A quiet Friday on the dipnet beaches of the Kenai River/Craig Medred photo
KENAI – Friday found the beaches at the mouth of Alaska’s most fought-over river woefully short of dipnetters willing to help stop the possible “over-escapement” of sockeye salmon so feared by the commercial fishermen of Cook Inlet.
Meanwhile, the commercial fishermen themselves, or at least their official representatives, were meeting with a state court judge to demand a reversal of an Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s decision to close setnet fisheries to protect a struggling run of Chinook salmon.
Carl Bauman, the attorney representing them, wanted a temporary restraining order (TRO) imposed on Commissioner of Fish and Game Doug Vincent Lang because he has, according to Bauman’s court filings, “violated so many points of applicable federal and state laws (constitutional, statutory, regulatory, and case law)” that there is a need for “TRO and injunctive
relief to the Court to stop the continuing harm.”
Bauman’s went on to list all the bad things Vincent-Lang has done, the most interesting of them being the suggestion that Vincent-Lang and the state Board of Fisheries have violated the interstate commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution by allowing the dipnet fishery to help provide food security for ordinary Alaskans.
“Does the Board have the authority to establish a new and expanding fishery for Alaska-resident-only, personal-use (dipnetting) that is at odds with Alaska Statute 16.43, CFEC, which has decimated the interstate commerce and the commercial fishery that CFEC was established to protect,” Bauman’s TRO filing asked.
All this acronym-laced gobbledegook will here need some unpacking for the average reader.
Permits were subsequently awarded to then-fishermen based on their length of experience. The permits became the property of the fishermen, and they were allowed to buy and sell them at will.
Since then, there has been a lot of buying and selling, and few of the permits today are owned by the fishermen originally given them.
Much of the intent behind this permitting idea was to protect parts of rural Alaska where commercial fishing provided the only real economic opportunity, but that didn’t work out so well.
Most of the driftnet permits for sockeye salmon fishing in Bristol Bay, by far the largest and most valuable salmon fishery in the state, are now owned by people who live elsewhere.
“(And) some regions like Bristol Bay have lost over 50 percent of their local rural permits.”
Some of the permits left the Bay when people who had been living there decided to move to urban Alaska, where life is easier than in rural Alaska. But many permits were also sold to fishermen from Outside.
Cook Inlet permits, being far less valuable than those in Bristol Bay have, however, stayed predominately local if the residency claims of the permit owners can be believed.
One of the highest profile of Cook Inlet fishermen – Roland Maw, the one-time director of the United Cook Inlet Drifters Association (UCIDA), the most powerful lobby in the Inlet’s realm of fishery politics – turned out to be faking his Alaska residency, a fact that wasn’t discovered until then Gov. Bill Walker, a good friend of UCIDA, appointed Maw to the Board of Fish where Maw was going to fix they fishery problems in Cook Inlet, which can be defined in one two words:
Fish wars.
Whose salmon?
The complex problem driving the constant battles over Inlet salmon is in its simplicity that the rivers and streams draining into the Inlet don’t produce enough Chinook, sockeye and coho salmon to meet the combined demands of commercial, sport, personal-use and subsistence fishermen.
But even if they were allowed to catch all of the Inlet’s Chinook, sockeye and coho there wouldn’t be enough for them, which takes all this back to the history of the Inlet before the creation of the CFEC.
The commercial fishery of the Inlet was then open to anyone who wanted to obtain a state permit to go commercial fishing. The Legislature’s first efforts to change that ran head-on into a conflict with the Alaska state Constitution.
The authors of that document were clear about who should own the resource of the state, and it wasn’t any single user group.
Article 8 for years prevented the Alaska Legislature, where commercial fishing interests have long punched way above their size, from creating a limited entry system.
But in 1972, Alaska voters approved an amendment to the Constitution that said this:
When Bauman now cites the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution, he is basically arguing that this amendment changed everything and that the prevention of “economic distress among fishermen” should afterward have take precedence over all else when managing Inlet slamon.
