By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Staff Writer
After the longest summer king salmon troll opening in nearly 20 years, the Southeast Alaska troll fishery will close to the taking of all salmon for three days as a coho conservation measure, the Department of Fish and Game announced Monday.
The closure goes into effect at 11:59 p.m. Thursday and ends at 12:01 a.m. on Monday, August 1. Despite the lengthy four-week king opening, the fleet has hooked less than three-quarters of their anticipated July catch.
All told, trollers are expected to take about 87,000 king salmon by the time of the Thursday night shutdown, leaving 67,000 fish in the summer allocation uncaught. When the fishery reopens on Monday, it will remain open indefinitely until closed by emergency order.
“The areas of high Chinook salmon abundance will open until further notice as less than 70 percent of the summer troll Chinook salmon allocation was taken during the first retention period,” Fish and Game’s announcement says. “The retention period will be managed in season with no predetermined length and will be closed by emergency order.”
The goal of the upcoming closure is to ensure that adequate numbers of coho salmon can make it to their home streams, ADF&G troll management biologist Grant Hagerman said.
“It’s just to ensure that we’re getting enough fish that are passing to inside waters and moving towards more terminal areas for escapement and to the river mouths,” Hagerman told the Sentinel today. “There’s several assessments. This is the first one, really, of the season for the region. And again, the projected commercial wild catch – which is kind of an early indication of abundance – did meet that threshold, but the catch rates we were looking at, we felt, were just a little below what we should be seeing in those weeks… It didn’t look really good even though it projected out. We felt like we should implement just a short kind of early season closure.”
Regardless of coho catch rates, the rates of king salmon catch were low.
While a number of factors are in play in the low king salmon harvest, Hagerman said, reduced fishing effort and lower king salmon abundance likely have a significant role in the diminished Chinook haul.
“The abundance this year isn’t projected to be as high, so there’s been a number of things,” Hagerman said. “The fleet size is pretty close to what it was last year and it’s pretty close to the five year average, but that’s still down from a longer term, the 10 year average is still down, probably by 30 percent.”
At the start of July, about 580 boats were active in the fishery, he said, but as the weeks drew on, that number declined by roughly half. Initially, the department estimated that the first summer troll opener would last about 12 days, but instead by Thursday it will have run for 28. In 2003, a year of tremendous salmon abundance, the king opener lasted for 39 days, though Hagerman said the prices that year were at “rock bottom.”
The upcoming closure is the first ever July coho conservation closure. Such closures have previously happened in August, he added, and can sometimes last for more than a week.
A number of trollers have been targeting cohos instead of kings, which Hagerman said has further reduced overall Chinook catch and led to a longer king opening.
“They’re definitely turning to run more coho gear and then fishing different areas. Coho fishing versus king fishing, they do have different techniques in areas they fish so that’s exactly what we’re seeing for this prolonged king opening. It’s just those that are fishing are targeting other species and some just aren’t fishing… You see the number of permits just continually dropping each week,” the biologist said. He cited the high price of fuel as a cause for some fishermen to keep their vessels moored.
The three-day troll closure is a short one, he said, and he’d like to give fishermen a chance to head back out sooner than later, though he acknowledged that it’s a tight turnaround time for the fleet.
“We’re trying to get the fishery reopened for king salmon as soon as we can to try to give them as much opportunity to harvest those as possible,” he said. “But they have through September 20, so they have some time to catch it. Obviously those fish are moving, they’re migrating down the coast. The longer you get into September the more likely chance that those fish are just gone… I can’t forecast it, but what I do know is that given recent catch rates and fleet dynamics and what we’re looking at for a target for August, we’re not putting a set date on how long it’s going to go.”
The brief duration of the closure is likely to cause bottlenecks for the fleet, Alaska Trollers Association president Matt Donohoe told the newspaper.
“A three-day closure really bottlenecks the fleet. It screws up the plants for packers and ice. If, like us, you’re out on the grounds trying to fish it’s a day at least to get back to town,” Donohoe said.
Hagerman anticipated similar bottleneck effects as vessels move to offload their catch.
Donohoe summarized the mood of trollers currently at sea in pursuit of kings and cohos as “fog, weather, slow hard fishing – got to keep grinding.”
Trollers can continue to target hatchery salmon in designated terminal harvest areas during the closure.
As chum salmon start returning to hatcheries, Hagerman expects some trollers to target those instead of kings, further reducing Chinook fishing effort in the coming weeks.
“One of the biggest factors is going to be how much effort we get drawn in from that chum fleet. Because last year… between Crawfish (Inlet) and Sitka Sound, I think there were over 150 boats that were fishing there,” he said. “So if we see that again we’re looking at 580 permits. That’s 26 percent of the fleet targeting something else.”
After the coming coho conservation closure, Hagerman expects the king salmon troll fishery to remain open without issue.
“We need a short little coho conservation closure, and hopefully we can move through the next month without any additional closures. Most likely we can just continue to fish,” he said.
