By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Staff Writer
After two weeks of fishing, the Sitka Sound sac roe herring fishery closed on Friday with a harvest total well below the guideline.
Between the initial opening on March 27 and Friday’s closer, the seine fleet pulled up about 16,000 tons of herring, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game announced Sunday.
Daily harvest through the final three days of the fishery remains confidential due to low participation, Fish and Game wrote, but as of April 6, the total harvest amounted to 15,700 tons, making the cumulative harvest Wednesday, Thursday and Friday only about 300 tons.
In January, Fish and Game set a guideline harvest level of 33,304 tons, though it indicated it didn’t expect the total harvest would exceed 20,000 tons. The forecast for herring returns this year was estimated at 210,453 tons.
Though this year’s harvest undershot the anticipated level, ADFG Area Management Biologist Aaron Dupuis said those who participated in the fishery got what they were hoping for.
“Twenty thousand tons was our maximum (estimated harvest). It definitely will not exceed that. I think this year everybody got what they were wanting to get, so from a processor standpoint it was a huge success,” Dupuis said over the phone today.
He noted that it may take months for fishermen and processors to know the price of the herring roe caught in the two-week fishery.
“That kind of comes when the fish tickets come in… Oftentimes we don’t find out until the product gets sold,” he said.
On the unusual side, the biologist noted that the seiners had a long window for fishing compared to previous years.
“Everything went really smooth. What I would class as being kind of unusual was how long marketable herring was available to the fishery – that was unusual,” Dupuis said. Herring fisheries can sometimes last for only a handful of days, he noted.
While the commercial sac roe fishery is finished for 2021, herring spawn on beaches continued over the weekend. The biologist said that this year’s spawn covers significantly more mileage than in previous years.
“We’re closing in on 80 miles (of spawn on beaches), which is quite a bit more than we’ve seen in recent years,” he said.
In a more typical year, he added, herring would spawn on about 60 miles of local beaches. Over the weekend, the department observed significant herring spawn in Promisla Bay, on Middle Island, near Halibut Point, and around Crescent Harbor. The little silver fish have also spawned at Pirates Cove and Redoubt Bay. On Saturday, the department noted 24 miles of new spawn.
On Sunday, a department aerial survey sighted 25 miles of spawn in Jamestown Bay, Hot Springs Bay, and on Middle Island.
The department does not yet know the depth of the spawn, which will be measured by dive transects.
“Once the spawn ends, we’ll be doing the spawn deposition survey, that’s the dive survey… On the Kruzof shoreline we’ve had spawn down to 80 feet – that’s quite impressive. They’re not just spawning right on the shoreline,” Dupuis said. He said dive surveys should begin next week.
He recalled one dive survey near Shoals Point several years ago in which he recorded a particularly sizable herring spawn.
“I was on one transect, it was four tanks of air to do one transect. We were really shallow, so each dive was 60 to 70 minutes long… We were cold at the end of that one… We pretty much swam from Shoals Point to Low Island (roughly one mile),” he remembered.
In the immediate future, Dupuis anticipated that the spawn would wind down soon.
“I expect spawn around town to start winding down here. We’re kind of nearing the conclusion of the spawn event, or the first spawn event,” he said, adding that secondary spawning sometimes occurs.
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