The judges who will decide the fate of Kenai River king salmon and much more/ADF&G photo

Alaska’s Kenai kings are on the chopping block

Meeting now in Anchorage, the Alaska Board of Fisheries looks primed to lead the 49th state farther down the wrong road of fisheries management, a road that has resulted in the state’s salmon resources becoming less and less and less valuable to Alaska for years.

This story could be about the commercial fishermen trooping before the Board over the weekend to complain that they’re not getting what they picture in their minds as their fair share of the salmon, and of the noncommercial fishermen pleading to save the fabled king salmon of the Kenai River, which once attracted anglers from around the world looking to catch the biggest of the big Pacific salmon.

But that story has been reported too many times already and nothing really ever changes.

Listening to commercial fishermen lobbying the Board to now sacrifice Kenai River king salmon at a time when the Lower 48-based Wild Fish Conservancy is asking the federal government to put the species on the endangered species list is like a bad flashback to 40-year-old arguments about Cook Inlet harvests of sockeye salmon and the then-bycatch of the big salmon much of the world knows as Chinook.

Back in the proverbial good old days,  the fish didn’t matter so much. The argument was all about everyone getting that “fair share,” whatever that might be, because there were a lot of fish.

Chinook returns ranged from more than 50,000 to more than 106,000 per year from 1986 to 1990, according to Alaska Department of Fish and Game estimates. The late-run of Chinook – the biggest of two distinct runs of kings to the river and the main one harvested in the commercial fisheries – numbered 79,837 fish in 1986 before falling to 39,656 in 1990.

The latter looks like a big number compared to today. The count was down to 13,922 last year with set gillnet fisheries and sport fisheries both shutdown to try to meet the minimum spawning goal of 15,000. It wasn’t met. But, hey, there was good news.

The in-river return in 2023 was the best in four years, and it has been creeping slowly upward from the tally of but 11,499 of the big fish in 2020. Still, the late run is now smaller than the early run was in the late 1980s, and the early run is so small some people seem to have forgotten it exists.

Commercial fishermen will argue that the number of fish being counted is biased by a shift in the counting method to track only “big kings” in the Kenai, but that ignores the reality that in the 1980s most Kenai Chinook were “big kings.”

Once they were so common that the state had to make a special category for “Trophy Fish Certificates” for king salmon from the Kenai because the Sport Fish Division was getting swarmed with applications for such certificates. The qualifying level for all Alaska waters except the Kenai stayed at 50 pounds.

The Kenai limit was raised to 75 pounds. The world record Chinook, a fish of 97 pounds, 4 ounces – was pulled from the river in 1985. International Game Fish Association records for line-class Chinook were in the 20th century dominated by Kenai Chinook and some of those records remain in the “book along with the late Les Anderson’s “all-tackle” world record.

Michael Fenton is credited with a 67-pound, 4-ounce catch on 12-pound-test line in 1986 and Jerry Downey is in the book with a 77-pound, 8-ounce catch on 16-pound-test line in 1985.

Serious anglers were flocking to the Kenai from around the world in those years to try to catch a record-size king. That ended a long time ago. For a long time now, the rod-and-reel fishery has been closed more than it has been open, and if anyone hooks a Chinook even approaching “trophy size” it is a big, big deal.

But enough about the demise of once world-famous Kenai kings. Most people are aware of their steadily falling numbers and the steady decline, in general, of all North Pacific Chinook. From the Yukon River in the north to the Columbia River in the south, their numbers just keep dropping while the fish themselves keep shrinking in size.

For Alaska, however, there is an issue here of even more concern than the fall of the kings. And that issue is the economic mismanagement of what should be one of the state’s most valuable resources.

Shameful resource management

The entire Alaska commercial salmon harvest last year had a value to commercial fishermen of less than 10 days’ worth of Prudhoe Bay oil.

The $398.6 million those fishermen were paid to kill 230.2 million salmon equaled less than $1.75 per fish. A 12-hour parking pass for an angler visiting the ever-popular Russian River just to fish for sockeye salmon last year cost eight times more – $14 – than the average commercially caught Alaska salmon was worth.

