Down to brass tacks

Before I get into the main topic of this column, here’s a quick reminder. The Mat-Su Outdoorsman Show opens at noon today at the Curtis D. Menard Memorial Sports Center. The show runs through Sunday and is the first outdoor show of the season here in Southcentral. The Alaska Gun Collectors’ Association (AGCA) Gun Show will be held tomorrow and Sunday at Raven Hall on the Alaska State Fairgrounds in Palmer. This is a great weekend for you outdoors folks and shooters to kick off the beginning of breakup.

Now, down to brass tacks. The Board of Fisheries (BOF) Statewide Finfish meeting wrapped up last Sunday in Anchorage. Approximately 35 proposals and two emergency petitions were addressed and acted upon. I’ll give you my take on a few of them.

First, there was one emergency petition that directly affects our Northern District of Upper Cook Inlet. The petition asked for a very specific regulatory action in light of the totally revised sockeye salmon enumeration program adopted by Fish and Game for the 2009 season and will continue this year.

For the BOF to adopt an emergency petition two votes are required. The first requires finding that an emergency exists and the second regards the merits of the petition. Over the years, the BOF has established some pretty lofty standards in order to have a finding of emergency. That’s where this petition failed. The board didn’t think the petition constituted an emergency. The merits of the petition were never discussed. However, the Cook Inlet meeting cycle is next year, so I would expect to see the petition reappear as a proposal for those meetings.

One proposal called for banning the use of felt-soled waders or wading shoes in Alaska with an effective date of Jan. 1, 2012. Trout Unlimited made the proposal based on a concern that felt-soled waders were prone to spreading parasites and diseases into areas where these organisms are not currently found. This is not a new concept. The BOF banned felt soles in Southeast last year during the Southeast meeting cycle. New Zealand has already banned felt-soled waders and at least two other states are looking to do the same thing.

During deliberations, the facts were established that a large part of Alaska has both the freshwater temperature ranges and intermediary host organisms to support several nasty diseases and parasites that are not currently present, as far as is known. However, nobody really knows much about exactly which diseases and parasites are or are not present in the bulk of Alaska’s freshwater systems. Choosing to err on the side of caution, the board passed the ban statewide.

As a side note to those of you cussing about having to replace your boots in a couple of years, the wader industry has been moving away from manufacturing felt-soled waders for several years because of these contamination concerns and has already developed alternate sole materials that work as well as felt without the problems felt has exhibited.

The local Mat Valley Fish and Game Advisory Committee had submitted a proposal requesting that sports charter boat captains and crews be allowed to catch and retain personal fish while on a saltwater charter with clients onboard. This proposal failed.

There were department concerns regarding halibut management if crews were allowed to fish, plus this practice had been severely abused when it was legal in the past. From an enforcement view, not allowing charter crews to halibut fish while allowing rockfish and lingcod catches would be a nightmare to enforce. From across the state, only two advisory committees supported this proposal in their on-time comments. Nine other ACs opposed it. They cited management and abuse concerns for their lack of support.

The BOF, in complying with a Superior Court order stemming from a lawsuit, passed a definition of the phrase “subsistence way of life” and kept the Chitna dipnet fishery a personal use fishery. This was a disappointment to the Chitna Dipnet Association and its many members.

The definition passed by the BOF is, in my opinion, a strict definition of what subsistence is as it was originally practiced, and still is in remote parts of the state. I’m not sure any new fisheries asking for a subsistence label will be able to meet the standard. In fact, several currently labeled subsistence fisheries stand to loose that title if they come under review by the BOF and this definition is applied. Only time will tell on that point.

The deliberations on whether Chitna should be reclassified as a subsistence fishery were, again in my opinion, thorough and in-depth. Just as there are people qualified for various subsistence fisheries who do not use the fisheries as such, I am sure there are users of personal use fisheries who practice a subsistence lifestyle in that fishery. However, both of these user groups are a minority within the users of the fishery in which they participate. The bottom line is that, in the opinion of the BOF, the Chitna dipnet fishery, when viewed overall, did not rise to the level of a subsistence fishery in light of the newly adopted definition of a subsistence way of life.

The Chitna fishery will continue to be managed as it has been for 22 of the past 26 years.

Howard Delo is a retired fisheries biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. You can leave him a message by e-mailing sports@frontiersman.com.