. Every bit of the king salmon was used, nothing left but the bones.”

The night went on and around the table they sat … They talked boats, they talked prices, they talked nets and canneries and can sizes.

They cracked jokes and talked about fishermen from the old days.

And they talked about getting older.

“The greying of the fleet. The last of the hardasses trying to hang on. – yeah – Him, Ofi put up the white flag a couple years ago. I’m hangin in there. — I don’t wanna be the richest man in the graveyard. *laughs* Maybe Skagerrack is bumpin somebody else for that position.”

That’s Ofi, giving Skagerrack skipper Paul Friis-Mikkelsen a hard time. Friis-Mikkelsen took a hard fall a few weeks back and may not fish this season.

“You know, at this point, it’s not really about the money so much. It’s just good being a part. You know, it’s a lifestyle… If I was well, I’d still be out there floatin’ around too. The thing I was trying to say is, it’s like bein part of this whole cycle.”

The whole Bay is a cycle…The fish run out and back, tides go out and in, and nets need mending year after year. And people gather around the table each summer to tell stories and to fellowship around the first king salmon.

“What I miss, Dave, is when I was small, young guy, even my first few years in high school, I used to go with my dad and some older people and, say we went camping or something. And then when the light went out, you stay there and listen to stories. Boy, interesting. Lots of stories, hunting stories, stories about ghosts. Sometimes I felt a little scared, but I never seen anything in my life. Never heard anything.”

With a twinkle in his eye, Ofi had a captive audience… and we all kept nibbling on that fish for hours after it got cold.

Summer chum and Chinook salmon have begun their runs along the Yukon River.

Wildlife managers and fishermen met via teleconference Tuesday to discuss river conditions and the salmon’s progress upstream. Community members reported summer chum as far upriver as Huslia and Ruby, with Chinook salmon fast on their heels.

However, the much-coveted kings may not be a welcome sight to fishermen this year. Stephanie Schmidt is the Summer Season Fishery Manager along the Yukon for Alaska’s Department of Fish and Game. She said Chinook numbers continue to be low — mandating fishery closures once the salmon enter each upriver community.

“[This] is going to be another challenging year for us,” she said. “We’re expecting a Chinook salmon run similar to last year. Which was an okay run; we met escapement goals. But only because of the very conservative management goals that had to be taken and all of the efforts that fishermen took to conserve Chinook salmon.”

Several fishermen voiced frustration at the closures, not because they’ll miss out on the long-restricted kings, but because gear restrictions — such as on nets larger than 4 inch-wide mesh — will hinder their ability to capture the more abundant chum.

Jack from Huslia explained that the arrival of Chinook salmon typically coincides with the peak summer chum run in his community.

“That’s when the best fish go by for us. That’s when we lose our half-dried fish and our dried fish,” he said.

Because Chinook salmon can be caught in gill nets just as easily as chum, all nets wider than 4 inches will be off-limits once the kings arrive. Schmidt said fishermen will still be allowed to use nets that are 4 inches or smaller for sheefish and smaller species throughout the salmon closure.

That came as a small consolation in communities where purchasing other, smaller nets may be cost prohibitive.

“We have to eat along this river; everybody has to eat. They can’t live out of the store,” said Martha, a fisherman in Ruby. “I can’t afford to get another net that’s smaller.”

Schmidt thanked fisherman for their continued efforts to conserve king salmon — and said she knows it hasn’t come without sacrifice. She also shared some positive news from ADF&G researchers monitoring Chinook in Pilot Station.

“Those researchers have been reporting phenomenal catches of juvenile Chinook salmon,” she said. “More so than last year. And I just offer that as a little bit of hope. Hopefully we are creating more baby Chinook salmon that grow up to be big Chinook salmon and come back.”

The meeting concluded with an atypical concern: Fishermen wanted to know what would happen to state-managed fisheries on the Yukon, and further North, if Alaska’s legislature is unable to reach an agreement on the state budget before July 1 — instigating a partial government shutdown.

John Linderman is regional supervisor for the Arctic Yukon-Kuskokwim region of commercial fisheries. He believes it’s unlikely that lawmakers will allow the budget impasse to reach that stage. However, he said wildlife managers have considered it, and there is currently enough money to keep fisheries functional until August 2015.

 

Smaller boats in Alaska’s offshore fisheries may no longer have to carry human observers in the future, if a plan to deploy cameras proves feasible.

At its Sitka meeting this month, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council gave the green light to an inter-agency effort to develop Electronic Monitoring. The council would like to see cameras in action within three years.

Although the headline news out of the council’s contentious June meeting focused on bycatch, there wouldn’t even be a bycatch debate without human observers.

Bycatch is what you get when you’re trying to catch something else. Halibut or chinook when you’re trawling for pollock; rockfish when you’re longlining for halibut.

Year-round, observers fly to Alaska’s remote ports, board fishing boats, and go out on trips. They monitor the bycatch, sample the harvest, and collect the reams of data needed by organizations like the North Pacific Fishery Management Council to sustainably operate commercial fishing in the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska.

Expenses for the program top $4-million a year, with about one-quarter of that funding coming from the federal government, and the other three-quarters from fees collected from the fishermen, who also have to feed and house the observers while they’re on board.