Whether that is what Alaska voters were thinking when they approved an amendment the first line of which says “no exclusive right or special privilege of fishery shall be created or authorized” is impossible to know.
From Bauman’s perspective, however, it all seems clear.
The state has overlooked the promise of economic security written into limited entry and “the CIFF (Cook Inlet Fishermen’s Fund) members have…been financially harmed by intentional, arbitrary, capricious, and negligent actions under AS 09.45.250 by the Commissioner, the ADF&G, and the Board, including continuing the illegal Alaska-resident-only UCI PU (Upper Cook Inlet, peronal-use) salmon fishery, continuing to unfairly and unlawfully allocate UCI salmon to the personal, sport, and sport-guided fishing interests to the detriment of commercial fishermen, and continuing to impose arbitrary, capricious, unlawful, and unjustified gear, set back, and other restrictions on set net fishermen as well as arbitrary restrictions on the drift net fishermen.”
Unfortunately, he overlooks the reality that even if commercial fishermen got all the Chinook, sockeye and coho, that wouldn’t prevent “economic distress” because the CFEC didn’t do its job very well back in 1973.
The newly formed agency bowed to political pressure from the region and issued about 10 percent of all salmon fishing permits to fishermen in Cook Inlet, which now annually produces only 2 percent of the state salmon harvest, and most of that made up of pink salmon from Lower Cook Inlet in demand by no one other than the commercial purse seiners who profit off the low-value fish.
If the personal-use dipnet fishery and the sport harvest in the Kenai River were eliminated and the fish came back in average numbers, the commercial catch could likely be boosted to 4.2 million salmon worth $6.8 million based on 2020 prices. This amounts to $5,230 per permit holder.
And if the personal-us dipnet fishery and the sport harvest were eliminated and escapements – the number of salmon getting past commercial fishermen and into the rivers and streams to spawn – were reduced to what commercial fishermen think the appropriate number, one might be able to add another half-million fish to this number.
So let’ssay Fish and Game could get the commercial catch up to 5 million per year on average, a better than 50 percent increase over the 10-year average. One would then be looking at a value of about $8.1 million based on 2020 salmon prices.
That’s a big number, but divided between 1,300 permit holders, it works out to a little $6,231 per fishermen.
Anyone trying to live the year on that income is going to be in for a great deal of “economic distress.”
Inherent conflict
Salmon management, versus salmon harvest, fortunately isn’t about economic distress and shouldn’t be.
Salmon management is about conservation to ensure there are salmon around forever and, in Alaska’s case, to meet another state Constitutional mandate.
The conservation responsibility was given to Fish and Game managers, and it is the reason the commercial setnet fishery has been closed. The minimum goal for Chinook spawners in the Kenai River hasn’t been met for three years running; the return is lagging again this year; and managers have decided they can’t have Chinook, the big “kings” as Alaskans call, them getting killed in setnets whether the number dead is 100 or 1,000.
The setnetters claim the former number for big kings. The real number is unknown. There is no monitoring of setnet harvests, and it would be easy for setnetters to toss a dead king salmon back into the Inlet rather than report it as harvested.
To the setnetters, of course, the “maximum benefit” to the state is to allow them to catch more sockeye and forget about those Chinook.
As Bauman sees it in his court filings, “the entire season catch of large Kenai kings by those setnetters is less than 100, which is hardly noteworthy given the inaccurate ADF&G sonar program.”
Meanwhile, the bigger issue of “maximum benefit of the people” has never been seriously discussed by Alaska fishery regulators and is, in the 49th state, limited almost solely to discussions of the regulation of the oil industry, wherein there have regular battles over taxes, which fund a lot of public-sector jobs but can discourage private investment in oil development leading to a decrease in private-sector jobs.
Some have over the years suggested a similar, economic’s based management policy for salmon management that would determine where salmon provide the greatest value – be that in commercial, sport or personal-use fisheries – but the idea has gone nowhere.
