Personal-use dipnetters swarming the mouth of the Kenai River/Craig Medred photo
Newest dipnetters can sell their fish
Dipnetting for Cook Inlet salmon, which usually doesn’t get underway until the opening of the Kasilof River tomorrow, jumped off to an earlier start last week, but with a twist.
The dipnetters went commercial.
They did not, however, turn out en masse as personal-use dipnetters do later this month and into July when sockeye salmon swarm both the Kasilof and Kenai rivers. How many commercial fishermen gave the newest fishery a shot is an unknown, given official state secrecy surrounding the individual catches of commercial fishermen.
But the Alaska Department of Fish and Game reported 38 sockeye caught and sold – a tiny, tiny fraction of what would be expected in a normal setnet opening. Then again, there aren’t many sockeye in the Inlet yet this year.
The reported commercial drift gillnet catch on the same day was but 482 sockeye, and somebody – or some somebodies (again state secrets make it impossible to tell how many people fished) – were burning up costly fuel to catch those salmon.
Where the new, commercial version of an Inlet dipnet fishery goes from here is anyone’s guess. Much depends on what the 735 holders of Cook Inlet commercial set gillnet permits decide to do.
The Alaska Board of Fisheries in March opened the door for any of them to go dipnetting up to three days per week when the use of gillnets is shut down to prevent the bycatch of a struggling run of Kenai River Chinook salmon (more on that below), and there is no real limit as to who these commercial permit holders can take along to join in the action.
They can invite into the boat any Alaska resident willing to put up $60 for a commercial fishing crew license, and it is conceivable some entrepreneurial sort might try to make a side business of running a dipnet charter.
Tourists – many of whom witness the activities in the Alaskan-only, personal-use dipnet fisheries and lament the fact they are legally prohibited from grabbing a net – would seem an even better market for this idea, but the state might have priced them out of the game.
A nonresident crew license costs $252. It’s hard to imagine someone wanting to pay the license fee plus a charter fee of $100 or more to go dipnetting, although the numbers might not pencil out all that bad.
Some math
Let’s say a commercial permit holder set up a $400 per day, license-included charter with a promise of 10 sockeye. That works out to $40 per fish. The average Inlet sockeye last year weighed 5.4 pounds.
At that weight, a dipnetter technically working for a commercial fishermen on a charter would be getting 10 salmon for about $7.41 per pound – cheaper than you’re ever likely to see the fish on sale in the Lower 48 – with a unique experience thrown in for free.
How much a commercial fishermen might be willing to gamble on an operation like this is hard to say. It really depends on how efficient someone can be in finding and then catching the fish.
But sockeye do travel in large schools, and the people running personal-use dipnet charters on the Copper River have already pioneered the art of what might be considered trolling with dipnets. Or would this be considered trawling, since it is pretty much the same thing trawlers do only with smaller nets?
The state limited commercial dippers to four, five-foot diameter nets per boat. Personal-use dipnetters aboard boats on the Kenai River have little trouble catching limits of 25 salmon or more (the individual limit is 25 with an additional 10 per each family member on the permit) when the fish are found in big schools in-river.
If it is possible to find similarly big schools of sockeye at sea in the Inlet, four people catching 40 of them to reach their individual charter quotas wouldn’t seem that difficult, and after that, they basically become free crew helping to put in the skiff as many additional sockeye as they can catch.
Free help usually sounds good to the business minded.
Still, as with any business that hasn’t been tried before, it’s all a big gamble and, in this case, the weather could screw things up at any time.
Will the risks prevent innovation? Maybe. But the great thing about American capitalism is that it allows entrepreneurial people to pursue seemingly crazy ideas that cease to become crazy when they are shown to work.
So how did we arrive at this particular craziness?
Bycatch, bycatch, bycatch
Chinook salmon bycatch in the East Side Set Net (ESSN) has been a long-standing problem even if some of the commercial fishermen in that fishery have long refused to recognize it as such. Some for decades clung to the belief that they had a right to harvest those big Chinook that Alaskans call kings because that was the way things had been done since territorial days.
And, of course, because there was money involved.
Pound for pound, kings are the most valuable salmon in the 49th state, and commercial fishermen – no matter how much some might try to spin the idea that commercial fishing is some fabled “lifestyle” – are in the business of killing fish for money.
A 10-pound or bigger king in their net is a nice payday. Kings averaged 12.9 pounds last year in the Inlet’s commercial fishery, according to Fish and Game data, with a value of $3.76 per pound. That made the average king worth about six times what the average sockeye was worth.
