Fisheries

The humpback whale that was tangled up in a gill net near Petersburg earlier this week has made its way to Juneau waters.

National Marine Fisheries Service spokewoman Julie Speegle said a disentanglement team was out Wednesday observing the whale. Today, the three person team is out trying to cut it free.

The whale has a buoy attached to it for spotting, as well as a tracker. It was in Stephens Passage on Thursday. Speegle didn’t want to disclose its specific location, for fear of people chasing it.

But with the Labor Day weekend, sightings are especially likely. Officials are asking boaters not to intervene and to stay clear of the whale, both for its well-being and their own.

“There is also a large amount of gill net in the water that’s attached to the whale,” Speegle said. “And that could pose a hazard to vessels as well. So if you spot this whale, you’ll want to keep your distance.”

As of last report this morning, the whale had turned and was headed south.

(Check back later for updates.)

Scuba diving emergencies can no longer be treated at Bartlett Regional Hospital in Juneau. After more than 30 years, the facility discontinued its hyperbaric chamber program and recently removed the 13-foot chamber.

Now, the closest chambers for public use are in Anchorage or Seattle.

Recently retired physician William Palmer remembers when the hyperbaric chamber came to Juneau.

“I was diving with some of the divers from the NOAA lab and it came up in discussion that if there was a dive accident of any significance in the local waters, there was no backup whatsoever,” Palmer recalls.

Palmer was sent to Florida in the late 1970s to study undersea medicine and hyperbaric chamber operation. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration signed a memorandum of understanding with the city and borough of Juneau in 1980, and loaned a chamber to Bartlett Regional Hospital.

Douglas Schleiger is the dive center manager for NOAA.

“Our interest was to have a chamber there so if something were to happen, our people could get treated there, that was our own vested interest in it. It was also a service to the community and local divers,” he says.

Scuba divers are at risk of decompression illness, also known as the bends, which can be caused by a fast ascent, a deep dive, or a long dive. Pressurized oxygen is pumped into a hyperbaric chamber to recreate the underwater environment. Over a period of time, pressure in the chamber is brought to a normal atmospheric level.

Without immediate treatment, a serious case of decompression illness could lead to paralysis or death.

Over the decades, the chamber at the hospital was also used for carbon monoxide poisoning and healing wounds. Dr. Palmer says within the first six months of its arrival, the chamber was used to treat ten cases of monoxide poisoning.

Robyn Free is the director of diagnostic imaging and respiratory therapy at Bartlett Regional Hospital. She says in recent years, use of the chamber dropped. It was last used in December 2011 for wound care, which requires 20 sessions in the chamber.

“And prior to that it was 12 months since they had anyone in the chamber.”

That’s one of the reasons the hospital decided to discontinue the program. Another is cost.

The federal agency Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services surveyed the hospital last June and said a fire suppression system had to be put in place to continue running the chamber.

“That was going to be $30,000 to $50,000,” Free explains.

The hospital was in charge of maintaining the chamber. But regulations changed, requiring the work be done by NOAA-certified technicians three times a year. Each visit would cost the hospital $3,400.

“We tried to talk to NOAA and say, ‘Hey, it’s your chamber. If you want it compliant and run a certain way, then we need some help from you,’ and they were like, ‘Well, we can’t do that,’ so there was nowhere to go with that,” says Free.

Dr. Alan McPherson works in Bartlett’s Emergency Department. When the program was still running, he was the main provider of hyperbaric care. He says running the chamber required a crew of five individuals.

“There would be the doctor who had some training or experience in hyperbaric medicine and that generally would be me. There would be the dive supervisor. You’d have a time keeper. You’d have an outside tender to run the levers, and an inside tender to watch the patient.”

Dr. Palmer worked at the hospital when the chamber program started and when it ended.

“I thought it was really, really sad to see, even though infrequently used, this very high tech, unusual emergency facility just fall away,” he says. “The point is really that when you need it, you need it.”

NOAA dive center manager Schleiger says he would prefer to keep the chamber in Juneau.

“If there was a way to work it out where it could be up there and operated by trained, certified folks, and liabilities issues are all worked out, certainly I would do that if it’s feasible because our divers have not gone away. They are still there.”