Neither the Alaska Legislature; the Board of Fisheries, to which the Legislature delegated fishery management oversight; nor the Department of Fish and Game, to which the Board delegates much authority, has shown any real interest in trying to determine how to set salmon harvest for the “maximum benefit of the people”
And all the interest groups have differing views on who to define “maximum benefit.”
To the commercial fishermen, the maximum benefit is in the commercial harvest, though few Alaskans are commercial fishermen and most of the jobs provided by the fishery got to temporary workers who come for the summer and quickly leave.
To those who fish for sport, the maximum benefit is in the cultural experience and the tourism business, the latter having been shown to produce far more valuable per pound from a salmon than commercial fishing given that tourists are willing to pay ridiculous amounts of money on flights, food and lodging to come catch a few salmon in Alaska.
And to personal-use dipnetters and subsistence fishermen (the former having been subsistence fishermen before the state made them personal-use dipnetters to get rid of the harvest “priority” subsistence users enjoy over everyone else), the maximum benefit is in food security.
State fishery managers have, to their credit, largely ignored most of this fighting over “fair shares” for decades and, at the end of the day, stuck to the view that conservation comes first, and that has spawned the big problem staring setnetters in the face for decades.
Bycatch, bycatch, bycatch
They would be fishing today if they could catch sockeye without catching kings, but they can’t.
They might be fishing today if they’d at least made a good faith effort to show that they could catch sockeye while only rarely killing a king, but they haven’t done that either.
This is the bycatch problem. And for years, setnetters insisted it didn’t even exist.
Here was one of their journalistic mouthpieces writing in the Alaska Journal of Commerce only nine years ago:
Commercial fishermen that year caught, killed and sold almost 28,000 of the big, late-run Kenai kings, according to Fish and Game records. That is a harvest more than twice the size of the total return of kings last year or the year before that or the year before that.
When kings were booming like this, commercial fishermen had a good case for ignoring their bycatch problem and arguing they were entitled to a share of the harvest. The case became weaker and weaker as Chinook numbers declined, but commercial fishermen continued to argue they were entitled to their king salmon bycatch.
This is the reason the Board of Fisheries never simply made it illegal for them to sell kings as federal officials did in the trawl fisheries. Some setnetters did years ago see the bigger bycatch problem on the horizon.
But when a few of them suggested some ideas for how to minimize setnet bycatch of Chinook, they were ostracized, and when the state ordered setnetters to use shallower nets that kings could swim under while sockeye in the upper water column continued to be caught, setnetters objected to that, too.
Bauman now goes to great lengths to argue that the net depth “restriction is arbitrary and punitive in nature against the ESSN (East Side Set Net) set gillnet fishermen. No other commercial fishery in Alaska is subjected to such a restriction.”
All of this, he argues, happened only because the Kenai River Sportfishing Association funded a study that produced “a flawed report by…Canadians” indicating that shallower nets might well decrease Chinook bycatch by allowing kings to slip under the “curtains of death” sport-fishing interests have accused setnetters of hanging in the Inlet.
Instead of embracing shallower nets as a possible solution, or coming up with a better idea to offer as an alternative, setnetters fought it and arrived at the point where they are today:
On the beach, prevented from fishing because of bycatch, and once again in court spending more money on lawyers than they are making in the fishery.
They did, however, win a public relations battle this week when they managed to get Alaska public media to gaslight the Kenai River sport fishery, which was closed to fishing for kings back on July 17.
The closure is not due to restrictions linked to the sport fishery. It is due to a lack of king salmon, which have failed to meet their minimum spawning goal for three years running and are in danger of not meeting the goal again this year.
And 2019, the last year when the minimum goal was met, wasn’t exactly anything to write home about. The count that year was 1`6,957 – well above the minimum goal but still little more than half of the upper goal of 30,000.
Here it must be noted that there are no indications the setnetters are responsible for this decline. Chinook are generally struggling from Kodiak Island east and south all the way to Oregon.
