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Alaska is one of a handful of U.S. states to launch a go-to website aimed at keeping ocean acidification in the public eye. The Alaska Ocean Acidification Network, a collaboration of state and federal scientists, agencies, tribes, conservation, fishing and aquaculture groups, went live last month. Its goal is to provide a forum for researchers to share their findings, and to connect with coastal residents concerned about future impacts on their communities. Ocean acidification (OA) is caused by the ocean absorbing excess carbon dioxide (CO2)...
Two big fish stories have been spawned so far by the 2016 Alaska salmon season: 1) sockeyes save the day; and 2) colossal pinks. A larger than expected sockeye salmon catch that has topped 50 million will salvage a summer that has seen lackluster catches of other salmon species, notably, those hard to predict pinks. “I think if you’re a Bristol Bay fisherman, you’re probably pretty happy, and if you fished anywhere else in the state, it probably hasn’t been a great season for you,” said Forrest Bowers, deputy director of commercial fisheries...
The decades-old ‘bycatch to food banks’ program has grown far beyond its original Alaska beginnings. Today, only 10 percent of the fish going to hunger relief programs is bycatch of primarily halibut and salmon taken accidentally in other fisheries. The remainder is “first-run” products donated to Sea Share, the nation’s only non-profit that donates fish through a tight network of fishermen, processors, packagers and transporters. Sea Share began in 1993 when Bering Sea fishermen pushed to be allowed to direct fish taken as bycatch to food b...
Salmon takes center stage each summer but many other fisheries also are in full swing from Ketchikan to Kotzebue. For salmon, total catches by July 8 were nearing 28 million fish, of which 10 million were sockeyes, primarily from Bristol Bay. Last week marked the catch of the two billionth sockeye from the Bay since the fishery began in 1884. Other salmon highlights: Southeast trollers wrapped up their first Chinook opener in just five days on July 5, with the preliminary catch estimated at around 80,000 fish. Fish tickets are still being...
There’s much more to Alaska herring than roe and bait. To prove that point, nearly 40 of Seattle’s finest restaurants and retailers will celebrate Northwest Herring Week as a way to re-introduce the tasty, health fish to the dining scene. “There’s more herring eaten all over the world than you can imagine. Some years there’s as much as four million tons harvested in the world. You can have a year when the herring fishery is as large as the whole Bering Sea pollock fishery,” said Bruce Schactler of Kodiak, a longtime fisherman and director of...
Alaskan fishermen have raised the bar for big fishing boats with the F/V Northern Leader of Kodiak, and Discovery Canada producers of the popular “Mighty Ships” programs have taken notice. Mighty Ships producers search for unique ships around the world and its seven year run has featured a wide range of vessels including cruise ships, aircraft carriers, cargo ships, dredgers and more. The programs focus heavily on operational capabilities and technical aspects of the ships and also make use of computer-generated animation to show und...
Alaska salmon fishermen can get rebates on pingers aimed at keeping baleen whales away from their gear. The six inch, battery operated tubes are tied into fishing nets and transmit animal-specific signals every five seconds to alert the animals to keep their distance. “Pingers can be really helpful to alert the whales to something in front of them so you have less entanglements,” said Kathy Hansen, director of the Southeast Alaska Fisheries Alliance. SEAFA received a $25,000 Hollings Grant from the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation to fund t...
Alaska Senator Dan Sullivan has scored seats on nearly every Congressional committee that deal with issues on, over and under the oceans. That fulfills a commitment he made to Kodiak when he ran for office two years ago, he said at a ComFish town meeting during a two day stay on “the Rock.” Sullivan ticked off a list of fishery related actions he’s had a hand in getting accomplished over the past year: passage of an enforcement act that combats global fish pirating and seafood fraud; adding language to bills that lifts pricey class...