Currently, there are seven NOAA divers in Juneau. State of Alaska agencies have about 30 divers in southeast. According to the state’s Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission website, there are over 430 active permits for Southeast dive fisheries. And there’s diving for recreation, commercial work, and search and rescue.

Kyle Hebert is the dive safety officer for the department of fish and game. Bartlett’s chamber was once part of the state’s safety plan. Now that includes a flight transfer to Virginia Mason hospital in Seattle. Hebert doesn’t know how much money that would cost the state.

“We’re probably more concerned about the cost in terms of likelihood of serious injury or death,” Hebert says.

The hyperbaric chamber was moved out of Bartlett Regional Hospital three weeks ago, and now sits in NOAA storage in Juneau waiting to be shipped to Seattle.

 

50,000 sockeye salmon is the early catch estimate for a 3-day gillnet opening at Port Snettisham and the Speel Arm near Juneau, with 35,000 of those fish caught in the first six hours.

The fishery is targeting sockeye salmon from the Snettisham Hatchery.

The fishery opened 6 am Tuesday, with more than 100 gillnet boats showing up for the first day. By Wednesday afternoon, only a handful of boats remained.

Dave Harris is the commercial fisheries area management biologist for Fish and Game. He says the weekend rain helped at least 4,000 sockeye reach the glacial Speel Lake, which is the minimum escapement goal.

“They hone in on their key stream, the scent of their stream draws them in. They’ll get close and they’ll sort of hold and just sort of wait for conditions to get them, so they get a big blast of fresh water and it just gets them all excited and away they go,” Harris explains.

Harris describes the fishing area in Speel Arm as deep and narrow with depths between 400 and 600 feet deep.

The Snettisham Hatchery was originally developed by the state in 1980 and operated by Fish and Game. Douglas Island Pink and Chum – or DIPAC – took over operation in 1996. The hatchery is located right next to the hydro-electric facility that serves most of Juneau.

“The water that comes out of the plant, that’s kind of their water source, and so it’s quite cold. Sockeye definitely like the cold water,” Harris says.

DIPAC expects a total return of 240,000 sockeye to the hatchery.

The average weight of a hatchery sockeye is around 5 pounds, and the fish are being sold at $1.70 per pound. Harris says that’s the best price he’s seen in a while.

Gillnetters have until noon Thursday to fish in the Snettisham area. Harris anticipates opening the special harvest area for the next several weeks concurrently with the normal gillnet fishery.

Hundreds of people poured into Juneau’s Ted Stevens Marine Research Institute, or Auke Bay Laboratories, on Friday, a day set aside to honor its namesake and his legacy in Alaska.

The late Ted Stevens served the state in the U.S. Senate for 41 years and left a major mark on fisheries protection laws.

Stevens was killed in a plane crash in 2010 and the next year the Alaska Legislature made every fourth Saturday in July “Ted Stevens Day.”

It was July 27th this year, so the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration hosted an open house the day before at the Auke Bay laboratories.

Nine-year-old Blake Plummer is holding a sea anemone.

“It’s really sticky. It’s like squishy and it’s like really clear. If I put my finger on the tentacle, it like sticks a little bit,” she describes.

Blake is one of a lot of children visiting the Ted Steven’s Marine Research Institute on Friday. Daily tours at the lab are usually for ages 16 and up.

The kids and parents hover over the touch tank. Inside are inter-tidal organisms like sea stars, urchins, sea cucumbers, and hermit crabs.

Lucky for them it happens to be a special day.

This is the first time the Ted Stevens Marine Research Institute has held an open house to celebrate Ted Stevens Day.

The 69-thousand square foot facility opened in May 2007 and cost $51 million.

Director Phil Mundy says naming the facility after the senator was obvious.

“Ted Stevens was responsible for a lot of the legislation that’s protected our fisheries and brought the fishing industry into our ports and onto our shores. We just wouldn’t have any sort of fisheries nowadays without the efforts that Ted Stevens put in when he entered the Senate in 1968.”

Congress passed the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act in 1976. It’s the primary law governing marine fisheries in the United States.

“Senator Stevens really had vision and also he had tenacity. He could really get in there and slug it out for what he wanted, so he not only got the Fishery Conservation and Management Act passed, he also developed this over a period of nearly 30 years into the legislation that it is today,” Mundy says.

