Fish and game issues another emergency order

Several things were happening in the fishing world this past week. In his column, Andy Couch touched on several of the items occurring before his deadline. One thing has happened after he submitted his report, so I’ll mention it now.

As I write this, I have just received the Fish and Game EO (emergency order) closing the commercial fishery in the Central District for the second time this past week. The normal fishing periods are Mondays and Thursdays. This just issued EO closed the Thursday commercial fishery.

According to the EO, historically, about 57 percent of the run of sockeye salmon have returned to the Kenai River by around July 25. So far, only about 445,000 sockeye have been counted. If one does the math, that results in a return of around 781,000 fish. The normal average escapement for a year like we’re seeing is about 900,000 sockeye, hence the commercial closure. There has also been some discussion about shutting down both the sport and personal use (PU) fisheries to make minimum escapements, but with the PU fishery scheduled to close on July 31, there probably wouldn’t be any real gain in escapement by closing that fishery.

To put things in perspective, the commercial fishers, and let’s narrow that down to the drift fleet, on average usually catch hundreds, if not thousands of fish per boat in each opening. The combined sport and personal use fishers might harvest a few thousand-fish total for a day. The conditions this year, from what I’m hearing, would not support those numbers. The same probably applies to the drifters – they’re probably only catching a few hundred fish per boat per opening. But several hundred commercial boats will catch significantly more fish in a day than the inriver users combined.

The forecast was for a poor return of sockeye in Cook Inlet in 2017 and so far, that forecast has been largely correct. The numbers of returning silvers have also not been good so far, but let’s hope that improves into early August. With the commercial drifters not being allowed to fish, we should see a steady run of silvers up here in the Northern District, assuming the fish show to begin with.

The short PU fishery which opened last Wednesday on Fish Creek closes tomorrow. Frankly, I’m surprised Fish and Game opened it. I had a friend call me a few weeks ago and ask me if I thought the Fish Creek PU fishery would be open this year. He was looking at getting a dip net but didn’t want to commit a bunch of money for something he couldn’t use if the fishery didn’t open.

I told him I didn’t think, based on past years results, that Fish and Game would open Fish Creek this year. Hopefully, he won’t begrudge me having a somewhat cloudy crystal ball!

I guess this is the year for RV repairs! I mentioned the problems we were having with the electrical system in the housing unit in a previous column. Here’s the update.

We took the RV to the dealership to get the master 12-volt solenoid replaced, thinking that was the cause of our problems. After replacing the solenoid, the technician found a faulty converter unit. This is what feeds 12-volt DC electricity from the house batteries to the various systems like lights and the water pump and which controls 120-volt AC electricity feeds to the air-conditioner, etc. This piece of equipment converts AC power to DC when the unit is hooked up to “shore” power to run the 12-volt amenities and recharge the house batteries.

We picked up the RV when the work was done and brought it home. In checking out the systems, I found the control panel/pump and furnace circuits appeared to have “dead shorts” in both lines. Back to the shop went the RV.

After many hours of chasing electrical lines, the technicians found where the two faulty circuits had apparently come loose from the back of the control panel and had shorted out against each other. After seeing the condition of the shorted wires, I’m thankful for blown fuses and a little surprised a fire didn’t develop.

According to the service manager, the wires had probably loosened from their connections over time and finally just came totally loose and touched each other. He thought this loosening was probably the cause of all the electrical issues we’ve had over the last couple of years in the housing unit.

I hope everything is finally fixed!