Fisheries

As the Kuskokwim River king salmon run comes to an end, the Department of Fish and Game is looking toward a commercial chum opening in the lower river Friday. But in a year with unprecedented chinook restrictions and increased reliance on chum salmon, many middle river fisherman say it’s too early.

At a work session Tuesday of the Kuskokwim River Salmon Management Working Group, subsistence fishermen told managers a commercial opening now undermines the conservation mindset and sacrifices that the working group and others have pushed all year. Nick Kameroff is from Aniak.

“The more commercial fishing that starts there.. it’s a lot of boats, it’s going to dwindle our chums and reds and opportunity for other people on the upper river who have not yet met their subsistence needs,” said Kameroff.

Several middle river residents reported not catching as many chum salmon as they might expect this year. They say many are still chum fishing and plan to try and target more silvers this year.

Mangers are proposing a commercial opening Friday in lower Sub district 1-B which runs from 15 miles below the Johnson River the to the southern tip of Eek Island. The six-hour opening is not finalized yet, but managers expect allowing 6-inch gear.

Aaron Poetter is the Kuskokwim Area Management Biologist with the Department of Fish and Game.

“Looks like we’re sitting really good as far as fish that have moved into the river, the relaxation of some restrictions in order to provide subsistence opportunity, good abundances of chums moving in, processor availability,” said Poetter.

A preseason forecast pointed to 100 to 200 thousand chum salmon available for commercial harvest. The data this year indicate an above average chum run. There will still be incidental kings salmon caught. The commercial buyer, Coastal Village Seafoods, told the working group they would not buy king salmon caught, all would be sent home for subsistence use.

There was no quorum, so the group could not pass a motion. Co-Chair LaMont Albertson from Aniak said he wanted managers to hear a message from the middle river.

“For those of use who have talking conservation upriver, this is not viewed as a conservation move when you open it up. You can say it’s just for chums, and that’s fine and I understand that and I understand the statistics you use to justify it also. But in the true spirit of the way things have gone this year, and in the way the people in the middle river, upper river and even the lower river somewhat have responded, This is just the wrong year to start this soon,” said Albertson.

The working group will be talking long term in the coming months and discussing the possibility of a tier two chinook salmon permit system that allocates permits based on several criteria.

Biologist report that a few silvers at least are in early: the Bethel Test Fishery on July 6th tied the record for the earliest catch of a coho salmon.

The next working group meeting will be at the call of the chair.

Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologists tracking bears near Mendenhall Glacier this morning came across a fish dump at the end of Valley Boulevard.

Two piles of cut up fish remains were found near the the popular Under Thunder trail.

“It’s a safety concern because it’s a bear attractant,” says biologist Stephanie Sell. “It’s in an area we know we have lots of bears because it’s butted up against Thunder Mountain.”

Discarding fish waste on public or private property is against state law.

Sell asks that people properly dispose of fish carcasses and says if you see someone dumping fish in town, you should call Fish and Game, Juneau Police or Alaska Wildlife Troopers.

“We just want to make sure that people don’t get hurt and at the same time we don’t want bears to get killed because of people’s irresponsible behavior.”

The best method of disposal is to clean fish at the docks and dump waste there. If you’re fishing in rivers, tossing small pieces in fast moving water keeps waste from building up on banks. If you have to bring the fish home, freeze the remains and put it out with the garbage in the morning.

Fishing was slow for the 90 boats that participated in the first Amalga Harbor purse seine fishery of the year. And it could remain that way if the fishery opens again this week.

Seiners caught about 100,000 chum salmon Thursday between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. During the same time last year, about 700,000 were caught.

Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologist Dave Harris says fishing wasn’t consistent during the 6-hour fishery.

“We started out with a voice countdown. Everybody sets their nets. And it very quickly developed into where boats were taking turns on a few key sets, like up the north line and the south line, and there’s a fair bit of waiting and then when your turn would come up, you’d make a set,” Harris says.

In the beginning of the fishery, some seiners caught about a thousand fish in a set, Harris says. More common were sets of a hundred to 200 fish.

Seiners are targeting returning DIPAC hatchery chum salmon. Most are five- and four-year-old chum. DIPAC’s executive director Eric Prestegard says the number of returning four-year-olds is weak.

