Stikine River Chinook fishery

to offer bounty of the sea

Klas Stolpe

February 24, 2005.

Healthy king salmon returns over recent years to the Stikine River have resulted in the Pacific Salmon Commission, at a recent meeting in Oregon, allowing fisheries to begin again near this popular Southeast Alaska river. On February 18 the Alaska Department of Fish and Game announced that directed fisheries for Chinook (king) salmon will be held on the Stikine for the first time since the mid-1970s.

“I’ve been waiting for this to open for 28 years,” Petersburg fisherman Mickey Knight commented. “There’s nothing like a king in the net… that’s why we call them kings, they are huge. This is going to be good for the whole community… sport fishers, charter operators, commercial, it’s employment.”

The preseason forecast of the terminal run – salmon returning to the river or harvested in the saltwater at the river’s mouth – for the Stikine is approximately 80,300 fish and the combined sport and commercial harvest in Alaska may exceed 27,000 fish. The ADF&G Advisory Committee will hold a public meeting tonight at 7:00 PM in the City Council Chambers

“We’ll be discussing, on the American side, how many fish we have to catch and just how to do that,” stated ADF&G Petersburg Area Management Biologist William Bergmann. “We have a new gillnet fishery and will liberalize the sport fishery. Those are the two basic things that we will be doing in front of Petersburg and in front of Wrangell, District 8.”

The advisory commission will give its suggestions from the meeting to the Alaska Board of Fisheries, who will in turn meet to determine how they want the fishery managed. The board of fish will begin taking public testimony on the Stikine king fishery, proposal 457, March 7 and do deliberations between March 11-13.

Bergmann said the fishery was originally shut down in 1977. The last full fishery was 1974. Declining runs reduced the time each year resulting in three weeks of one to two days of fishing the final season.

“Escapements were poor,” Bergmann recalled of that time. “It was time to do that, but now the fishery has been rebuilt and we were just negotiating with Canada on how we are actually going to split those fish up. Now we have an agreement so we can talk about how to run the fishery on our side.”

In 1999, under the Pacific Salmon Treaty Agreement, the United States and Canada agreed not to develop fisheries on transboundary river Chinook salmon stocks without the consent of both parties, and without first developing and implementing abundance-based management regimes. The agreement also provides for U.S. subsistence fisheries for Coho and king on the Stikine River.