Returns north of the Panhandle look to be struggling just as much, but the Canadians said they lacked enough data to make a definitive, scientific conclusion in areas further north.
The consensus of fisheries scientists is that poor ocean survival is at the heart of the problem, but what is driving that is undecided.
An over-abundance of pink salmon, which compete with Chinook for food, has been implicated as one possibility. Predation by marine mammals or sharks has been suggested as another.
Most of the kings there are believed to be from the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers of Alaska and from Russia, but some Chinook from points far to the south do range into the Bering Sea.
Some have tried the blame the coastwide decline in Chinook on trawl bycatch in the Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska, but the evidence to support that idea is weak.
Last year, NOAA reported a total bycatch of 32,480 Chinook in the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska trawl fisheries. Given that these Chinook come from dozens and dozens of rivers and tend to young fish that might not survive to spawn, federal scientists concluded the impact on any one river is tiny.
When residents of Western Alaska panicky about crashing Chinook populations in that part of the state in January petitioned NOAA to eliminate king salmon bycatch and cap chum salmon bycatch in the pollock trawl fishery, they were turned down.
The pollock trawl fishery was reported to have caught 13,783 Chinook in 2021 while hauling in about 3.5 billion pounds of pollock. At an average weight of about 1.5 pounds this amounts to about 2.3 billion pollock, putting the ratio of kings to pollock at one of the former for every 9,188 of the latter.
That works out to a ratio of one king for every 342 sockeye.
The data would, at this time, appear to indicate the fishery has a bycatch problem much bigger than that of the trawlers in the Bering Sea. And the setnetters want to continue to ignore it.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story had an error in the tabulation of the sockeye catch in the setnet fishery which resulted in a minor alteration in the ratio of sockeyes to kings in the harvest.
Categories: Commentary, News, Outdoors
Limited entry is such an absurd failure by Alaska. I know as a recent transplant from outside that I’m not allowed an opinion, but I was shocked by the recent tasting room legislation to find out that liquor licenses are held in similar quirky fashion up here.
Fascinating that the set netters resort to the same sort of approach that UCIDA does, attempting to insert the courts into the allocation process via uninformed judicial fiat rather than taking the results of the process, whatever that may be.
They lack creativity, as they are fighting the same war on the same grounds with the same weapons for 50 solid years. Imagine their impact should they choose another approach, one to instead grow the pie (fish farming) rather than engage in increasingly bitter fights for a shrinking pie. The drifters and ADG&G commfish have managed to divide and conquer sportfish, PU, subsistence, and the set netters from their real clients in Cook Inlet, UCIDA.
Perhaps its time for the set netters to join with the rest of the Cook Inlet user groups and attempt to actually SOLVE the problem by rolling back the statewide ban on fish farming. If they were RAS people, they wouldn’t be shut down. Would be fun working with them to make that happen. Cheers –
When I read the NOAA Chinook Salmon Incidental Catch I come up with 33,004 trawl caught kings in the Gulf and Bearing fisheries…the math they did for each area is wrong with one extra in the Bering and one less on the Gulf. Not that it matters much, the numbers from last year are much better than they have been for the last decade and a far cry from the 170,000+ caught in 2007, so there is improvement on the part of the trawl fleet. The trawl fleet is made up predominantly of out of State interests, so it is good that we do something to reign in their wasteful ways.
According to the 2021 UCI Commercial Salmon Season Summary the ESSN fishery harvested an estimated 208 that were large Kenai River late-run origin fish, or 16% of the 1,297 kings that were harvested by ESSN. The drift gillnet fishery harvested 215 Chinook salmon of all sizes and all stocks. The total 2021 harvest in the ESSN fisheries was 407,007 sockeye salmon, or 1 king for every 313 sockeye. The total 2021 harvest for UCI drift gillnet was approximately 851,901 sockeye salmon, or 1 king for every 3,962 kings. The season summary report doesn’t tell us how many of the drift kings were Kenai kings or what percentage would be considered large Kenai kings and count towards the escapement goal.
