Apparently unaware of why the Alaska Boards of Fisheries and Game were created and clueless as to the biological significance of the commercial salmon fishery in Upper Cook Inlet, Rep. Sarah Vance, R-Homer, is wading full-bore into the never-ending, Cook Inlet fish war.

She earlier this month sent the Fish Board a letter “demanding” it “clarify its stance “on the future of our drifter and setnet fisheries in Cook Inlet” and suggesting the board is threatening “the way of life” of “the people of Homer, Kenai, Kasilof, Ninilchik, Voznesenka, and beyond,” as reported in the Homer News.

Where does one even begin to unpack this nonsense?

In the first place, Vance has no more right to “demand” anything from the Fish Board than any other Alaskan, given that the very reason the Board was set up was to try to avoid the sort of political tampering in which Vance now wants to engage.

On top of that, one would hope that a politician undertaking this sort of grandstanding would at least know enough about the Upper Cook Inlet sockeye salmon fishery, which is what has Vance up in arms here, to know it is not going any time soon in for one simple reason: “harvest capacity.”

But we’ll get into that later.

Let’s first deal with Vance’s claim that “the people of Homer, Kenai, Kasilof, Ninilchik, Voznesenka, and beyond have a right to hear, in no uncertain terms, that their way of life is not being targeted for extinction.”

Vance might believe this, but the economic picture painted by the Kenai Peninsula Borough indicates that the way of life for 93 percent of the residents of the region wouldn’t change even if all commercial fishing ended.

This would include not only the salmon fisheries in the Upper Inlet, which is what Vance’s tirade is about, but the salmon fisheries in Lower Cook Inlet, the salmon fisheries on the outer Kenai Coast, and various bottomfish fisheries, such as those for halibut, in the Inlet and around the coast to Seward.

All of these fisheries are part of the Peninsula “seafood industry” that, according to the January 2025 Kenai Peninsula Update published by the borough, accounts for 7 percent of Kenai employment.

The big players

Cuts in governments jobs on the Peninsula – given President Donald Trump’s attempt to “drain the swamp” of federal government employees and state of Alaska belt tightening due to falling revenues – are arguably more of a threat to the Kenai way of life than the loss of all fisheries, only a portion of which are involved in Vance’s wild claim.

Government jobs are reported to account for 18 percent of employment in the region. Eliminating even 40 percent of them would have a bigger impact on the Kenai way of life than eliminating the entire seafood industry – something no one has suggested doing.

The visitor and transportation industries (why they are lumped together is unclear) account for another 17 percent of the economy, way more than the entire seafood industry, and some of what the Fish Board has done, much to Vance’s chagrin, has been done to try to protect or help rebuild those industries.

Eliminating 45 percent of these jobs would also have a greater impact on the Kenai way of life than, again, the elimination of the entire seafood industry.

When talking commercial fishing in the Upper Inlet, Vance isn’t talking about eliminating the way of life for “the people,” she’s talking about a possible threat to the way of life of a tiny minority of people.

It would be sad to see their way of life disappear, but the ways of life of tens of thousands of journalists – people who, trust me, lived their work most every day all year long – have been eliminated in recent years, and these individuals seem to have survived.

The world changes; you adapt or you die.

Those journalists were victims of economic evolution, and if one looks toward the future, the fate that befell them probably awaits most commercial fishermen in Alaska as well. The market hunters who once paralleled commercial fishermen in supplying Americans with meat to go along with their fish were put out of business 125 years ago. 

With the world now increasingly and steadily turning to farmed fish, commercial fishermen – or at least commercial salmon fishermen – could be largely gone in 50 or 100 years.  But they’re not going away anytime soon because of the aforementioned “harvest capacity.”

Fishery basics

It is here that a biological reality and the favorite word of Cook Inlet commercial fishermen – “over-escapement” – comes into play.

Over-escapement is a self-correcting, natural problem in undisturbed salmon runs. If salmon returns become too large, there is increased competition for spawning space and, in the case of salmon species such as sockeye, increased competition between fry and smolt for food in rivers and freshwater lakes.

This competition can become great enough to force a decline in productivity, which can, in turn, cause wide swings in the size of salmon returns from year to year. The whole idea behind fisheries management is that managers can reduce the size of these annual variations.

On the Kenai in particular, the big debate that has raged for decades now is where the bar should be set for defining over-escapement of sockeye into Kenai River, the state’s most fought over salmon fishery, because that big, gray, glacial river is the tail that shakes the entire dog of salmon fisheries in the Upper Inlet.

The greater the number of sockeye salmon returning to the Kenai, the more the Upper Inlet’s commercial gillnet fisheries must catch to hold the return down. But the more these commercial fisheries operate in the Inlet, the more non-Kenai sockeye and other non-Kenai salmon they intercept with consequences for salmon streams along Turnagain Arm, in the Susitna River drainage, in the Yentna River drainage, in the Matanuska River drainage, and along the west shore of Cook Inlet.