On a big boat with a large crew, like a factory trawler, an extra person isn’t necessarily a big deal. These ships may carry an observer every single voyage. On small boats, that extra person can be a bit of a wild card.

“Our observer was on board. And our observer was seasick for about half the days. Conditions were cramped, and I got to sleep on the galley table,” said Steven Rhoads, who owns a 55-foot longliner based in Sitka. Rhoads explained to the council why he’s one of over a hundred boat-owners in this size range who ask for exemptions when they’re randomly selected to carry an observer.

“The observing was not approaching anything I would call complete. It greatly disrupted our regular fishing functions.”

This so-called “observer effect” is a concern. If fishing trips are miserable with an extra person on board, or if boats manipulate their normal fishing patterns in order to return to port sooner and shed their observers — how does it affect the quality of the data?

Recently the council authorized a research program to test electronic monitoring, and Rhoads was one of eleven boat owners to volunteer to have cameras installed on his deck.

“This year every trip, every set, every haul, every hook was observed. It is a wonderful alternative.”

 

Another one of those volunteers was George Eliason. I visited him aboard his 50-foot longliner in Sitka’s Crescent Harbor. The TammyLin has six bunks.

“My boat’s big enough that there’d be plenty of room for an observer. I don’t think we’d do anything differently than we do now. I don’t think I would have a problem with that person, unless we have a conflict in personalities. That always happens.”

But Eliason has not had to test his patience with a human observer. Because he’s got room for only four people in his life raft, he’s successfully applied for an observer exemption. Instead, he’s had cameras on the Tammylin for two years running.

“This wire here goes over to the hauler. Soon as the hauler turns on, it starts the cameras up. Two (seconds) after the hauler goes off, the cameras go off.”

Eliason says he was worried at first that the cameras might catch him in a mistake, throwing fish overboard that he ought to have kept. Unlike gulf trawlers, who are prohibited from keeping some species aboard, longliners like Eliason bring their bycatch back to port and sell it. It’s species like yelloweye and demersal shelf rockfish — but if they catch too much it can restrict their ability to target halibut in some areas.

Eliason’s fears did not come to pass.

“After the person looked at the videos, they said that they could tell what each species was, because what they saw is what they’re going to get.”

Unlike salmon, bottom fish species are managed in weight, and not quantity. Accurately converting the video image of fish into weight remains one of the biggest challenges to be solved by electronic monitoring. But the upside is so compelling: Removing human observers from boats — of all sizes — reduces an element of risk, both for the crew and for the observer. Those “personality conflicts” Eliason mentioned can escalate to abuse — even assault — in the high stakes world of commercial fishing.

Why not just work out the bugs in electronic monitoring, and go for it?

“It’s a challenge. Because federal funds are tight.”

Chris Rilling manages the North Pacific Groundfish and Halibut Observer Program. Because of problems with federal funding, he’s scraping bottom just to pay for the human observer program.

So, organizations like the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association in Sitka are finding money on their own. Just this month they received nearly $500,000 out of a total of $3-million awarded by the National Fish & Wildlife Foundation to develop electronic monitoring. The funding will put cameras on 120 boats in Sitka, Homer, Seward and other ports.

All the boats receiving the equipment will be in the 40- to 57-and-a-half foot range, the so-called small boat fleet. But Rilling doesn’t rule out the possibility that electronic monitoring will have applications in bigger classes.

“There are a lot of promising applications for EM technology, whether it be accounting for halibut discard on some of the larger vessels, compliance monitoring for retention of species in some of the trawl fisheries, and for catch accounting on some of the smaller boats. There are a variety of ways we could use the technology and we’re exploring all of those.”

The council voted unanimously in Sitka to move forward with a pre-implementation design this year, with the hope that electronic monitoring could be integrated into the management of the small-boat fleet by 2018 — when it then could be subsidized by observer fees.

Back on the TammyLin, George Eliason has mixed feelings. He believes electronic monitoring is an important goal, but that doesn’t mean he’s fine with it.

“It’s not fine to any one of us. It’s a direct intrusion on our liberties. Nobody likes it, but nobody sees a way out of it.”

Relatively speaking, Eliason and skippers like him are a small part of the bycatch problem in the Gulf. But if electronic monitoring becomes viable, they’re hoping to play a big part in the solution.

The Alaska Fisheries Conservation Alliance has handed over enough signatures to the state division of elections to get a voter initiative on the 2016 general election ballot.

The Alaska Fisheries Conservation Alliance wants to stop all commercial setnetting in five areas deemed to be “urban” and non-subsistence under Alaska law.

According to the groups’ president, Joe Connors, who owns a sport fishing lodge on the Kenai River, the Alliance’s motive is to conserve dwindling salmon stocks.

The initiative asks state voters to decide on banning setnets in the five urban areas.

A state Superior Court decision last year favored the Alliance’s plan to put the question on the ballot, but the state has challenged that decision and asked the state Supreme Court to decide if the Alliance’s initiative is legal. Corie Mills, a spokesperson for the state department of law, says state attorneys are drafting an opinion on the constitutional legality of the initiative, and would not comment further on the issue.