Now who wouldn’t rather catch fish worth $48 each than fish worth $8 dollars each?
Money helped ensure that for years, as kings returned to the Kenai River by the tens of thousands, ESSN fishermen clung to what they considered their “fair share” of the harvest, and thus made no effort to find ways to minimize their bycatch of Chinook while harvesting the far, far more plentiful sockeye.
Sockeye are the money fish in the Inlet. The preliminary value of the nearly 2 million caught last year was $16 million, according to Fish and Game data; that’s more than 300 times the value of the commercial catch of fewer than 1,100 kings.
There was a reason for this small catch of Chinook, however. Setnetters are usually responsible for the bulk of it, and they were largely shut down last year because of the bycatch problem.
The bycatch hit the fan, so to speak, several years ago as king returns to the Kenai plummeted due to poor survival of the fish in the ocean. Suddenly, there weren’t enough fish returning to meet spawning goals let alone any to provide for a harvest to be shared between commercial interests, sport fishermen and personal-use dipnetters.
The Kenai has now for four years running failed to meet its so-called “escapement goal,” which is defined as the number of fish escaping harvest and entering the river to spawn. It did come close last year with an in-river sonar counting just shy of 14,000 fish bigger than 34 inches in length. This marked a significant improvement from the just under 11,500 of those fish in 2020.
But to get to the bigger number, state fisheries biologists had to shut down king salmon fisheries.
The sport fishery was closed. Personal-use dipnetters were told that if perchance a king ended up in their net they were to immediately roll it back into the water unharmed. Setnetters, however, didn’t have any such catch-and-release option because so many of the kings caught in gillnets die.
So the state shut the setnet fishery to save the salmon. First in 2022 and then again in 2023. The setnetters went to court, as they have been wont to do for years, to claim this was unfair.
Their attorney, Carl Bauman, argued that the state’s so-called “limited entry law” – which came to pass after Alaska voters in 1972 approved an amendment to the Alaska Constitution to allow the state to limit the number of commercial salmon fishing permits issued in Alaska, gave commercial fishermen an ownership interest in the fish.
Some commercial fishermen were at that time being driven to near madness by the sight of a lower Kenai River full of dipnetters happily hauling in and beating to death sockeye while setnetters were stuck on the beach.
There was nothing stopping them – or at least nothing stop the the Alaska residents among them – from picking up a free permit from Fish and Game and joining the masses on the river or along its banks, but when you’re in the business of catching fish for money rather than to provide food for your table, being limited to a catch of 25 sockeye – or maybe 125, if you have a huge family – might seem like a waste of time.
The courts sided with the state, and the setnetters lost their case. But the state tried to fix the problem by giving commercial salmon fishermen their very own dipnet fishery sans any bag limit other than how many fish they can catch in a 12-hour fishery opening.
Along with this, however, came the restriction that they, like the rest of the dipnetting public, must release unharmed any king salmon that happens to get into the net.
What happens next, as was noted at the top of this story, is anyone’s guess.
Dipnetters didn’t go commercial, commercials were restricted to dipnets. It’s all verbage. We do have a lot of documentation of personal use Disney fish being sold….. thx
The Cook Inlet set net fishery did not deplete the Kenai Chinook for over 80 years until the 80’s, when the decline began.
What changed in the 80’s?
1) The explosion of trophy sport fishing on the Kenai. Targeting the largest.
2) The explosion of trawling due to the implementation of 200 mile limit.
Between 1980 and 1991, we simply don’t know how many Chinook the trawlers caught as bycatch. It was not reported.
Even the reported numbers are reasonably suspect due to pressure to keep “reported” bycatch numbers low. Any real scientist, would test the quality of their bycatch data by interviewing retired crew members of trawlers from 1980 until now to ensure there was not systematic under-reporting taking place.
The raping of the pollock resource was at its worst between 1980 and 1995. The Shelikof Strait fishery for roe pollock, was decimated by 1995, and was closed. The so called Donut Hole Aleutians fishery was likewise decimated, and is now closed. The reason this is important is not simply because of the Chinook bycatch reported (and not reported).
Here is the reason the decline in pollock between 1980 and now, is so important. It mirrors the decline in Chinook in both numbers and the decreasing size of Chinook which leaves less eggs per female on the spawning grounds.
The reason Chinook are caught with pollock is simple. Pollock are a common food source for Chinook.