Some anglers and personal-use, dipnet fishermen see this as an argument for shutting down the entire commercial salmon fishery, but that’s not in their own best interest (some of these people are as ignorant as Vance when it comes to fisheries management) over the long term because it would lead to over-escapement and and the destabilization of Kenai sockeye returns.

A little science

The science driving this management is imprecise, but it does point to a general set point for sockeye numbers in the Kenai River. At this time, the Fish Board in consultation with scientists from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game has set a goal of limiting to 1.1 million to 1.4 million the number of sockeye allowed to escape commercial fisheries and enter the river every year.

The Board also set a “sustainable escapement goal (SEG)” of 750,000 to 1.3 million sockeye. The escapement goal is the most important element.  It defines the number of fish escaping all fisheries to reach their spawning grounds.

In this case, the in-river goal is higher than the escapement goal to account for in-river harvests of sockeye.

In 2023, 2.35 million sockeye escaped the commercial fishery and entered the river,  putting the in-river return about a mile over the goal. But anglers that year caught more than 500,000 sockeye in the Kenai drainage to lower the actual escapement to about a half-million over the goal.

Whether this half-million constitutes a biological over-escapement is yet to be determined. To qualify, it will need to produce a drop in the total return in three or four years. Fisheries management is not an exact science, and there is still debate about exactly how many spawning sockeye in the Kenai is too many.

But there is agreement on this much: There is some point at which the number of sockeye returning per spawner starts to drop, and it is for this reason that maintaining a commercial fishery in the Inlet is a management necessity.

The commercial fishery in 2023 harvested 1.6 million sockeye in the Inlet of which 1 million or more were likely Kenai River fish. Allowing another 1 million sockeye into the Kenai would have been of no benefit to anglers and personal-use dipnetters who compete with the commercial fishery for harvest and might well have cost all users in the form of weaker returns of sockeye in the future.

This is why a commercial sockeye fishery in the Inlet isn’t just desired but needed. When sockeye return by the millions, dipnetters and anglers can’t begin to catch enough to keep the escapement goal within what has been calculated to be its optimum range.

Another million sockeye in the river in 2023 would have put escapement at twice the goal, and the consensus among fisheries scientists is that doing this – especially if several years of huge returns come back to back – could cause dire results in the form of the feast becoming a famine.

This why Vance’s suggestion that the Board is trying to shut down commercial sockeye fishing in the Inlet is nonsense. But then she doesn’t seem to understand that not all fisheries in the Inlet are the same nor are all the salmon.

While sockeye returns to the Kenai have been exceeding in-river goals, Chinook returns to the same river have been falling short of their minimum. Chinook are what most Alaskans call “king salmon,” the state fish and the largest of the Pacific salmonids.

For better or worse, kings are especially susceptible to being caught and dying in set gillnets fished along the east side of the Peninsula. To protect these kings, which the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is considering as candidates for listing on the nation’s Endangered Species List, the state has in recent years seriously restricted commercial setnetting and/or shut it down.

This has, on occasion, limited and/or eliminated the summer jobs of about 700 setnetters. How long this situation will last is unknown. The Board, for its part, has been looking at alternatives to the setnets that allow for the harvest of sockeyes without killing kings, but so far, the only technique that has passed muster is dipnetting, which is rather inefficient.

Beach seining looks to have some potential, but there is a lack of data on whether king salmon released from those nets survived. Reef netting, another fishing technique that allows for the safe release of non-targeted salmon species, has not been tried, and salmon traps, which scientists agree are the best solution, were long ago outlawed in Alaska because their predominately Seattle-based owners were not liked.

Management, in this case, is as much a problem for the Board, which is charged with protecting and preserving Alaska’s salmon, as it is for the setnetters. The Board can restrict setnetting, or it can allow it to keep pushing the king escapement down, down, down.

The setnetters did not cause this problem, but they are, unfortunately, the victims of an indiscriminate gear type that can’t tell a king samon from a starry flounder. The problem with gillnets everywhere is that they catch pretty much everything that runs into them, and in the Inlet, with its big tides, they often entangle and drown kings before the fish can be released.

These are known facts.

Why kings are in decline in Cook Inlet and statewide is less clear,  although it might have something to do with warmer waters in the North Pacific Ocean and an explosion in pink salmon numbers due to both maximum sustaince yield (MSY) management of the species and open-ocean, pink farming driven by salmon hatcheries in Alaska and Russia.

Pinks, for their part, appear to enjoy a competitive advantage over other salmon species in a warmer Pacific and, if that is indeed the case, adding to pink numbers with hatcheries in this situation only compounds the problem of their squeezing out other salmon in the natural fight for survival. 

Vance’s answer to this has been to embrace the production of even more hatchery fish, which is pretty much all that need be said about her understanding of Alaska salmon management issues in the 21st century.