And, as you read this, the Alaska Board of Fisheries is once again debating how to alter its “Upper Cook Inlet Salmon Management Plan” to ensure that commercial fishing remains a priority in the Inlet from late-June into August.

This is nuts. This amounts to nothing but devaluing an Alaska resource to subsidize a comparative handful of people who hold limited entry permits entitling them to commercially harvest salmon.

This is 20th Century thinking in a 21st Century world. Someone should rip the smartphones out of the hands of Board members and their staff and find them some antiquated IBM Selectrics with which to help them in their efforts to write the words to amend the holy grail of 1980.

It was that year that the Board wrote the management plan that dictates “the commercial fishing industry in Cook Inlet is a valuable long-term asset of this state and must be protected, while recognizing the legitimate claims of the non-commercial user.”

Protecting the commercial fishery was then a worthy idea. But all these years later, in a radically different world, that 20th-century tail is now wagging a 21st-century dog.

Times change and the value of assets change with them.

A brick-size Motorola DynaTAC cell phone was worth $3,995 in 1984. Today, they’ve all been thrown away except for those being sold on Ebay as collector’s items at a fraction of the cost. They make great paperweights for anyone still into paper.

The salmon returning to Cook Inlet are a still more valuable asset than those phones, but they are being devalued by Fish Boards that refuse to recognize that the Inlet’s commercial fishing industry is, sadly, no longer a “valuable long-term asset of this state.”

The fish, yes. The commercial fishery, no.

The global, market takeover by farmed salmon – farmers now produce about 80 percent of the salmon people eat – has screwed Alaska’s commercial salmon fishing industry. And the state is now at a point where everyone but a handful of commercial fishermen loses when a decision is made to protect a commercial fishery when there are more valuable fisheries in which to invest the fish.

Here is the reality: Alaska is at a point where the statewide value of a sockeye caught by a commercial fisherman last summer averaged 64 cents per pound, according to Alaska Department of Fish and Game numbers.

Yes, the value was dragged down by the record low prices paid in Bristol Bay, a sockeye fishery so big the state’s other sockeye fisheries look insignificant, but the peak average for a sockeye from any other fishing district in the state was only $1.82 per pound, and that was in Prince William Sound.

Most of those fish are sold as famous “Copper River” red salmon even if a lot of them aren’t caught off the mouth of that big glacial river and thus aren’t really Copper River salmon. Still, the Copper River label helps boost the price of sockeye and king salmon from the Sound.

Despite that, last year’s Sound reds were worth less than the average $2.88 per pound a Bay sockeye brought in 1988. And that is $2.88 in 1988 dollars which ignores what inflation has done to the dollar in the past 36 years.

If you run that $2.88 through the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI Inflation Calculator to get an apples-to-apples comparison of value, it estimates that a 1988 sockeye would today be worth $7.46 per pound.

So, what we have here is state management that over the last 36 years has been able to manage away 60 percent of the value of the state’s most valuable salmon in part because the members of the state Board of Fish have had their heads up in place where they can’t see that the world has changed.

Granted, there isn’t much the state can do about this in the Bay. The Bay is far from anywhere and the sockeye there come back in such great numbers that commercial nets are really the only way to harvest them.

But for the Board to be trapped in this commercial-centric view of salmon harvests everywhere in the state can only be explained by incompetence, stupidity, political cowardice, bribery or some combination of these things.

Tear it up

The Cook Inlet Management Plan should have been torn up years ago and rewritten to reflect the true value of the Inlet’s salmon – which is now tied to the state’s booming tourism industry – and the commercial fishery should have been assigned a new but still important role in mopping up the millions of salmon surplus to what the non-commercial fisheries can harvest.

Instead of doing this, however, Board after Board has Board has through the decades treated that 1980 management plan as if it comprised the 10 Commandments of fishery management dragged down from Little Mount Susitna by an Alaska Moses.

