Frowns fill fish forum

WILLOW — If there was a person attending Wednesday’s meeting satisfied with the state of sport fishing in the Valley this summer, he or she didn’t speak up.

Rep. Mark Neuman, R-Big Lake, called the meeting and brought Alaska Department of Fish and Game Commissioner Cora Campbell and some of her staff to the Willow Creek Resort. The meeting came on the heels of a request by Gov. Sean Parnell to declare a federal emergency over low king salmon returns.

“This low abundance period is not specific to the Susitna drainage,” she told the crowd, and the state is hoping to figure out what’s going wrong.

Jeff Regnart, Campbell’s director of commercial fisheries, said the problem is real and statewide.

“We have something that we haven’t seen really in about 75 years,” Regnart said.

He said the state is putting together a list of “significant stocks” of fish. The Susitna’s fish will be on that list. The department intends to study the problem starting with a symposium in Anchorage Oct. 22 and 23.

“I’m hoping people will come in and help us design this study plan,” he said.

From that study, the state will be able to generate a “suite of programs” to manage the fish and, hopefully, return the fisheries to health.

But the crowd wanted to hear more. Some asked about decisions made this summer. How would the department rate how it handled fisheries?

Regnart said that if faced with the same information in the same sequence it arrived this summer, the department would have made the exact same decisions it did. Whether those were the right decisions, he said, is a worthy discussion.

Another question from the crowd: why does the department let thousands of red salmon go by in an attempt to let a certain number of king salmon return to their spawning grounds?

“We’ve been having those conversations,” Campbell said. “We had a season that I don’t think anybody expected we would have.”

The department’s director of sport fishing, Charlie Swanton, said one of the surprises this year was a really late run of kings.

“It was surprising to all of us,” he said.

Others in the crowd decried decisions to let commercial fishermen in the inlet fish when, folks in the crowd clearly believed, it was obvious those fish wouldn’t return in sufficient numbers to allow fishing in the Susitna drainage. Still others decried a system that seemed weighted to favor fishing on the Kenai Peninsula over fishing in Mat-Su.

Part of the problem, though, is that different parts of the fisheries are managed differently. Campbell sits on the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council, which sets the rules for fishing on the high seas. Those rules are important because some of the fishermen out there are pulling in bycatch, or fish of a species they are not targeting, which could also mean fewer fish in the rivers.

“This summer for the first time they put a limit on high seas bycatch,” Campbell said. “The federal process is very slow.”

Contact reporter Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.