Friday, March 30, 2012

Chinook take a dip for Southeast trollers

Southeast Alaska commercial trollers have a Chinook salmon harvest allocation this year of 197,272 fish, down 20,788 from the 2011 preseason allocation.

Here's the announcement from the Department of Fish and Game.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

trollers are getting the short end of the stick!the seine and gill net fisheries are killing off a lot more king salmon here in southeast then ever gets reported.when have we heard of any in season area closures of any kind for the seine or gill net fleets due to high incidence king salmon bycatch?there are none,and i dought if the adfg has any idea of how bad it really is.the king salmon abundence is way below the historical average and something needs to change!

Anonymous said...

Lets not forget the killing of small king salmon in the Icy Straits troll fisheries either. Trollers think they are so pure..

Anonymous said...

I think there maybe a more significant problem with charter fishing catch and release than seine and gill net bycatch. In Sitka I have overheard charter clients bragging about the fifty kings they released that day.

Anonymous said...

There are some very misinformed folks on here.

How long do you think ATA would sit around if seiners and gillnetters were ravaging kings.

The truth is that seiners get 4.3% and gillnets 2.9% of the kings.

The trollers get the rest

In fact, in many years out of the past 2 decades, the net fleets gave up their meager percentages to help the sports and trollers.

Why do we know this? It's been studied and studied and there have been long periods where there has been full retention- entire seasons- and the seine fleet hit around 20,000 tops out of more than 300,000 chinook.

Check your facts. This has been well documented. The ADFG and PSC study these critters more than any animal in Alaska.

You are dead wrong. Gillnets and Seines are very carefully controlled and monitored and regulated with regards to chinook.

Robert M. Thorstenson, Jr
Northern Panel, Pacific Salmon Commission

Anonymous said...

I don't always agree with Bobby T but in this case he is correct,blaming the net fisheries for reduction in King quotas would be laughable if it weren't so sad.Studies have shown shaking Kings all day to land the big one is not good practice so part of the blame goes to unscrupulous charter guys.Not all of them but enough.

Anonymous said...

Not to mention all the incidental feeder kings being killed by the new "chum" fisheries in Icy Straits.. To sacrifice a healthy king run in the name of chum salmon is disgusting.

Anonymous said...

"To sacrifice a ...... king run in the name of chum salmon is disgusting.", your comment can be applied to the Eastern Norton Sound chum salmon fishery managed out of the Nome ADF&G office. The King Salmon run in the river which the village of Unalakleet sits on, is weak yet Nome ADF&G continues to allow a chum salmon fishery off the coast.

That fishery benefits about 30 people at the most. Subsistence fishers count in the thousands, yet more and more salmon drying racks are empty year after year. The Constitution of Alaska guarentees the people first dibs at our natural resources. The management must not know about that clause in the Constitution.

That said "chum salmon" fishery is also intercepting the Nome area salmon as well. That's my personal logical reasoning here since I'm not a scientist.

I remember seeing a Salmon Cycle Poster when I was in high school in a biology class and it showed how the schools of salmon zoned in on the land then swam up or down the coast to find their spawning river. Last I know, this is still the pattern because I've not seen another since. That's logical reasoning because I'm not a scientist.

So, I'm going to take this one step further and say "To sacrifice" any "king run" anywhere in Alaska in this day and age is extremely poor management. Alaskans cannot allow this to continue.