For the sake of argument, let’s assume all of those 215 drift caught kings were Kenai kings (a statistical improbability) add in the estimated 208 setnet caught kings and that would have put 423 additional large kings in the Kenai or a little less than 4% of the total for 2021. We don’t know what percentage of the 32,480 or 33,004 trawl caught kings were headed to the Kenai. Thanks to the genetic testing done on trawl caught kings we know that somewhere around 10-16% of trawl caught kings in the Gulf and Bearing are from the Northwest Gulf of Alaska, basically from Kodiak to Western PWS including Cook Inlet.
It will be interesting to see if the number of trawl bycatch kings continues to trend down. I’m guessing with less available kings to catch that it will, just like it will for the fishermen in CI who either won’t be allowed to fish or will be restricted further. If I had my druthers I’d want the ESSN fishery to take steps to limit their king catch rate so they could continue to fish, unfortunately the commercial fisheries in CI would rather fund lawyers and blame others than take meaningful steps to help conserve king salmon. If, as has been shown, using a shallower net catches fewer kings then all ESSN’ers should be using them so they can get more fishing time and the ability to catch reds. Instead they are proverbially cutting off their nose to spite their face.
I once walked up a stream leading into Thumb Bay on Adak that had so many Pinks that they were pushing fish sideways onto the rocky shore. Incredulous as it sounds, one pool actually had healthy fish vertical because the pool was so crowded. Not an eagle in sight, as the dump had sinful amounts of wasted food from the military and civilian mess halls. There was even a blind eagle that walked around amongst the plentiful bounty. The grounded eagle was in no danger from the island’s well-fed predators.
I remember rivers 40-50 feet wide in SE chock full of humpies, so many you could almost walk across their backs. You could literally grab them out of the river by hand, there had to be more fish than water. We had a creek in the backyard, maybe 6 feet wide at the widest point and pools 3 feet deep you could count the humpies by the hundreds every tide, every other year anyways. I have pictures somewhere.
Get rid of the nets and go back to traps
That would leave far less of a carbon footprint.
Excellent summary Craig. As we once again go back to the Alaska Board of Fisheries process the focus must be on developing and implementing much more selective gear for the set net fishery. That “Canadian” study the suit refers to was not flawed, in fact, it’s results provide one pathway forward.
What fun we could have at a state Constitutional Convention next year amending Article 8, Section 15 of the Alaska State Constitution – making food security for all Alaskans (regardless of where you live) as the highest preference among beneficial uses of fish.
There is no sense waiting any longer for the state legislators to take that action. The Alaska Legislature has shown us for decades that they are incapable of
fixing the 1972 limited entry into any fisher mess.
Bring it on.
What exactly is overescapement? Did it occur when there were no “user groups” competing for the resource and Mother Nature was the de facto manager of the resource? Somehow, the salmon survived and coexisted nicely until the “user groups” (humans) arrived and began the battle over “allocation”. In current discussions the River herself is left out, SHE ALONE is the most important shareholder, if she does not get a large enough share the resource dies, period. ADFG knows that their responsibility is to the RIVER FIRST, all other user groups are a distant second. Why is there a dwindling king return? Unfortunately we do not know but likely is NOT due to setnets, dipnets or sportfishing (which generally all existed during years of abundance). When will we spend the money to find the answer? In the meantime we must manage the resource as best we can, without regard to “user groups” competing interests and finger pointing. Great article Craig.
When I read the NOAA Chinook Salmon Incidental Catch I come up with 33,004 trawl caught kings in the Gulf and Bearing fisheries…the math they did for each area is wrong with one extra in the Bering and one less on the Gulf. Not that it matters much, the numbers from last year are much better than they have been for the last decade and a far cry from the 170,000+ caught in 2007, so there is improvement on the part of the trawl fleet. The trawl fleet is made up predominantly of out of State interests, so it is good that we do something to reign in their wasteful ways.
