Fish and game announcements, stocked lakes in the Valley

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game has been busy, once again, with new announcements and regulatory changes. I’ll be paraphrasing or quoting from these announcements. The first involves shellfish.

The Board of Fisheries recently adopted a reporting requirement on Prince William Sound sport and subsistence shrimp permits. Individuals that fail to report harvest by October 15 will be denied a permit the following season unless they return harvest information and demonstrate that the failure to report was due to unavoidable circumstances.

Regarding squid, the BOF adopted new statewide sport fishing regulations for fishing squid. In addition to taking squid with traditional sport gear, squid may be taken with up to two squid jigs attached to a single line. A squid jig is defined as an artificial lure that consists of barbless hook clusters. The jig configuration may not exceed twenty-four inches in total length.

For hardshell clams, in all Cook Inlet and North Gulf Coast waters including Kachemak Bay, the sport and personal use fisheries for hardshell clams (butter and littleneck clams) are now closed. In the Cook Inlet area, the bag and possession limits of hardshell clams in the subsistence fishery were reduced from 80 to 40 clams in combination.

For West Cook Inlet and North Gulf Coast razor clams, the BOF established a bag and possession limit of ten gallons in the sport and personal use fisheries. Clammers are also now required to keep all clams dug to prevent wastage.

For East Cook Inlet razor clams the BOF adopted a management plan for the sport and personal use fisheries, which: 1) Divided east Cook Inlet into two management areas with the northern area assessed with Clam Gulch abundance data and the southern area being assessed with Ninilchik data; 2) Identified adult abundance thresholds necessary to open the new limited fishery and historical fishery in each management area; and 3) Created a limited fishery with a bag limit of thirty a season from May through October, and a total harvest identified as 10% of the adult abundance dependent on survey results.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game will be conducting razor clam abundance surveys at Clam Gulch and Ninilchik from mid-April through mid-May and will announce later in May if adult abundances are sufficient to open the new limited fishery.

The Frontiersman ran this following announcement last Sunday, but I’m repeating it to remind you of these additions. “Five lakes: Leech, Summit, Zero, Kings, and Anderson lakes; were added to the stocking program in the Northern Cook Inlet management area in June 2020.”

“Leech Lake is part of the Matanuska Lakes Complex and is accessible by foot from the Matanuska Lake trailhead and is stocked with 500 catchable rainbow trout. Summit Lake is in Hatcher Pass and is stocked with 500 catchable rainbow trout. Zero Lake is in the Houston area and is stocked with 4,000 fingerling rainbow trout. Northern pike were eradicated from Kings and Anderson lakes in 2020. Both lakes were stocked the following year, with 11,000 rainbow trout fingerling stocked into Anderson Lake and 3,000 rainbow trout catchables stocked into Kings Lake.

“The bag and possession limit for rainbow trout in these stocked lakes is five fish, of which only one fish may be 20 inches or greater in length.”

“The stocking program provides alternative opportunities for anglers that might otherwise direct their efforts toward native fish that are vulnerable to overfishing. As sport fishing effort continues to increase in the Matanuska-Susitna Valley, hatchery fish are becoming a more important management tool to satisfy recreational demands.”

And finally, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, Division of Sport Fish is offering a Streambank Rehabilitation Workshop in the Big Lake area. This workshop will be held over three days: two half-days in a virtual classroom setting and one full day outside in a hands-on setting.

The virtual classroom days will be held on Tuesday and Wednesday, May 10-11, 2022, from 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. The hands-on day will take place in Big Lake on Friday, May 20 from 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Participants will get their hands dirty while installing a portion of a streambank rehabilitation project using techniques and materials that they learned about in the classroom portion. Due to COVID-19, only twenty people will be allowed to participate in the hands-on portion.

For additional information, please contact the program’s Habitat Biologist, Jess Johnson, at (907) 267-2403.