“Normally the fives come in first. They’re the early arrivers, and then followed by the fours. The fives are starting to turn down. The fours should be going up and we’re just not seeing that mix change of the relationship between the four and fives. There are still majority fives,” he says.

Prestegard says four-year-old hatchery chum are missing throughout the region and state.

Historically, the number of returning chum salmon to Amalga is highest later this week.

“The normal peak would be sometime around the 10th, 11th or 12th. But that’s if there’s four-year-olds. If there’s not four-year-olds, we may have already seen the peak,” Prestegard says.

Seiners find out Tuesday if they get another opportunity to fish Amalga Harbor.

“Unfortunately, I do think it looks like, if we do have a fishery Thursday, it’s not going to be a real great one. They’ll catch some fish, but it won’t be like last year where there were some pretty big numbers taken,” Prestegard says.

Last year, seiners fished four times in the Amalga Harbor special harvest area and caught just over one million salmon.

If you’ve noticed a lot of empty slips in Sitka harbors today, there’s a reason for that: Tuesday was the first day of the summer troll opening for king salmon — and Southeast fishermen are looking at a record high target harvest.

“This is just an extraordinary year,” says Fish & Game biologist Pattie Skannes.

Trollers will be going after more than 171,300 kings in this first opening. Skannes says it’s the largest target ever for the July opener.

And it’s significantly higher than last year, when the July target was just 62,864 kings.

To put those numbers in perspective, there will be about the same number of fish available to trollers in the next two to three weeks as were available to all gear groups — trollers, seiners, gillnetters and sport fishermen — for the entire year last year.

Skannes says a number of things are contributing to the high target, including big expectations for Chinook returns in the Pacific Northwest.

“The Columbia River is expecting an enormous return this year, a record-breaking return,” she says. “So some of those stocks are what we call driver stocks for the Southeast fishery. That means that they contribute significantly to what we are harvesting up here, so we benefit from their abundance.”

Skannes says it’s always hard to know what causes big returns, but it might be a matter of what’s happening way off shore.

“The leading hypothesis is that productivity is driven mostly by ocean conditions,” she says. “So years in which we have a good abundance, that is in part explained by ideal or favorable ocean conditions.”

Fish & Game hasn’t set the length of the July opening yet. That will depend on how fast the fleet approaches its target. But Skannes estimates it will last between 14 and 21 days. And she expects there will be a second opening in mid-August, following the closure of the Coho troll fishery. Last year, there was no second opening, because the fleet caught the entire summer quota in six days in July.

Skannes says she expects more boats to participate in the fishery this year, attracted by the large quota and long opening. Last year, 714 permit-holders fished. That was lower than in the past, perhaps because of the low quota and short season. This year, Skannes says she’s expecting about 800 boats.

And last year, fishermen got an average price of $4.61 per pound for king salmon, according to number compiled by Fish & Game. Skannes says that so far, during spring trolling, fishermen have seen an average price of $5.52 per pound. She expects that summer prices will probably be somewhat lower than that, because of the higher volume of fish coming in.

Meanwhile, trolling for chum salmon has gotten off to a slow start. In recent years, Fish & Game has seen a fairly significant fishery in June in Icy Strait. This year, Skannes says, it was almost nonexistent — although numbers have picked up in the past week.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is opening public comment on a plan to relax Steller sea lion protections and allow more commercial fishing in the western Aleutian Islands.

The agency released a draft of its new regulations on Tuesday. They would pave the way for the first commercial harvests of Atka mackerel and Pacific cod since 2011.

That’s when federal managers banned fishing on those species in the western Aleutians. It was intended to help an endangered population of sea lions. But commercial fishing interests and the state of Alaska argued that the science behind the fishing bans were faulty.

After years of litigation — and a comprehensive, court-ordered reassessment of the protection plan — NOAA ruled that commercial fishing wouldn’t jeopardize the sea lions if it was done under the right conditions.

Members of the public will have 45 days to weigh in on a draft of the new fishing regulations. The comment period will close on August 15. NOAA’s aiming to finalize the new rules by January 2015.