Poor king returns blamed on weather

MARY LOCHNER

July 03, 2008 at 12:56PM AKST

King salmon proved not to be a very punctual fish this year.

A meager number showed up for Bristol Bay’s commercial fishing openings Thursday, June 5 and Monday, June 9 — so few that anticipated later openings didn’t happen.

Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s projected escapement for kings in the Westside Bristol Bay Salmon Fishery was 12,000 by June 12. They didn’t approach that number until June 23.

Tim Sands, an area management biologist with Fish and Game based in Dillingham, said he thinks cold weather has kept kings back and could also be keeping sockeye in check.

Dan Gray, regional management coordinator with Alaska Department of Fish and Game, said observational and genetic sample data taken from their test fishery at Point Moller boosted optimism about late-running sockeye, however.

“We’re very hopeful about Bristol Bay,” he said. “In my opinion, we’re still well on track to perform well there, according to forecast.”

Kings finally started to come in, and by Monday, June 23, Dillingham subsistence fisherman Bill Jackson had got almost all the king salmon he needed for the year.

Jackson’s been subsistence fishing for 20 years, and he echoed Fish and Game’s cold-water theory to explain the late salmon. He said you just never know how the fish are going to run.

“They come in late once in a while,” he said.

Another hypothesis for why salmon runs in Alaska might be drab, is that they could be poached by illegal, unregulated and unreported — or IUU — fisheries on the high seas.

Sen. Ted Stevens sponsored anti-IUU legislation that was approved Tuesday, June 24, by the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation.

Under the North Pacific Fisheries Treaty, it’s illegal to fish for salmon in the high seas, Stevens said in an interview with The BayTimes on Thursday, June 26. But the patchwork-style enforcement that exists now does little to stop it.

Stevens said his anti-IUU legislation, co-sponsored by Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, would, among other things, form an International Fisheries Enforcement Program.

Under the program, vessels that are documented to be IUU vessels would be blacklisted from using U.S. ports to unload their fish or for other uses except in emergency situations.

“We’re asking our ports be closed to them,” Stevens said. “They can’t come in and unload fish in our ports, and if they do sneak in and try, the boat will be seized.”

He said that, while there isn’t proof that salmon poachers on the high seas are affecting salmon runs in Alaska, it’s a sensible deduction to surmise they might at times be a factor.

“We do know they’re out there on the high seas in the Gulf of Alaska, and we know our salmon migrate up and down,” he said. “We’re making it a crime to come into our ports and dump fish they’ve caught without any connection with scientific concepts of the species they’re harvesting. There are enormous vessels on an international basis, and they’re growing in numbers.”

Mary Lochner can be reached at (907) 348-2438, or (800) 770-9830, ext. 438.