By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Staff Writer
After an early spawning on the south end of Kruzof Island introduced a significant challenge in this year’s commercial sac roe herring harvest, the seine fleet rushed to adapt, and by the time the season closed in the second week of April the catch totaled about 10,200 tons, the Department of Fish and Game reported Monday.
It was about one-third of the pre-season guideline harvest level.
Of the fish taken, the mature roe proportion was about 10.8 percent, less than the ten-year average of 11.7 percent, fishery manager Aaron Dupuis told the Sentinel over the phone Tuesday.
Many of the fish this year weren’t exactly what the industry was hoping for, he noted. And it was a tough year for the F&G fishery managers.
“It was just really mixed. Every fishery we had, there were some really good sets with larger fish and higher roe percentages, but then mixed in with it was marginal-borderline fish,” Dupuis said.
“It was work – we were out there every day. The last two years, once the fishery got rolling, the easy management decisions were on where to fish, and that wasn’t the case this year,” Dupuis said. ”Everything was mixed. We really had to look pretty darn hard for opportunity. We found some. I think it easily could have been a fairly disastrous season for the seiners, but everybody worked together pretty well and we were able to make the best of it.”
The spawning, which eventually encompassed 83.8 nautical miles of area beaches, began in late March off the rocky shore of south Kruzof Island.
“A pretty good chunk of the biomass spawned… from Shoals Point out to Cape Edgecumbe,” the biologist said. “There’s a pretty good volume of fish that went right there… That was a pretty bad spot to have a fishery. It’s really what they call a sticky bottom, so nets get hung up pretty easily there. Guys don’t want to fish it. But that’s where the fish were… Once that big spawn event took off on the Kruzof shoreline, that’s kind of when we started to see, kind of across the board, lower roe percentages and smaller fish.”
Seine boat skipper Jamie Ross, a veteran of the Sitka Sound fishery, agreed with this appraisal in an April 11 interview with the Sentinel.
“This was a very complex year; the fish were all over the place,” Ross said. “Up in Salisbury Sound all the way down to Crawfish Inlet – places in my 32 years that we have never fished before... There were some opportunities that we probably should have taken that we didn’t, but the bottom line is I think we only had a market for about 14,000 tons total, between all five companies thereabouts, and we caught almost 11,000.”
This year’s guideline harvest level was 30,124 tons.
By comparison, the 2021 and 2022 sac roe fisheries were “a total cakewalk,” Ross said.
The heavy spawn at Shoals Point this year complicated matters because the location wasn’t suitable for purse seining.
“The fish were really big because a lot of them are age class fish, and rather than spawning when we wanted them to, they spawned in the most inaccessible spot in the whole Sitka area, down on the south end of Kruzof Island in the middle of the ocean, in the middle of a huge rock patch,” said Ross. “So the majority of marketable fish spawned in a place that we couldn’t fish on. From that point on, we were playing catch-up.”
Over a week and a half, the fishery opened sporadically on eight days over a wide geographic expanse around Sitka Sound and environs.
Fish and Game spawn deposition surveys indicated heavy spawn on Kruzof and nearby islands.
“Preliminary results indicate that herring egg deposition was high throughout much of the surveyed area, particularly along Kruzof Island, Hayward Strait, and the Magoun Islands areas,” ADFG wrote in Monday’s release. “The highest egg deposition was observed along the southern and eastern Kruzof Island shoreline, similar to what was observed in 2020 and 2021. Egg deposition south of Sitka, in the Goddard area, was low to moderate.”
After that spawn on south Kruzof, herring activity continued around Sitka Sound clockwise, and also occurred far to the north, in Salisbury Sound, St. John Baptist Bay and southward in Hot Springs Bay. Fishery openings were also held close to town in Leesoffskaia Bay and around Inner Point.
Though the fishery formally closed April 11, the game was up by April 8, the fishery managers said.
“Test sets conducted between April 8 and April 11 indicated that the likelihood of high-quality herring for sac roe harvest being located was very low and processors participating in the fishery withdrew interest in continuing to search for commercial opportunity,” the department said.
After a full month of herring surveys by both plane and boat, Dupuis said the future looks good for herring returns to Sitka Sound.
“I’ve spent, shoot, almost a month out there looking around, sonaring,” he said.” There’s a lot of fish out there; we saw a lot of fish. And all the information that we have right now is pointing towards a pretty good number of young fish coming into the population. So the future’s looking good, at least from where I’m sitting with the information I have right now.”
