Busy weekend for outdoors events

This is a busy weekend if you’re both a shooter and a boater. For the shooters out there, this Saturday and Sunday, Feb. 17th and 18th sees the Mat Valley Sportsmen’s Gun Show at Raven Hall on the state fairgrounds near Palmer. Right now, I’m planning to attend this show and possibly be working the McKinley Mountain Men table, if they have one.

This same weekend (add Friday, Feb. 16th) sees the Anchorage Boat Show at the Dena`ina Center in Anchorage. If you’re really into boats, boating, and fishing, this show can’t be missed. I haven’t been to a boat show in some time and, if I must make a choice, while it would be nice to attend this show, my first love will always be shooting over boating. In fact, I’m considering selling my riverboat if I don’t use it much this coming season.

Another item, while not happening this weekend, is coming up beginning the following week. The Alaska Board of Fisheries (BOF) will be holding their Upper Cook Inlet meeting beginning Feb. 23rd at the Egan Center in Anchorage. This is a critical meeting for several reasons.

The feds are taking over management of the center of Cook Inlet, known as the EEZ, for salmon beginning this coming season. This takeover is a result of a lawsuit filed in 2017 by the commercial drift fishing fleet from the Central District. Depending on how the feds structure their management plan, the results could be devastating for us in the Northern District of Cook Inlet.

The problem here is that the federal management style is almost opposite of the state program. The feds have no methodology for in-season management and have virtually no in-season data to base their fisheries predictions on. Everything the feds will do to correct issues arising during the fishing season is based on after-the-season data analyses, when the damage has already been done. With the currently proposed commercial fishing times in the plan, there is a significant chance of overfishing most or all the smaller runs of salmon passing through the mixed stock fishery in the EEZ. This will dramatically affect numbers of salmon passing into state managed waters.

If this happens, the brunt of conservation actions to protect the salmon stocks will fall on users in state waters and, worst case scenario, could result in no fishing for in-river users.

These smaller runs of salmon are everything other than the Kenai and Kasilof salmon runs. The Susitna River salmon runs, while being the third largest in Cook Inlet, are only around ten percent of a typical Kenai River run strength.

While the feds are mandated to manage to protect against overfishing of smaller stocks, they have no tools to monitor the fishing effort until after the season, and with their slow administrative functioning processes, couldn’t respond even if they found an overfishing problem during the season. That’s why you need to attend as much of the BOF meeting as you can to follow what happens and add your voice to the call for proper management.

If you’re new to the BOF process, the Mat-Su Borough Fish and Wildlife Commission (MSBFWC) is planning to hold an informational/educational public meeting in the evening next week to explain how things work and how you can more fully participate in a BOF/BOG (Board of Game) meeting. Check the Borough FWC website page for the day and time.

Many Valley residents spend part of their winter in Hawaii, soaking up sun and warm temperatures. If my wife had her way, we’d be living there (and wondering how to afford food and housing)! The State of Hawaii Supreme Court recently issued a ruling restricting their citizens’ Second Amendment rights.

In the case of Hawaii vs. Wilson, the court reversed a ruling by a lower court that the charges Mr. Wilson faced for carrying a gun without a permit violated his rights. Hawaii’s Supreme Court ruling is directly contrary to recent decisions from the United States Supreme Court, and further stated that hundreds of years of legal precedent regarding the Second Amendment is wrong.

The court declared that the federal cases in Heller and Bruen were wrongly decided and that the state’s constitutional rights to bear arms wasn’t an individual right. The justices wrote in their decision that the Second Amendment clashes with the “spirit of Aloha” while not offering a legal definition of exactly what that phrase means and how it differs from the Second Amendment. They just say the two concepts clash.