Alaska’s 2016 salmon harvest will be down by 40 percent from last year’s catch, if the fish show up as predicted. The preliminary numbers released by the Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game call for a total catch of 161 million salmon this year; the 2015 harvest topped 268 million fish. The shortfall stems from a projected big decrease for pink salmon. A humpie harvest forecast of 90 million would be a drop of 100 million fish from last summer. Here’s the statewide catch breakdown for the other salmon species: for sockeye, the forecast calls for a...
If a fisherman gets 50-cents a pound for his reds, how can the fish fetch $10, $15 or more at retail counters? “It’s all the other stuff that happens after he sells the fish. A lot of costs, margins and profits are included in that retail price,” said Andy Wink, a Fisheries Economist with the McDowell Group in Juneau. It’s an ‘apples and oranges’ comparison when it comes to using weights paid for the raw goods and the end product. A lot of weight is lost going from a whole fish, which fishermen are paid on, to a fillet at retail counters. ...
Fire sale salmon prices last year and a dim outlook for the upcoming season have caused the value of Alaska fishing permits to plummet. To another extreme – the prices for halibut catch shares have soared to “unheard of levels.” Starting with salmon permits: “A lot of people had disastrous seasons last year, whether it was drift gillnet or seine permits, and the values have declined dramatically,” said Doug Bowen of Alaska Boats and Permits in Homer. At Alaska’s bellwether fishery at Bristol Bay, a base sockeye prices of 50 cents a pound helpe...
Fish stomachs could help solve the mystery of why Alaska halibut are so small for their age. Halibut weights are about one-third of what they were 30 years ago, meaning a halibut weighing 120 pounds in the late 1980s is closer to 40 pounds nowadays. One culprit could be arrowtooth flounders, whose numbers have increased 500 percent over the same time to outnumber the most abundant species in the Gulf: pollock. Fishermen for decades have claimed the toothy flounders, which grow to about three feet in length, are blanketing the bottom of the...
Early signs point to continuing headwinds in world markets for Alaska salmon. Global currencies remain in disarray, the ongoing Russian seafood embargo is diverting more farmed salmon to the U.S., and tons of product remains in freezers from back to back bumper sockeye runs. (The majority of Alaska’s salmon goes to market in frozen, headed and gutted (H&G) form.) One plus: aggressive market promotions have kept reds moving briskly at retail outlets at home and abroad and removed some of the back log. “What the Alaska industry really needs is...
Fishing lives and fishing wives are set to be showcased for a national audience; one as a documentary and the other, on reality television. The first, an hour-long feature called Last Man Fishing, focuses on the lifestyles and challenges facing our nation’s small-scale fishermen. “We’re from Indiana and we realized there is a disconnect between the consumer and where their fish is coming from,” said JD Schuyler who is co-producing the documentary with his wife, Kelley. “We want to bridge the gap of people appreciating seafood, while also unde...
Needy Alaskans are enjoying a rare taste of sablefish, thanks to a science project that kept research fish from going over the rails. Sablefish, more commonly called black cod, are one of the world’s priciest, high end fish, and Alaska waters are home to the largest stocks. The deep water fish are found at depths of 5,000 feet or more and can live to nearly 100 years. The Gulf of Alaska fishery, which has a catch total of about 20 million pounds this year (18.2 million in 2017) is usually worth more than $90 million to Alaska fishermen at t...
Alaska’s halibut stocks are showing signs of an uptick and fishermen’s catches will not be slashed for the first time in 15 years. Fishery managers on Friday set the coast wide Pacific halibut harvest for 2016 at 29.89 million pounds, a 2.3 percent increase from last year. “This was probably the most positive, upbeat meeting in the past decade,” said Doug Bowen of Alaska Boats and Permits in Homer. “The feeling is the stocks are up and the resource is stabilizing and recovering, and it’s the first meeting in a long time that there weren’t any...
WRANGELL — On Jan. 4 a federal judge imposed fines on two Wrangell fishermen for falsifying Individual Fishing Quota records over a three-year period. Charles Petticrew Sr., 70, and son Charles Petticrew Jr., 42, had on Oct. 16, 2015 pleaded guilty to charges brought against them by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Alaska, and agreed to pay fines totaling $100,000. The two admitted to submitting IFQ reports falsely specifying statistical areas in the Gulf of Alaska where they caught nearly 4,000 pounds of halibut, valued at $23,375. The rep...
