Gulf gets more cod

Details in this press release from the North Pacific Fishery Management Council.

Togiak herring quota set, but will anyone fish?

This year's harvest quota for the Togiak sac roe herring fishery is a sizeable 20,737 tons.

The question is, will any commercial fishermen go after it?

We saw no fishery 2023, 2024 and 2025 due to lack of market interest.

This could well be the fourth consecutive year the Togiak herring fishery remains dormant.

It's odd considering that years ago, this was a wildly competitive fishery with numerous boats, spotter planes and processors going after fish valued in Asia for their eggs, or roe.

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

Mining the seabed off Alaska?

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, in a recent Federal Register notice, said it is "initiating the first steps that could potentially lead to a lease sale for minerals on the Outer Continental Shelf offshore Alaska."

Here's a BOEM map showing prospective mining areas.

Juneau watch

Jeremy Woodrow, executive director of the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute, is scheduled to present this sweeping overview tomorrow to the House Finance Committee.

An interesting graph on Page 10 tracks the ex-vessel value of Alaska's seafood harvest over the last decade.

An anxious moment for Bering Sea pollock trawlers

The North Pacific Fishery Management Council is meeting for a week starting Thursday in Anchorage, and the main item on the agenda is possible action to crack down on chum salmon bycatch in the Bering Sea pollock fishery.

Trawlers are worried over the possibility the council might recommend limits, or caps, on the number of chum the fleet could take each season. Once met, such caps could result in closure of the fishery, leaving valuable pollock quota stranded in the water.

The council is under enormous pressure from Western Alaska villagers, environmental groups and others to impose caps on the trawl fleet, which has been broadly blamed for poor chum returns and subsistence fishing restrictions.

"The salmon situation in our communities has become an existential crisis," the Bethel-based Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission said in a letter to the council.

The pollock industry is adamantly opposed to caps, arguing they wouldn't do much to help improve Western Alaska chum runs. For one thing, they argue, many of the chum caught as bycatch in the pollock trawl fishery actually come from Japanese and Russian hatcheries, not Alaska rivers.

Trawl interests urge the council to select a different option, one that would build upon steps the fleet already has begun to avoid chum — particularly Western Alaska chums. These steps include fleet communication, avoidance of chum "hot spots," genetic identification of chum to determine their origin, and the use of salmon excluders in nets.

"It is obvious that the pollock fishery's bycatch is not driving Western Alaska chum declines," United Catcher Boats, a Seattle-based fleet organization, said in a letter to the council. UCB noted complex factors such as changing ocean conditions.

The chum bycatch issue is expected to draw a ton of public comment at the meeting. Council members likely won't have an easy time deciding this one.

Look out for the ladder cops

A fishing vessel owner tells Deckboss he was surprised a few days ago when a U.S. Coast Guard boarding team issued his skipper a ticket for lack of a pilot ladder onboard.

The owner shared a copy of the ticket with us.

The ladder regulation hadn't been enforced previously — boarding teams never asked for a ladder during numerous boardings, he said, and no one ever asked to see one during dockside exams.

The boat involved in the Jan. 21 boarding was a 58-footer fishing cod in the Bering Sea out of False Pass. The boarding team was from the Coast Guard cutter Alex Haley.

The boarding team told the skipper they were "starting now" to enforce the ladder requirement, the fishing vessel owner said.

A pilot ladder is a flexible ladder lowered over the side of a vessel to aid people coming aboard.

Such ladders are helpful, as it's always perilous to climb from boat to boat.

This recent enforcement action begs the question: Are we seeing a crackdown on the pilot ladder requirement?

The vessel owner noted that pilot ladders are bulky, and expensive.

Scott Wilwert, the Coast Guard's fishing vessel safety program manager for Alaska, told us he was not aware of any big enforcement push on pilot ladders.

But fishermen should be aware that if their vessel has more than 4 feet of freeboard, federal regulations require a boarding ladder to assist law enforcement personnel and fishery observers, Wilwert said.

Freeboard can change considerably depending on whether the fishing vessel is tanked down, he noted.

The False Pass vessel had a freeboard of 5 feet, 6 inches, the ticket said.

Seattle sinking

A venerable fishing vessel, the Quaker Maid, sadly has sunk at Fishermen's Terminal in Seattle. We don't have any details on how this happened, nor do we know much about the vessel's history. The 72-foot wood boat, a Hanson make, was built in 1935, according to the Alaska Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission database. The boat was registered for many years with CFEC as a fish tender, with 2020 being the last year. Her homeport is listed as Excursion Inlet, and the owner is Quaker Maid Fisheries, of Lynnwood, Wash. Note the "for sale" sign on the wheelhouse. Jeff Pond photo