Wyatt Fournier is a NOAA fisheries biologist at the Auke Bay labs. On this day, he’s also a tour guide. He guides a group to the necropsy lab.

“So if we find a marine mammal that’s washed up on shore and we don’t know how it died, this is the only place in Juneau you can bring it,” Fournier explains.

NOAA public affairs officer Julie Speegle says the Ted Stevens Day open house brought a lot of people to the research institute, including the late Senator Stevens’ wife, Catherine Ann Stevens.

“She took the tour, looked around at things, and really liked what she saw. She also took the time to speak to the employees here and told them how she’s very interested in their work and really supports what we do here.”

Research taking place at the labs on the status of fish stocks, fish habitats, and marine ecosystems helps develop policy for fishery management.

Cara Rodgveller works in the marine ecology and stock assessment program. She says she loves watching how excited the children get at the touch tank.

“‘Cause I remember being like that when I was little and seeing fish, and growing up fishing, and that’s why we got into this business,” she explains.

Blake Plummer contemplates her favorite thing in the touch tank, “Uh, probably that sea cucumber.”

Who knows, perhaps one day Blake will be working at the Ted Stevens Marine Research Institute.

 

One of the most riveting stories of disaster and bravery at sea is now a television documentary, being broadcast this week on KTOO’s 360 North.

Tragedy and Courage on the Bering Sea, by filmmaker John Sabella, recounts the fire that destroyed the Fishing / Processing Vessel Galaxy in 2002.  The story is told entirely by the ship’s captain, Dave Shoemaker.

As Rosemarie Alexander reports, Shoemaker is now devoting his life to training people who spend their time on the water.

On October 20^th, 2002, Captain Dave Shoemaker and his crew aboard the 180-foot Galaxy were fishing in the Bering Sea some 30 miles southwest of St. Paul Island in the Pribiloffs. About 4:20 p.m., the ship was hit by a very large wave on the starboard side.

From all accounts, smoke was immediately detected on multiple decks.  Captain Shoemaker was in the wheelhouse when a factory foreman alerted him.

Thick, black smoke began to fill the bridge.

As he set the fire alarm, explosions began to wrack the ship.

“The next thing I feel is this boat rock violently and this explosion took place, and now I’ve got people screaming ‘man overboard,’ ” Shoemaker told filmmaker John Sabella.

Up to that point, it had been just another day on the freezer longliner.

“Within 4 minutes there had been a huge backdraft explosion that basically destroyed the vessel and most of its survival equipment and all of their safety plans and procedures,” Sabella says.

He originally produced training films for fishing groups with Shoemaker. The television documentary grew out of those projects.

“This catastrophe occurred so fast it just overwhelmed the crew,” Sabella says.

The 137-page U.S. Coast Guard accident report is gripping, but the story of the Galaxy in the Captain’s words is powerfully evocative.

The documentary condenses the more than three hours between the discovery of smoke to Shoemaker’s rescue.  He was the last man on the burning ship.

“I’m asking people to jump off the back of a boat that’s 34 feet out of the water at the dock, and add 20-foot seas to that. You’ve got 40, 45, 50 feet and these kids are standing back there petrified,” Shoemaker recounts in the documentary. “Not only am I going to have them jump off the back of the boat,  I’m going to have them jump out of a four-story building.”

Several of the crew members were in their early 20s; for some it was their first experience on a floating processor.

Three men died, but the rest were rescued, including a National Marine Fisheries Observer who was in the frigid water for nearly  an hour and a half without a survival suit.

Since that day, Shoemaker has told the story hundreds of times.

“And when I bring up the fact that I prayed on the bow of the boat on the Galaxy I was actually saying ‘goodbye world, hello heaven.'”

Shoemaker had been with the Bering Sea fleet for nearly 30 years, but this was a near-death experience no one ever expects.

Good Samaritan boats broke off their fishing to help rescue the Galaxy crew. Later, skippers called him in the hospital where he recovered from his burns.

“They said, ‘you know Dave, if it can happen to you it can happen to any of us. We need to pay closer attention.'”

He is now a Coast Guard certified trainer with the North Pacific Fishing Vessel Owners’ Association.

“This is something I’m going to do for as long as I can do it and get in front as many fishermen that I can,” he says.

He has realized a goal of speaking to the cadets at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy.  He’s become a trainer for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA fisheries.