Any animal or fish scientist worth their salt would immediately investigate the food supply when fish or animals mysteriously get smaller. If a farmer bales the hay in a field and then lets his cows graze the mowed field, the cows don’t grow well, because he removed the food(hay) from the field before letting the cows graze.
By my cocktail napkin calculation, the trawl industry removed approximately 30,000,000,000 lbs. of Chinook food(pollock) from the ocean between 1980 and 1995.
No good scientist would suggest that removing 30 billion pounds of Chinook food would have ZERO impact on Chinooks.
In the pursuit of the cause of this Chinook catastrophe, has this been studied. Nope. Trawlers don’t want it studied.
The goal here is to simply blame someone else. Usually the weakest politically(Alaska Natives) and then move on. The problem with this is that the problem then gets worse.
What we are looking for is the proximate cause of this ecological disaster. The single thing that caused this mess, so that we can alleviate the cause. Anything less is guaranteed failure.
I have figured out the proximate cause that is causing so much misery with Native Alaskans, sports fishermen, crab fishermen, and halibut fishermen.
The cause of all this misery are Alaskan politicians with their hand out-stretched to receive a fist full of cash from the trawl industry.
When the Chinook become extinct, the trawl industry will point to their zero bycatch and tell us how clean they now fish.
They are peeing in your pocket and whispering in your ear, that it is raining.
That’s a very nice red herring you have there, Doug. You should start your own misinformation website.
First off, correlations are not caustion, although they might point to the latter. Along those lines, there might be a better case to be made that Chinook have been losing because of the MSY management of pollock at too high a sustainable level since the U.S. took over the 200-mile zone given the pollock are both competitors with Chinook in the hunt for food and prey for Chinook.
The young of both species dine on euphasids and copepods: https://today.oregonstate.edu/archives/2006/feb/cold-water-copepod-species-may-be-key-juvenile-salmon-survival-ocean
Euphasids and copepods have been in such short supply in the northern Gulf of Alaska in recent years that they have been blamed for the poor survival of young pollock: https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/low-fat-diet-possible-culprit-poor-survival-young-pollock-born-2013
And there have also been issues in the Bering Sea. It could be the now large biomass of pollock has grazed these species down to the detriment of Chinook. It could be Chinook had it better when the foreign fleets were fishing the hell out of pollock in U.S. waters prior to the Magnuson-Stevens Act in 1977.
According to NOAA, foreign “catches increased rapidly during the late 1960s and reached a peak in 1970-75 when catches ranged from 1.3 to 1.9
million t annually (Fig. 1.1). Following a peak catch of 1.9 million t in 1972, catches were reduced through bilateral agreements with Japan and the
USSR.” https://apps-afsc.fisheries.noaa.gov/refm/docs/Historic_Assess/bsaiwp98.pdf
U.S. commercial harvests of Chinook averaged 619,000 in the 1970s with healthy catches of subsistence Chinook in the Yukon and Kuskokwim not in that number. The Yukon harvest is now gone and the Kusko harvest a fraction of what it was. And the commercial Chinook harvest is down to less than half of what it was in the 1970s.
Of course, there was one other big change between the 1960s and now that you failed to mention. The North Pacific was flooded with pink salmon and guess what?
“In the late 1990s, Japanese researchers noticed an intriguing pattern while studying in the Bering Sea just north of the Aleutians. During every odd-numbered year, populations of tiny ocean creatures called copepods were very low. The year after, their numbers were high.
“Pink salmon eat copepods. And, the Japanese scientists noted, pink salmon are most abundant in odd calendar years. The Japanese scientists postulated that pinks, which have exploded in numbers since the early 1990s, had gobbled up many of the copepods.” https://www.gi.alaska.edu/alaska-science-forum/pink-salmon-too-much-good-thing
But I’m confident you’re smarter than any of the scientists, so clearly your simple theory based on big, bad trawlers is the answer.
As I’ve said to others here, if you want to be mad at the trawlers because Alaska (other than the Western Alaska villages invovled in the Community Development Quota (CDQ) program – https://coastalvillages.org/what-is-cdq/ – get so little out of the trawl fisheries, be mad. I am.
And I’m sorry, deeply sorry, the Yukon Chinook crash killed your processing business on the Yukon. I found the attempt to make Yukon Gold processing a mainstay for the Kaltag economy one of the most commendable activities out that way. Unfortunately, no matter what you want to believe, the evidence doesn’t support the idea that the trawl fleet killed your business.
So let’s try to stick to science and facts and ignore vendettas.
