Deckboss: Emergency action: Board restricts northern Cook Inlet king salmon setnet fishery

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Here's a summary of what happened at yesterday's Board of Fisheries meeting.

John Bitney said...: Wes. Let's go kill some pike at Alexander Lake. jwb (I think we should have a pike bounty collectible only by kids under 16.); April 30, 2009 at 10:08 AM
Anonymous said...: Mr. Chief of Staff (Bitney)

You are dead on. We have to work together with both sport and commfish folks to get to the bottom of some of the issues that plague the Cook Inlet basin.

I recall Dan Winn of Homer over a decade ago, spouting off about the "pike problem" in some of the upper Inlet drainages and I thought to myself, "These commfish guys are just looking for excuses"

But here we sit well over a decade later and there is a serious problem, much of which was created by the "pike problem", an invasive, nonindigineous specie in Cook Inlet as far as I know.

Let's do something about it. Bounty is one thing, perhaps subsistence or personal use gillnets in the fresh water during times when there is no salmon passage through these systems could be another.

I've heard of folks talk about just sterilizing the systems but that could be very very dangerous if not done with exact precision.

Working together we can bring back the salmon so that we then have something to argue about. Right now no one is winning this one.

I applaud Mr. Bitney's approach to both sport and commfish issues and want to be sure that he is at the table of problem solving in the Cook Inlet basin.

bobbyt; April 30, 2009 at 1:01 PM

Deckboss