According to the 2021 UCI Commercial Salmon Season Summary the ESSN fishery harvested an estimated 208 that were large Kenai River late-run origin fish, or 16% of the 1,297 kings that were harvested by ESSN. The drift gillnet fishery harvested 215 Chinook salmon of all sizes and all stocks. The total 2021 harvest in the ESSN fisheries was 407,007 sockeye salmon, or 1 king for every 313 sockeye. The total 2021 harvest for UCI drift gillnet was approximately 851,901 sockeye salmon, or 1 king for every 3,962 kings. The season summary report doesn’t tell us how many of the drift kings were Kenai kings or what percentage would be considered large Kenai kings and count towards the escapement goal.
For the sake of argument, let’s assume all of those 215 drift caught kings were Kenai kings (a statistical improbability) add in the estimated 208 setnet caught kings and that would have put 423 additional large kings in the Kenai or a little less than 4% of the total for 2021. We don’t know what percentage of the 32,480 or 33,004 trawl caught kings were headed to the Kenai. Thanks to the genetic testing done on trawl caught kings we know that somewhere around 10-16% of trawl caught kings in the Gulf and Bearing are from the Northwest Gulf of Alaska, basically from Kodiak to Western PWS including Cook Inlet.
It will be interesting to see if the number of trawl bycatch kings continues to trend down. I’m guessing with less available kings to catch that it will, just like it will for the fishermen in CI who either won’t be allowed to fish or will be restricted further. If I had my druthers I’d want the ESSN fishery to take steps to limit their king catch rate so they could continue to fish, unfortunately the commercial fisheries in CI would rather fund lawyers and blame others than take meaningful steps to help conserve king salmon. If, as has been shown, using a shallower net catches fewer kings then all ESSN’ers should be using them so they can get more fishing time and the ability to catch reds. Instead they are proverbially cutting off their nose to spite their face.
Not sure why this showed up here, I must have hit the wrong button
Couple things. You need to correct for the apples and oranges if you’re going to compare trawl caught kings and Kenai kings. If you used the “big king” standard for the trawl catch, their take would probably fall to a few hundred fish if that.
But I’ll buy the idea that up to 10 percent of the trawl catch are of Cook Inlet origin and that maybe 70 percent of those fish (figuring the survival odds are pretty good for them once they are big enough to get caught in a trawl) might have made their way back toward the Inlet.
So there could be 2,300 or so fish split mainly between the Susitna and Kenai drainages headed east. So maybe another 1,000 to 1,200 Kenai fish go in the pipeline headed back to the Kenai River, but then there’s Kodaik in the way.
The 10-year average catch for the seiners there is 11,791 with a sockeye harvest at about 2.4 million; so they’re catching a king for about ever 200 sockeye, which is a higher rate of harvest than the ESSN. It doesn’t have to be that high.
When the state ordered non-retention in the western district’s last year to protect weak runs of Chinook to the Karluk and Ayakulik, the ratio fell to one for every 363 sockeye. Of course, this too needs to be corrected for the “big king” standard to compare to Kenai, making it easier to just use the total Kenai catch and ignore the big-fish issue.
Especially given that the 34-inch standard is arbitrary. Twenty-eight inches was tradionally used as “large spawner size,” and when I lived in Southeast and fished a lot with rod and reel, it was not unsual to catch 30-inch kings full of eggs.
It is interesitng that when you look at the data the trawlers actually fish cleaner – ie. taking a significanlty higher proportion of their target species to incidental or by-catches, call them whatever you want – than some of our salmon fisheries.
Who woulda thunk it.
And Kodiak, as the state genetics study showed, is doing business on pretty much everyone else’s fish: “The annual harvest of Kodiak-origin Chinook salmon was below 5 percet of the total harvest.” Fifty percent of them were from B.C.
Alaska is to Canada today what the offshore Japanese trawl fisheries once were to Alaska. If I was a Canadian, I’d be pissed. First you’ve got Chinook declines 65 percent less productive that in the past for whatever reason, and then you’ve got Alaska still fishing, or trying to, at “traditional” harvest rates on this reduced population of fish.
