
An Alaska Fish and Game employee battling ice to keep the Copper River sonar working in years past/ADF&G photo
No sooner had the Alaska commercial salmon season begun amid reports of sky-high prices for Copper River kings and sockeyes than fishing was put on hold for lack of fish.
Gillnetters were sitting idle in the tiny port of Cordova Monday with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game saying the sonar count of salmon that should be entering the river is a tiny fraction of what it should be, and a sockeye catch of less than 12,000 during a fishery opening Thursday only about 40 percent of what was expected.
Part of the problem might be the weather.
After a string of winters that had Alaskans thinking serious climate change might have arrived in the north to stay, something approaching winter normal returned to Eastern Alaska this year.
As a result, spring breakup has come slowly to the Copper. The river is still running so much ice that the state has been unable to install one of the two sonar units – one on the north bank and one on the south bank of the river – that count fish entering the glacially turbid drainage.
“The south bank has had giant icebergs coming through,” regional commercial fisheries supervisor Bert Lewis said Monday. Managers have been afraid to employ the sonar for fear it will get crushed and destroyed by the ice.
With only the north bank sonar operational, the count of the escapement of fish in the river stood at only 423 fish on Sunday. Even if that were doubled, tripled or quadrupled to account for the missing south bank sonar, the resulting number would still fall way, way short of the goal of 8,000 fish by May 22.
Bad start, weak year
Longtime Cordova fishermen do note that cold water normally delays the entry of fish into the river, and ice-filled water is invariably cold. Lewis said the conditions make it too early to pass judgment on whether the return to the river this year is going to be even weaker than the less-than-rosy preseason forecast.
The annual prediction that came out in February called for a total sockeye return of 1.43 million, about two-thirds of the 10-year average return. But salmon forecasts usually aren’t much better than weather forecasts.
As the Alaska Fish and Game concedes, the predictions “are inherently uncertain and are primarily used to gauge the general magnitude of expected runs and set early-season harvest management strategy.”
Harvests do usually fall somewhere within the range predicted by the state agency, but the upper ends of the ranges tend to be at least double the lower ends and sometimes more than that. The Copper’s sockeye range this year stretches from 900,000 to 1.9 million sockeye.
The management goal calls for getting a minimum of 656,000 of these fish past the sonar, which doesn’t leave much for commercial harvest this year if the return is near the lower end of the range.
The 656,000 goal is intended to buffer in-river subsistence, personal-use and sport fisheries if the return is weak. The goal is almost 300,000 fish over the minimum spawning need of 360,000.
Despite the weak return to date, Lewis said he expects managers will decide to let the commercial fleet fish its regularly scheduled fishing period Thursday. At this point, the commercial catch is the best indicator as to the number of fish staging off the mouth of the river.
“You’d like to see a climb (in the catch),” he added.
Managers had hoped to see such a climb on Sunday with the second opening of the commercial season, but the catch actually came in lower than that for the first opening on May 16.
“The fish just weren’t moving,” Lewis said.
Winners and losers
With sockeye salmon stocks booming in Bristol Bay on the southern edge of the Bering Sea, Gulf of Alaska sockeye stocks have been in a slide for years. Last year was a near disaster for commercial gillnetters in Cordova.
The weak return followed a trend from Kodiak Island south along the coast to Oregon. Canada’s Fraser River, once one of the biggest sockeye producers on the West Coast, was a disaster.
Canadians have pointed at Alaska and blamed some of the problem on the interception of south bound salmon in 49th state fisheries, but Alaska harvests can’t begin to account for the number of missing Canadian salmon.
Others have blamed warming North Pacific waters, but the evidence to support that theory is lacking unlike in Bristol Bay where scientists have documented the increased survival and growth of young sockeye in lakes due to warming.
This appears to be driving the explosion of sockeye in the Bay.
The forecast calls for a run so big the harvest could reach 61.82 million fish, almost 10 million sockeye more than the 10-year average for the size of the total run.