It’s bad enough that Alaska’s salmon fisheries are more valuable to the Pacific Northwest than to Alaska, but in the big picture the value of the pollock fisheries to Seattle, rather then Alaska, dwarfs this. So be mad about that, but save the wild conspiracy theories.
No one wants to save the kings. The issue is who gets to kill the kings. Meanwhile, the kings are far fewer and smaller. We messed it up.
Certainly a novel way to commercial fish. I’d buy a seven day $30 commercial resident license fee and pay a commercial fisherman with a boat $150 for a day of dipnetting to get 25 fish. I’d be OK with 10 at that rate, that’s a better deal than you can get from the commercial charters for salmon and halibut.
It’s kind of odd that there have been set nets and drift nets in the inlet for what? Maybe 100 years or so, give or take. When I moved to soldotna in 1995 the river was a highway with charter boats raping the river of kings on their spawning beds….. I know the trawling fleet takes huge amounts of kings as bycatch but they are not restricted??? Please stop blaming the set nets, if you kill the adults as they’re on the spawning beds guess what? No little fishes. Daaa
Good god man. What are you smoking?
1.) The trawl fleet DOES NOT take huge amounts kings, and they are restricted.
2.) The progeny of the 1995 fish – no matter what was happening on the river then – are long gone as is the “raping” if there ever was any.
3.) Nobody is “blaming” set nets. They are gear. Blaming the set nets would be like blaming hooks or seines or spears or dynamite or traps or any of the other means humans have used to kill fish over the years.
The problem isn’t the set nets. The problem is the set netters who have long refused to recognize their king salmon bycatch as a problem they needed to fix. And now they’re paying the price.
The only thing you got right, at least partially, was “no little fishes. Daaa.”
A part of that problem, possibly the smallest part, might be that the Kenai isn’t meeting escapement goals even with all king harvests – set net, sport fish, personal-use dipnet – legally shut down. The bigger part of the problem might be commercial fishermen who keep encouraging ADF&G to flood the ocean with humpies and finance hatcheries to add to the humpacolypse.
I’d suggest a good look in the mirror from the sounds of this comment.
Craig, what percent of the Kenai large king total run did the set net fleet catch in 2019? That was a year of restriction but not the draconian levels of restriction of recent years. Once you find that percent ask yourself is that significant enough to harm the king poulation.
The problem is that the answer depends on your definition of “harm.” Some peope think failing to meet the minimum escapement goal is harmful. Some, especially those with a financial interest in killing fish, think it’s fine to come in under the goal. Plenty of North American salmon runs ended up depressed because escapement goals weren’t met.
The better question here is why haven’t setnetters tried to solve the bycatch problem? If that had happened, they’d have nets in the water now.
Your incorrect and biased claim that it was the sports fishers that have caused the huge decline of Chinook is representative of the Set net fleet’s denials that have been heard year after year as the numbers decline.
How you can continue to be so obtuse is mind boggling.
It’s anyone’s guess as to how many Chinook have been killed and never reported by the set net permit holders. The numbers of drop outs, ( likely a huge number), fish hidden under a tarp, fish actually reported are likely staggeringly high. But the set net clan has done everything in its power to blame the low abundance on anything other than themselves.
You all have had the easiest and most productive farm Operation going. You have not had to seed, fertilize, water, use chemicals to stop Infestation, etc. All
You have had to do is harvest. You
Have resisted measures to reduce Chinook harvest, opposed efforts to save Chinook, and unconsciously denied your role in the reduction of Chinook, the State Fish.
Your efforts now find you reduced to using a dip net instead of a set net. A well deserved restriction. The real
Answer is the total elimination of the UCI set net fishery. When that happens look in the mirror to see who caused that to happen.
In the sport fishery, if a king salmon is released, it can not come out of the water. Any rules for the commercial dip net fishery to do the same?
“……..Let’s say a commercial permit holder set up a $400 per day, license-included charter with a promise of 10 sockeye. That works out to $40 per fish. The average Inlet sockeye last year weighed 5.4 pounds. At that weight, a dipnetter technically working for a commercial fishermen on a charter would be getting 10 salmon for about $7.41 per pound ………”
I got quotes from two northern district catcher/sellers working out of the Anchorage small boat harbor early last month. One wanted $25 per fish (whole) at the launch. The other wanted $9/lb fileted at their facility in Palmer (I live near Palmer). No mud, no crowds, no aggressive a-holes, little fuel costs, little effort. Thanks to ADFG/BOF mismanagement, I (unfortunately) can’t catch them myself for cheaper/easier like in times past.