As far as I know the big king metric isn’t based on much of anything, yeah there are jack salmon but kings that are smaller than 34 inches aren’t all jacks. Most, if not all, statewide regulations that deal with measurements for Jack kings is a fish under 20 inches.
I hadn’t thought about the Kodiak intercept issue. It’s death by a thousand cuts, no doubt. Just in the oceans there are people, killer whales, seals, birds, sharks, and any other number of predators trying to catch and eat them. Add in the unknown variables of inconsistent and shared food sources, changes in water conditions, and whatever other day to day challenges they face and it’s a wonder so many make it back to spawn every year.
It makes sense that the trawl fleet fishes cleaner, they are out in the wide open ocean targeting a specific fish and they have set restrictions that would shut them down if they catch too many nontarget bycatch species. They also must pay out of their own pockets to process, store, and ship the nontarget bycatch. In other words they are incentivized to fish clean, these are factory ships that know how and where they can fish to catch clean. Whereas the CI gillnetters are a targeted terminal fishery on a mixed stock, the limits placed on setnetters is based upon how many fish are in the river not how many they catch (the way it is for trawlers) and they aren’t incentivized to catch fewer fish, in fact they are paid more per pound for a king than a sockeye.
I don’t know where I read it but the Canadian trawlers have a much better/cleaner fishery than we do, because they are forced to or they are shutdown since their bycatch limits are so much stricter than ours. we just don’t incentivize as much or as consistently as the Canadians. As far as Canadians being pissed, it makes sense if they are…maybe they will hold another ferry hostage?
Excellent summary of the issues.
It would be refreshing if the UCI permit holders and their commercial Organization would drop all pretense wanting fairness in allocations. What they really want and many Alaskans know it, is to get rid of our State fish, the King Salmon in the Cook Inlet. After all it is those pesky Kings that stand in the way of their “right” to catch more Sockeye. Secretly that’s what the gill net fleet really wants. But they are too cowardly to admit that it is their ultimate goal. And regrettably because of fish politics they may yet get their way.
Someday, maybe a good title to a book about the demise of the Cook inlet King Salmon could be “ The State Fish, a sequel to the “King of Fish” which chronicled the demise of the King in the Pacific Northwest.
A lifetime of sport, subsistence, and commercial fishing experience, plus close to a minor in fisheries management, equips me with enough knowledge to know I don’t know enough to know what deleterious effect big over escapement of other species has on survival of fertilized king eggs already resting in their redds. A rule of thumb is that a huge salmon run will have an unusually large head and tail on it. So what happens to king eggs laid previous to big, later arriving red numbers excavating their own spawning redds over top of king redds?
One of the men in our radio & marketing group brought his boat up the Kvichak and over the old portage road to Cook Inlet so he could work on it over the winter at his Ninilchik home. It was a year of huge escapement, far and away over the upper escapement parameter the “Cold Slimey’s” at Fin ‘n Feathers proclaimed healthy for the system. Just for a look-see at those creek clogging numbers, the man walked a ways along a small feeder stream. He reported that washing into every slow pool, the dug-up, decomposing eggs lay “a foot deep.”
God is probably the only one to know whether, in an effort to save kings by shutting down the red salmon fishery like they have on the Kasilof, which now has an obscene number of fish in river, with more coming, if reds digging up King redds have a bigger effect on the king egg deposit-survival numbers, than the small bycatch the setnetters with their Bay-depth (29 meshes deep) do on a few openers.
BTW, I have long thought it a travesty that Bay permits held by Bay villagers have dwindled, now owned by other Alaskans and those out in America. But, they did not LOSE them–they SOLD them. If someone is short sighted enough to sell their birthright, they have no one to blame but themselves. Too, too bad for the health of the region, but those who swapped their lifeway for a bowl of pottage did it to themselves.