“A Bristol Bay harvest of this size (would be) 75 percent greater than the most recent 10-year average harvest of 34.24 million which has ranged from 15.38 million to 42.94 million, and 170 percent greater than the long-term average harvest of 22.22 million fish (1963 to present),” state biologists say.
A run of this size would dwarf the cumulative return predictions for all Gulf of Alaska sockeye systems in 2022.
Some have linked the Gulf decline to the explosion of pink salmon fueled in part by Alaska hatcheries. The theory is that the pasture is overloaded with salmon and that in the competition for food, sockeyes are the biggest losers.
As with the possible consequences of warm water, the theory is hard to prove. The North Pacific ecosystem is mindboggling in its complexity with hundreds of species competing with each other for food and often feeding on each other.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – in cooperation with the Canadians and the Russians, at least prior to the war in Ukraine, and West Coast states – has now begun an effort to untangle the secret lives of salmon in the ocean, but definitive answers to the consequences of warmer waters and interspecies interactions are years away.
Maybe Fish and Game can’t predict accurately to the day the fish are going to show? The fish are lunkers this year too…When was the last time the up river users didn’t get their share of fish?
https://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=commercialbyareacopperriver.salmon_escapement
2018, 2020, 2021, and now 2022 all have had a later than predicted run. It appears the issue is in the return predictions before June 1st. Patience grasshopper
“All systems are expected to meet their spawning escapement goal”. Right!
And if they do not, the department will simply reduce the goals until they can be met.
Making mistakes by ADF&G staff seldom results in promotion or pay increases. So instead of admitting they over harvested or made other mistakes in managing the fisheries, the Dept simply reduces the goals and bingo, the goals are reached and all is well. This has resulted in almost catastrophic reductions in the Chinook runs and now in some areas, Sockeye runs.
And it is unbelievable that we are witnessing a collapse in the PWS sockeye fisheries yet fail to recognize the disastrous impact on them from the hatcheries release of hundreds of million pinks into the Sound each year.
The greed of the Comm Fishers and short sidedness of the Dept and the BOF is beyond comprehension. Something must change!
Reminds me of our education system – “simply reduce the goals and bingo, the goals are reached and all is well.” Same manufacturing.
Copper River sockeye salmon harvest and escapement may be lacking, but the Copper River king salmon harvest may already be excessive for this early in the season when the fish headed far up the drainage are being harvested at a substantially higher rate. Below is a bit of figuring I did using data supplied by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G):
May 16 — Copper River Commercial Chinook Salmon Harvest — Copper River provides subsistence, personal use, and sport fishing opportunities for many residents of the Mat -Su Valley and State of Alaska. Excessive early season commercial harvest can cause closures or restrictions to upriver subsistence, personal use, and sport fisheries — for that reason — I’ve decided to record early season Chinook salmon harvests in the Copper River commercial fishery through June 10. ADF&G harvest data shows a commercial harvest of 2,830 Chinook (king) salmon on May 16. Since ADF&G has forecasted a total return of 40,000 Copper River chinook salmon for 2022, and since ADF&G’s Copper River Chinook salmon spawning escapement goal calls for a spawning escapement of 21,000 –31,000 fish, the Department’s best science (40,000 total run minus 21,000 — 31,000 spawning escapement goal) indicates a harvestable surplus of 9,000 — 19,000 Copper River Chinook salmon for 2022. Therefore, during the May 16, 2022 Copper River commercial opening (depending upon stock composition of harvested Chinook) up to 15 – 31% of harvestable surplus Copper River Chinook salmon may have been caught by the commercial fishery.
May 19 — Copper River Commercial Chinook Salmon Harvest — 2,690 Chinook were harvested (depending upon harvested stock composition) up to 14 — 30% of projected harvestable surplus Copper River Chinook may have been harvested on the second 2022 Copper River Commercial Opening. The cumulative commercial harvest for May 16 and May 19 therefore indicates up to 29 — 61% of the harvestable surplus of Copper River Chinook salmon may have already been harvested — before any upriver state subsistence or personal use fisheries were even open for the season, and likely before any upriver sport harvest occurred! Does anyone else see something wrong with this scenario?