By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Staff Writer
Salmon returns in the Sitka area have improved compared to last year, but numbers remain below average for seiners pursuing the anadromous fish.
“Probably a little bit less than average, the run that we have this year, getting pretty close to normal ... way better than last year,” Department of Fish and Game biologist Aaron Dupuis told the Sentinel.
“Last year was one of the smallest runs that we’ve had in Section 13A, so it’s a pretty good increase with that. I’m pretty pleased with how things are developing.”
Fishing Section 13 encompasses the area around Sitka, with 13A stretching from Yacobi Island around the West Chichagof-Yacobi Wilderness area to Salisbury Sound. Besides 13A, Redoubt Bay the only part of Section 13 open to seining now. Dupuis noted that there was been almost no fishing effort by seiners there this year.
So far in the fishery, 22 fishing boats in 13A have caught about 246,700 fish, 237,000 of which were pink salmon, Fish and Game reported in a news release.
While the fishery overall is performing decently, Dupuis wasn’t optimistic about the outlook for wild chum runs.
“What we’ve seen for wild chum has been very poor … We’re seeing hundreds when we should be seeing thousands or sometimes tens of thousands,” he said. “We’re not done counting yet, but all indications now point to a very poor run of summer chum salmon in the Sitka area, for wild chum … some of the systems, it’s very bleak.”
Crew members aboard the seiner Lucky Star move a net this afternoon at Crescent Harbor. (Sentinel Photo)
Looking back on the summer of 2020, Dupuis noted that salmon runs in the West Chichagof area were particularly poor.
“Much of the area didn’t open last year, and the openings that we had were fairly restricted. It’s kind of a long story, but generally in Southeast the even years are low, odd years are big,” the biologist said. “So last year being an even year, we expected it to be pretty low in several areas, Lisianski, Hoonah sounds… You just expect it to be chugging along but last year was pretty bad for West Chichagof, probably one of the lowest harvest years that we’ve had on record.”
There’s a degree of uncertainty over the cause of a poor salmon run, he said, but possibilities include poor freshwater conditions, low food availability, and high salmon morbidity in the ocean.
This year, many of the fish returning to their home streams to spawn were born in 2019, a low-water year that placed significant pressure on fish populations.
“What I’m really pleased about this year is the fish coming back this year are from 2019 when we had extremely low water conditions in a lot of the Sitka Management Area. It’s good to see that it wasn’t a complete disaster. Hoonah Sound, Section 13C, we’re not really seeing good numbers of fish there yet, so who knows. Section 13C has not performed well the last couple years,” Dupuis said.
Overall, he said, the seiners fishing north of Sitka are having a decent year.
“Moral of the story, this year it’s much better than last year, still not great, but for the amount of effort that we’ve had it’s been a pretty good season for 13A,” he said. “Most of the effort that we’ve been seeing this year is quite a bit lower than what we usually see and I think a lot of that has to do with big catches in the Ketchikan area and the Chatham corridor… The boats that are here are doing decent.”
Successful fisheries in other parts of Southeast, he added, have the potential to reduce the number of boats that come to Sitka to fish.
While Section 13 seiners are catching plenty of fish, the pinks coming in are smaller than normal.
“They’ve been small, pretty small, smaller than normal… Normally we figure 3.5 pounds for a pink salmon. That’s kind of what you think of a pink salmon being. This year we’ve been getting samples going back at 2.5 pounds… We’ve been seeing that across the region,” he said.
The cause of this reduction in fish size was uncertain, he said.
The price of pink and chum salmon – the primary targets of the seine fleet – has risen from the collapse of 2020, he said.
