By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Staff Writer
A tremendous return of hatchery-released chum salmon in Sitka Sound and West Crawfish Inlet has pulled trollers away from the ongoing opener for king salmon in favor of the cheaper, but far more plentiful, chums.
The troll fleet currently targeting Chinook salmon is unusually small, Department of Fish and Game biologist Grant Hagerman told the Sentinel.
“The fishery has been open for a week now, after having landings coming in... what we’re seeing is very, very few boats, the lowest fleet size for targeting kings in an August opening on record for summer, including July and August fisheries,” Hagerman said today. Over the last three years, the king salmon troll fleet has shrunk each year.
The July Chinook troll opener closed on August 7 with a catch of 71,000 treaty Chinooks, Fish and Game said, which leaves 53,000 kings to be harvested in the second opener, which began on August 13 and is still underway.
Hagerman said a variety of factors are at work in the reduced fishing effort on kings, but the draw of the local chum fishery is significant.
“Others are targeting other species, and that’s probably a big part of this story. I would say the return for the Deep Inlet chum is coming in very strong right now,” he said. “So up to 100 trollers have chosen to target NSRAA hatchery chum salmon returning to Deep Inlet and Crawfish Inlet Terminal Harvest Area. So that has drawn quite a bit of the king effort away into chums.”
The troller Acumen passes rafted seiners anchored near Sitka National Historical Park this afternoon. The fishing fleet mostly has been targeting chum salmon in Sitka Sound. Producers have been paying around $1.15 pound recently for chum. (Sentinel Photo by James Poulson)
Along with strong hatchery chum returns this season, prices being paid for the plentiful fish is also high at the moment.
“Prices tend to improve (through the summer), so with kings the average price is maybe around $7 a pound, cohos are around $3 per pound, and right now for chums they’re around $1.15,” Hagerman said.
While chums don’t command the price of kings on a pound-for-pound basis, the biologist noted that some trollers have reeled in over a thousand chums in a single day, whereas those targeting kings catch only a small fraction of that.
“This is the highest chum price that I’ve ever heard of for these enhanced troll chum...These are very good catch rates, 500 to 1,000 a day is very good,” Hagerman said.
“For the last two weeks, probably the last three weeks they’ve caught more than 375,000 chums,” he said. “This is definitely more than what we’ve had in recent years. A few years ago they had some good fishing in West Crawfish, but this has been something that they haven’t seen.”
There were 585 boats in the July opening for kings, but about 100 boats have since diverted to fish for chums.
“We had 585 that fished kings in the July opening,” Hagerman said. “If you were to take 100 out of that, there’s 17 percent of that fleet size is now targeting chums in the August opening... The Sitka chum fishery is kind of the talk of the region.
“It’s not unprecedented, it has happened before, but it hasn’t happened in a while.”
Chum harvests in the Sitka Sound area haven’t been this high since 2013, Hagerman said,
With chum prices high, he said, the economic impact of the trollers’ pursuit of chums has been significant.
“The value of that fishery for the last few weeks was a rough estimate of nearly $2.8 million...This isn’t the highest value we’ve ever seen but for this two- or three-week window it’s been extremely high... We have a lot of boats coming from all throughout to participate,” Hagerman said.
In a statement earlier this month, Fish and Game estimated that the current king opener will likely run between seven and ten days.