No one has kept track of the time, energy and most of all the money spent trying to tweak this and jigger that to try shape the plan to satisfy competing, political interests while adhering to this idea that the “commercial fishery must be protected” while that fishery, like all of Alaska’s commercial fisheries, was being crushed by fundamental, evolutionary changes in the global salmon market.

Here’s the new reality:

Mowi – a Bergen, Norway-based company with salmon farms in Norway, Scotland, Canada, Chile, Ireland and the Faroe Islands – now produces 475,000 tonnes of salmon per year and has announced expectations of reaching the 500,000 tonnes mark this year.

These are not smallish pink salmon, either. They are big, fat, tasty looking Atlantic salmon, which produce attractive filets which are the now most-desired product in the global salmon market.

Alaska last year recorded the fourth largest, all-species harvest of salmon in state and territorial history. It amounted to 417,187 tonnes of which two-thirds were low-value pink salmon primarily destined for cans, pouches and fish meal from which to make dog food or fertilizer or maybe feed for farmed shrimp, America’s most desired seafood.

Canned salmon, even if it comes in a modern-day pouch, is the bastard stepchild of a U.S. “tinned fish” market dominated by tuna. Canned tuna ranks third on the list of favorite American seafood. Americans are reported to eat almost two pounds of canned tuna per person on average every year. 

Canned salmon doesn’t even make the top-10 list of favorite American seafoods which ends with “clams” at a consumption rate of about a quarter pound per year. Tilapia is third on the list. Pangasuis, which some reading this story might not recognize, is sixth.

Pangasuis is a medium-large to very-large, shark catfish native to freshwater in South and Southeast Asia that generates some online debate about whether it is even safe to eat. The European Parliament says the fish raises health concerns given that “it is mainly fished in the Mekong, one of the world’s most polluted rivers, where it is exposed to highly toxic micro-organisms and discharges containing heavy metals, plastics and pesticide residues, which is particularly alarming.

“Another cause for concern is the veterinary use on fish farms of pharmacological substances that are banned in the European Union. Studies and research have shown that this fish may therefore be dangerous, especially because of high mercury concentrations, which would make it totally unsuitable for children. Several large retail chains in Italy and in Europe have already banned the sale.”

Despite this, Americans consumed only slightly less of this fish than they did Alaska pollock, which features in the McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish, and more of it than of cod, crab, catfish and clams at the bottom of the list of popular American seafoods.

The U.S. market doesn’t seem to care all that much about health warnings, a fact that should be given some serious thought by those who still foolishly believe Alaska can alter market dynamics by trying to promote the idea of “farmed salmon bad” and “wild-caught salmon good.”

Americans appear to judge what is good food and what is bad food largely on how the food tastes – not its health properties – and a significant number of them now think farmed salmon tastes better than wild-caught, some of which isn’t all that wild given Alaksa’s massive ocean-farming program.

This situation isn’t going to change. The world is now well past the point that Alaska could influence the market. The volumes of farmed salmon are just going to keep going up which will drive Alaska’s market share ever farther down.

Alaska commercial fishermen, if they were smart, would already be focused on forming smallish cooperatives to carefully handle and sell fish in niche markets in the way fine wines are sold, but the salmon fishing business in Alaska remains dominated by major processors set up to deal in huge volumes of low-priced fish.

Nearly all these processors are significantly invested in salmon farming, too, which guarantees they’re not going to aid any campaign designed to promote wild-caught as better than farmed.

All of this has pushed the real value of a 21st century Alaska salmon toward the tourism market. Most people are willing to spend way more money to come to Alaska to try to catch themselves a salmon than they would ever spend on Alaska salmon at the supermarket.

That last line bears repeating: Most Americans – those people we Alaskans like to call “Outsiders” – are willing to spend way more money to try to catch an Alaska salmon than to buy one in the supermarket.

Accepting reality

Some Alaskans, of course, don’t like this. Every summer there is whining about the “coolers full of salmon”  spotted rolling through the Ted Stevens International Airport in Anchorage.