Alaska’s mariculture industry has passed some big milestones, and is getting set to head into the weeds. Aquatic farming, which was Ok’d by Alaska lawmakers in 1988, topped $1 million in shellfish sales for the first time ever in 2014, coming in at $1.2 million. “This is the highest sales we’ve had since the inception of the program which is pretty exciting,” said Cynthia Pring-Ham, Director of Mariculture for the state Dept. of Fish and Game, adding that shellfish production increased 27 percent. That’s an average of $7,049 in sales per a...
9 marks a quarter of a century for this weekly column that targets Alaska’s seafood industry. At the end of every year, I proffer my ‘no holds barred’ look back at the best and worst fish stories, and select the biggest story of the year. The list is in no particular order and I’m sure to be missing a few, but here are the Fishing Picks and Pans for 2015: • Most eco-friendly fish feat: The massive airlift/barge project led by the Dept. of Environmental Conservation that removed more than 800,000 pounds of marine debris from remote Alaska be...
“Tis the season for even bigger Alaska fish catches when groundfish seasons open at the start of the New Year. Catches of pollock, cod, flounders and other groundfish account for nearly 85 percent of Alaska’s harvest poundage, and 67 percent of the nation’s total groundfish harvests. Those numbers could increase due to boosts in several catch quotas in both the Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea for the next two year. For pollock, the nation’s largest fishery, the catch is up slightly to 1.3 million metric tons, or just under three billion pound...
Despite some encouraging signs that Pacific halibut stocks are stabilizing after being on a downward spiral for nearly two decades, catches could decrease slightly in most regions again next year. That’s IF fishery managers accept the catch recommendations by halibut scientists, which they don’t always do. At the International Pacific Halibut Commission meeting last week in Seattle, the total 2016 catch, meaning for the West Coast, British Columbia and Alaska, was recommended at 26.56 million pounds, down from 29.22 million pounds this year. Fo...
The popular January Tanner crab fishery has been called off for the third year running throughout the Westward Region (Kodiak, Chignik and the South Peninsula), leaving fishermen and managers wondering where all the crab has gone. State managers for several years have been tracking a huge plug of crab that appeared poised to enter the 2016 Tanner fishery, but based on this summer’s surveys, the crab have failed to materialize. “In 2013 saw a very large cohort of juveniles in the survey estimated at over 200 million crab, which was one of the...
Alaska claimed the top three fishing ports for landings again last year, and led all U.S. states in terms of seafood landings and values. “The Alaska port of Dutch Harbor continued to lead the nation with the highest amount of seafood landings – 761.8 million pounds, 87 percent of which was walleye pollock,” said Dr. Richard Merrick in announcing the national rankings last week from the annual Fisheries of the U.S. report for 2014. It’s the 18 year in a row that Dutch Harbor has claimed the top spot for fish landings. Kodiak ranked second...
WRANGELL — Two Wrangell fishermen have pleaded guilty to charges related to falsified commercial catch reports. In documentation submitted to the U.S. District Court in Juneau on Oct. 19, federal prosecutors alleged Charles Petticrew Sr. and Charles Petticrew Jr. conspired together to submit falsified Individual Fishing Quota records over a three-year period. Petticrew Jr. was alleged to have knowingly submitted IFQ reports that falsely specified the Gulf of Alaska statistical areas where around 3,977 pounds of halibut were caught, valued in a...
“Unsettled” best describes the mood among brokers in the business of buying, selling and trading Alaska salmon permits and quota shares of various catches. For salmon permits, “the dust hasn’t really settled” since the season ended, said Doug Bowen of Alaska Boats and Permits in Homer, but at the moment, prices are tanking across the board. “There were a few bright spots but several areas in the state did not do well, either because of production or price or both. That’s put a downward press on permit prices,” he added. Bristol Bay drift gilln...
