By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Staff Writer
After the end of a summer fishery in which a huge return of chum salmon drew effort away from the pursuit of Chinooks and cohos, the winter troll season opens next week with a harvest limit of 45,000 wild Chinook.
Power troll catch rates in the first two months of the winter fishery will be used to determine fish abundance and help guide management for the rest of the year, Department of Fish and Game management biologist Grant Hagerman told the Sentinel.
“Right now, I really don’t know what to expect. But over the first eight weeks, it will give us some idea of not just how the winter fishery is shaping up, but what we might be looking at for an abundance for all of next year,” Hagerman said.
The troll fleet will be able to chase king salmon beginning Tuesday, Oct. 11, until March 15 next spring, though Fish and Game is open to the idea of fishing in April again.
“We are still under ‘stock of concern’ management fishing through March 15. Last year, we did provide opportunity after the fishery closed,” Hagerman said. “We had met at the Alaska Board of Fisheries meeting and got direction to look at potential areas where we could provide more opportunity to the trollers to harvest Chinook when there wasn’t a significant concern for harvesting the wild Alaskan stocks, and so we came back from the board meeting and reopened the winter (fishery) in the beginning of April. So they did fish April last year.”
While the winter troll season traditionally is extended through April, in recent years poor Chinook returns in a number of Southeast Alaskan rivers such as the Taku, Unuk and Stikine led the state Board of Fisheries to enact conservation measures and end the season in March.
Before the department decides whether trollers will be permitted to wet their lines in April next year, assessments will be conducted.
“We want to make sure stock compositions haven’t changed and that there aren’t any red flags,” Hagerman said.
Summertime Chums
Although the fleet did not take their full allocation of kings during the summer troll fishery which closed Sept. 20, boats around Sitka pulled in a historic number of chum salmon.
“In the Sitka Sound area and Crawfish Inlet combined, (trollers) almost caught a million chum,” Hagerman said. “That’s the most that they’ve had for chum harvest regionwide in nine years, 10 years. So it’s a pretty significant value, because the price was so high, the value of that is just incredible.”
While the price paid for chums is usually less than a dollar a pound, it rose to about $1.20 this year, which helped offset increased fuel costs, he noted.
In addition, trollers chasing hatchery chums remained close to Sitka and burned less fuel in travel.
“They don’t have to go very far. They can fish right outside of Sitka here and not burn as much fuel. The price was good, the catches were good. And it just kind of made sense for them to do that rather than burning more fuel and going out and fishing kings and cohos when the price was not quite as reflective,” he said.
Because of the exceptional chum return, fewer boats targeted king or coho salmon. All told, the fleet was allowed to take 193,150 kings over the course of 2022, but about 10,000 were left on the table at season’s end. The regulatory count starts over at the beginning of the winter troll season, Hagerman added, and fish not caught in one year are not carried over to the next.
“There were about 148,000 kings (caught), so they were roughly 10,000 fish shy of their summer allocation,” the biologist said. “But that’s also their annual allocation… So there are two things: they came up 10,000 fish shy of that August target, but they also came up 10,000 fish shy of the annual allocation, and right now that’s kind of the bigger thing… Annual allocations do not carry over. Whatever’s unharvested from the 2021-2022 fisheries does not get carried over into next year.”
Despite the number of fish left in the water, Hagerman said, the fleet hooked more kings than they have since 2016. Had the enhanced chum run been smaller, the fleet would likely have caught the 10,000 kings remaining in the allocation, he said.
“Had those chums not come in as strong as what they did, a lot more of those boats would have actually been out fishing kings and cohos. And we probably, I would say, over the four or five weeks that they were fishing chum, those additional boats would have taken those 10,000 kings.”
In terms of coho, the all-gear harvest is shaping up to be 42 percent below the 20-year average, the department said in a release in late September. However, the coho take has exceeded the total from the 2021-22 season, Hagerman noted.
Despite the historic chum salmon catch this summer, the overall fishing effort was down.
“What we did see was again, kind of the continuing trend is reduced effort in the fishery, fewer boats fishing every species, with the exception of chum,” Hagerman said. “Chum effort for the hatchery chum fishery here in the Sitka area was definitely up, the harvest was up, values were up, effort was up, and that kind of took away from some of the other species.”
With about a third of the fleet targeting chums, a significant amount of fishing effort was lured away from the king and coho fishery.
“The chum thing has been really kind of the topic of conversation for the year,” Hagerman said. “There was a lot of money made over that four or five week period (mostly in August) for those. I think there were almost 260 permits that fished between Sitka and Crawfish. Very profitable, and that, I think, did help a lot of the trollers who were not finding a lot of king salmon or cohos during the July opener.
“But then some of them were just waiting things out, the fuel prices were too high. They weren’t getting what they needed to make ends meet and didn’t fish until the end of July when these enhanced chums showed up running and saved a lot of seasons.”