Apparently, some Alaskans are jealous nonresident anglers are better at catching salmon than they are, or they are foolish enough to believe commercial fisherman propaganda that makes a big deal of out these coolers while the commercial fishing industry is shipping salmon out of the state unseen by the tote load.

The cooler whine has reached the point where some people on Prince of Wales Island at the very southern end of the Alaska Panhandle now want to further restrict who qualifies for a resident Alaska fishing license in the belief that some part-time residents are getting away with robbery by spending too little time in the state and spending too little money in Alaska before heading south with coolers full of fish.

This idea, ironically, is being pushed by a big-game guide who for years came north to make money off killing Alaska wildlife because the U.S. Constitution makes it impossible to restrict guide jobs to Alaska residents. Guiding, like commercial fishing, is considered a business and the interstate commerce clause stops the states from discriminating between resident and non-resident businesses.

The guide has now moved to Prince of Wales Island and adopted the idea that residents are good and nonresidents are bad when it would be better if he was still thinking like a big-game guide. Their business is boosted by a state law requiring big-game hunters hire guides in order to hunt brown/grizzly bear, sheep or mountain goats because it is too “dangerous” for nonresidents to hunt them without supervision.

A similar “danger” argument could be made for requiring nonresident anglers to be accompanied by a guide on many Alaska rivers, most notably the aforementioned Russian and the upper Kenai River where anglers in the summer encounter brown-grizzly bears on an almost daily basis.

Angler Dan Bigley was the victim of one of the most gruesome grizzly bear attacks in Alaska history on the Russian River in 2003 when it was far less common to see a grizzly there than it is now.

It wouldn’t seem unreasonable to require nonresident anglers on the Russian be accompanied by a guide to keep them safe, and such a requirement would be just one more way for the state to increase the economic value of its salmon without pushing them into the commercial fish supply-chain at rock bottom prices.

Maybe there should even be a law stipulating that Alaska salmon can only be shipped out of state in airline-size coolers. This might help subsidize a good-size cooler manufacturing plant in the 49th state given the size of the commercial salmon catch.

The non-commercial, all-species, rod and reel catch of salmon in the 49th state ranged from 1.1 million to 1.8 million per year for the past decade, according to Alaska Fish and Game data. If you assume the last season matched the highest of those catches, the total rod and reel harvest for 2023 – residents and nonresidents combined – would have accounted for 0.7 percent of the statewide harvest of salmon.

It’s hard to determine how many salmon were harvested by nonresident commercial fishermen, but that number is certain to exceed by orders of magnitude the rod-and-reel catch of residents and nonresidents plus any salmon caught in the state’s personal-use dipnet fisheries.

And this sort of harvest dominance by nonresident and resident commercial fishermen is going to remain the norm in most of Alaska far into the foreseeable future because in most of Alaska there are far more salmon than people available to catch them.

Cook Inlet is an exception. It has become the epicenter for the state’s rod-and-reel and personal-use fisheries.

The Fish Board needs to recognize this and stop trying to pound new square pegs into the old round holes of its aged Cook Inlet Management Plan in an effort to abide by the idea the Cook Inlet commercial fishery should be maintained as some sort of ode to the old days and the Alaska economy be damned.

Board members need to step up and accept that they are supposed to be representatives for all Alaskans and all Alaska, as the late-Rep. Don Young used to put it, instead of representatives for a a comparative handful of commercial fishermen.

It’s long past time to write an entirely new Upper Cook Inlet Management Plan that recognizes the world as it is today and prioritizes putting salmon into the fisheries that now bring the 49th state the greatest economic bang while recognizing, whether some sport fishermen like it or not, some sort of commercial fishery will be needed the Inlet for a long, long time to come because anglers and dipnetters lack the harvest capacity to capture all the surplus salmon the state is blessed to see return each year.

Sadly, the odds of an Alaska Fish Board doing this appear extremely low because no one in power seems to give a shit about the economic loss to the state and its people. But maybe this particular Board of Fisheries can manage the state into a position where the federal government actually does put Alaska Chinook salmon on the endangered species list, which would truly make things interesting.