It wasn’t that Shoemaker or his crew had not trained for emergencies before. Training was part of their work.

“I think one of the things that happens in the fleet is everybody becomes calloused at one particular point or another, because we don’t have the experience to relate to. We’ve not had  the emergency we had to deal with.  We become a little hardened to the fact that it could in fact happen,” he says.

Shoemaker knows mistakes were made that day. Throughout the film he talks about trying to regain control of his crew and the ship.

The Coast Guard report of the Galaxy fires and sinking calls his actions extraordinarily brave and heroic. He and two other crew members were given Coast Guard commendations.

“Twenty-three people managed to survive and I attribute that to the effort, energy and heroism of every individual on the vessel that day,” he says.

He believes most of the Galaxy crew members have left fishing.  His therapy for dealing with the trauma is to help other fisherman achieve through training what he calls a level of unconscious competence in emergency response.

Tragedy and Courage on the Bering Sea can be seen on 360North, Sunday, at 7 p.m.  360North can be found on GCI cable channel 18 in Juneau, and channel 15 elsewhere in Alaska, as well as DirecTV and Dish Network.

 

For the first time since it started in 1976, Douglas Island Pink and Chum – better known as DIPAC – is operating in the black. The salmon hatchery recently finished paying back 42 million dollars of loans and interest, and is getting more salmon to the commercial fishing fleet than ever before.

DIPAC rears and releases chum, coho, sockeye, and chinook, but chum salmon is the organization’s main species for recovering operational costs. KTOO News recently visited DIPAC’s Macaulay facility to watch the process of chum salmon egg taking.

Thousands of chum salmon are swimming up the DIPAC fish ladder this week. They began their life at this facility four to five years ago.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06o9LOo135A]

“We release fish here so they come back here,” explains Eric Prestegard, DIPAC’s executive director.

The fish are returning from years in the open ocean. Once they make it to the top of the ladder, they enter an assembly line.

“Next box is electro-anesthesia machine. We just literally put a charge in there, and it stuns the fish and then down they go.”

The fish spill out, down a short metal slide where they are sorted by gender. The females go to a room where an egg taker gaffs each fish under its lower jaw and slits the belly. Eggs pour out in a steady stream of pink.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmubXyl1EKM]

“There’s about 2000 eggs per female. We go through a lot of fish. We probably go through 150,000 to get our full needs,” says Prestegard.

The males are waiting for those eggs. A fish handler holds a male chum with two hands, bending it in such a way that sperm shoot about two feet into a bucket of eggs. Sperm from at least eight males will go into each bucket.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyGa5t3dAfk]

“We want to make sure we get fertilization and we want to make sure that we’re having full genetic diversity,” Prestegard says.

Buckets full of eggs and milt are transferred upstairs to a spacious dark incubation room.

“He’s stirring it up, stirring just to make sure it’s nice and mixed, then adds water,” Prestegard explains. “He’ll stir them again, and that way hopefully the water activates the sperm, so we should have massive fertilization taking place right now.”

The eggs are rinsed with water and poured into an incubator.

“We put about 200,000 eggs in each incubator, five incubators to a stack, so about a million eggs per stack.”

DIPAC has 650 incubators that fit 125 million chum salmon eggs. Prestagard says the goal is 94 percent survival. “They’ll hatch out in probably October. Then they’ll come out in March and we move them out to the release locations.”

Earlier this month, the seine fleet harvested an estimated 650,000 fish at Amalga Harbor, making it the second biggest seine catch of chum salmon in a single opening in Southeast Alaska.

Ron Josephson is Fish and Game coordinator and section chief for the hatchery program. He recalls going to Amalga last year, the first time DIPAC made the chum available to the commercial fleet. One opening saw almost one-hundred seine boats.

“DIPAC was kind of the product of one person’s inspiration. That was Ladd Macaulay. And many of his children were out there seeing that fishery when I was out there and they were all just happy. They realized that that was part of their dad’s dream, was to see things like that happen.”

Chum salmon released at Amalga Harbor were once intended solely for recovering DIPAC costs. Now that the hatchery has broken even, it’s able to give commercial seine boats a piece of the action.

DIPAC had a total return of four million chum salmon last year. Already, DIPAC’s Prestagard says this year’s chum return has surpassed that.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nK25wTtOPKE]