Commercial fishermen will have a 12-hour shot Tuesday, from noon to midnight, to harvest summer chum salmon in District 1 on the Lower Yukon River.
What's really interesting about this opener is that fishermen can use only beach seines and dipnets, rather than the usual gillnets.
The Alaska Board of Fisheries acted this year to authorize the new, nonlethal gear types as a way to allow chum fishing without seriously impacting the expected poor Chinook run.
Fishermen using beach seines and dipnets will be required to release incidentally caught Chinook back to the water immediately, and alive.
"In the event that a Chinook salmon is killed by these gear types, the dead Chinook salmon must be recorded on a fish ticket and forfeited to the state," says this press release.
Dip nets, yep, that'l work.
ReplyDeleteIf more Chinooks don't start showing up on the Kenai river, the beach fishermen better start thinking about some means of catching sockeye without killing Chinooks or they will be sitting again like last year. A couple of them have already moved in that direction with more shallow nets and "harvest modules'. They should be rewarded for their initiative. The ESSN crowd thought it was bad last year. It's stacking up to be more of the same.
ReplyDeleteFishing with a dipnet and a beach seine on the Yukon River is about as silly as a clown without a red nose!
ReplyDeleteOn other fishing news, there is a great article titled "In rural Alaska, the spoils of the sea set village against village", The New York Times, also printed in ADN.
Salmon Bycatch of the Bering Sea Pollock Fishery has brought this peril onto the poor people of Western Alaska.
Actually, the dip nets are working. Some fishermen are catching 400+ chum with the dip nets. That is a lot of money for people down here. Kwikpak is excited to be buying fish and with the third commercial opening today, more and more people are going out.
ReplyDeleteWell, it's good that the dip nets are working and when you say "That is a lot of money for people down here." what exactly does that mean?????
ReplyDeleteDip netting is a lot of work. I bet in the end, they will barely cover expenses and then maybe pay off some bills only to go back into the hole again.
The buyer is paying $0.75 per pound and the fish are about 6 pounds. So if they bring in 150 fish in one opening, that's $675. Dip nets cost about $100 and they're not using much gas because they're just barely motoring downstream. Or some are anchoring in nice eddies. But fishermen are allowed to get a maximum of 25 gallons of gas at $5 a gallon each opening. If they fished even 5 openings, that's $200 for two dip nets, $625 for gas, and they made ~$3400 on selling fish. That's $2500 in their pocket.
ReplyDeleteIf a family needs at least a bare minimum of $40,000 a year to get by in Western Alaska, then $2,500 for a season of fishing chum salmon is just a drop in the bucket. We're watching the end of Commercial Salmon fishing for the people of Western Alaska.
ReplyDeleteADF&G is letting thousands of people down for not managing the resource for "sustainable harvest" both for the commercial and subsistence harvest. This is not acceptable.
"We're watching the end of" salmon fishing as a source of food and a little bit of cash to ward off destitution of the worst kind. A loss of tradition and culture from which generates self-identity will increase our State's problems tenfold. It's already happening. Thousands of people living in Western Alaska forgotten, ignored, suppressed, beaten-down.......
ReplyDeleteIronically they are celebrating 237 years of Independence today - the same government that promises them liberty and justice....... Poor people don't have the same protections as those with money.
Gillnets rank beside bottom trawling and salmon farms as among the greatest threats to sustainable seas. The U.S. ought to have the sense to ban them, since fisherman won’t take this sensible step themselves. The only place these nets have a place is, perhaps, at terminal salmon fisheries (where artificially raised salmon return to the pen nets where they were raised). They need to be off main-stem rivers and out of the oceans. Thanks for the article.
ReplyDelete