The state Supreme Court will hear the case during August 26 and 27.

Pollock ‘B’ Season opened Friday in the Aleutian Islands and Eastern Bering Seas Region.

Mary Furness is a Fisheries Resource Specialist with the National Marine Fisheries Service in Juneau.

“The total allowable catch is up for the Bering Sea Pollock fishery this year, about 43,000 metric tons and the allocation is divided by the A season which gets 40% and the B season gets 60%,” she said.

According to Furness, there are about 19,000 more metric tons of Pollock available for harvest in this year’s B season.

Pollock numbers have been up in recent years. Last year’s was the second largest biomass estimate on record since scientists started surveying the fish in 1982. But harvest levels for groundfish are not allowed to surpass 2 million metric tons, regardless of increased assessments.

Furness said federal managers expect the Pollock B Season to wrap up by early to mid-October.

Every year, millions of sockeye salmon return to Bristol Bay, headed for spawning grounds in area rivers. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game has counting projects on several rivers throughout the region to give managers a sense of how many fish enter rivers to spawn, but less is known about what happens to outbound juvenile fish each spring. Research teams on three rivers that flow into Bristol Bay have been studying those baby fish, called smolt, for the past few years.

The team is studying smolt on the Kvichak River, near the village of Igiugig and Lake Iliamana.

It’s a little past 1 a.m. in Igiugig, and I’m headed down the Kvichak to a fish trap set up to catch sockeye salmon smolt.

Researchers from the Bristol Bay Science and Research Institute are working on a study of smolt abundance, and the trap is how they collect fish each night to take a fin for genetic samples, scales for aging, and record certain information about the smolt, including lengths and weights.

Smolt are juvenile salmon that have spent the first part of their life growing up in the freshwater.

This is one of three sites where BBSRI is studying smolt in Bristol Bay, in partnership with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. The information collected here, and at similar projects on the Ugashik and Egegik rivers, provides a picture of the condition smolt are in as they swim downstream, leaving the lake where they’ve grown for the past year or two, headed for the ocean where they’ll spend the next phase of their lives.

Matt Nemeth is the project manager for BBSRI’s smolt program:

“Well, it’s important to study smolt because it gives us an opportunity to see how the fish are doing halfway through the lifecycle, instead of waiting until the very end when they come back as adults. And if we have smolt data paired with the adult data that come back, then we can start to learn a lot more about the fish.”

Eventually, when there’s a better understanding of how smolt features correlate with the number of salmon swimming back, information on smolt could be used to help with run forecasts.

But for tonight, we’re just fishing in the dark. Nemeth says the crew captures smolt at night to try for a representative sample of the fish migrating downstream.

“We capture the fish at night because that’s when we can get the most representative sample of the fish that are going by. Most of the fish, most of the smolts, emigrate at night. And we know from the sonar data, that when they migrate at night, they’re distributed unusually close to the surface, and that’s where our trap is, and so we can capture the largest portion of the run.”

Back on the river, there’s one last band of pink light ahead of us, and a bright moon behind us. That’s about as dark as it gets in Igiugig this time of year.

Dirk Middleton and Chris Sewright pull the trap away from shore and start fishing. Logan Reveil keeps the second boat ready in case it’s needed to help move the trap. Once the trap is secured near the middle of the river, we pull in to wait. It’s warm tonight, and the crew keeps reminding me that I’ve lucked out on the weather.

“It’s called an incline plane trap, ‘cause it’s got the incline that comes up right, so we’re fishing further down in the front than in the back. It’s almost like sluice box.”

The trap fishes about three feet deep, in a pretty fast section of river. Smolt typically run close to the surface at night, when predators aren’t out.

“It’s pretty incredible there are that many fish going down. Every once in a while, we’ll have a night, you just look out with your headlamp, and the whole river is just fish. You feel like you could walk right across the water.”

The crew samples fish almost every night for the month that the project operates, trying to capture 600 sockeye smolt in two hours each night. Tonight they’re done much sooner. It’s probably about an hour from the time we head down the river to the time we get back to the bunkhouse carrying six buckets with smolt in them.

The trap is just for collecting samples and data. The count itself comes from sonar pods at two sites on the Kvichak. Last weekend, a sonar pod at one site had to be replaced, a project that involved taking all eight off the bottom of the river, changing one out, testing the array, and putting them back.

But most days, the sonar do their job on their own. The crew downloads the data each day. It’s read in the summer, and Nemeth and his colleague Justin Priest write a report by the fall that includes the number of smolt estimated to have swum done the Kvichak during the study period.

The report also includes size, age and genetic information about those smolt based on the fish captured each night. The field crew collects samples from the smolt to provide that information.

Back at the bunkhouse, the sun is getting ready to rise, and the crew is getting ready to start sampling the smolt.

Chris takes scales, Logan measures the smolt and clips off a fin, Dirk records the data. They get into a rhythm.

And they keep each other on track, Dirk says.

“So you really end up, you do look out for one another. Like if there’s something missing in part of the cycle, he’ll catch it, Chris will say no, I think we’re on this one because of the scales, and the same for me.”