How many fish are enough

You arrive at the Anchorage Ted Stevens International Airport to pick up your visiting relatives this summer. While passing the ticket counters, you notice several travelers with fishing rod cases in hand and speaking a foreign language, possibly French or Italian, or even German. You also notice that each person has four or five "fish boxes," containing nearly 70 pounds each of frozen salmon fillets to be checked as baggage. You mutter to yourself that these guys must have broken the law, and where's a cop when you need one?

This scenario has occurred several times every year in recent memory and will occur several times again this summer in Anchorage. Why haven't the Alaska Department of Fish and Game or the Division of Fish and Wildlife Protection Troopers taken a more proactive role in stopping this obvious abuse of the sports fishery resources of Alaska in general and Southcentral specifically?

Perhaps they have, but under existing regulations, they are limited in what they can do.

The history of sports anglers taking home literally hundreds of pounds of salmon fillets, as well as quantities of halibut and other popular sports fishing species has been documented in the press for years. Usually, the illegal attempts at catching or processing the fish are the stories most prominently reported in the news.

An article in the Frontiersman by Naomi Klouda, from July 15, 2002, reported that four Italians were cited for over-bag and possession limit violations of king salmon from the Talachulitna River.

Jon Little, writing in the Anchorage Daily News on Aug. 5, 2002, tells of how a joint effort by several different Alaska state agencies involved in fish and game law enforcement broke up an illegal salmon snagging and canning operation on the Kenai River. These offenders were staying in a RV park and were American tourists from the Lower 48.

Craig Medred, writing in the July 25, 1993, issue of the Anchorage Daily News, discussed some personally witnessed over-bag-limits by Germans fishing on the Newhalen River. He goes on to mention both French and Japanese tourists also being greedy and leaving with more than the legal limit. The problem wasn't just confined to foreign tourists, however. Medred further noted similar problems with American tourists up from Outside and many Alaskan residents as well.

However, not every angler with several boxes of frozen or canned fish has collected them illegally. Currently, only king salmon, of the five salmon species present in Alaska, has a season bag limit on the number of fish that can be kept. The other two salmon species of most interest to sports anglers, coho or silver salmon and sockeye or red salmon, have daily bag limits, but no season limit. The remaining two salmon species found in Valley waters, pink and chum salmon, also have no season limit.

The current sports fishing regulations list a bag limit of "other salmon," which are any salmon species except kings, as three per day and a possession limit, depending on whether the anglers are working the Knik Arm streams or the Susitna River and its many tributaries, of either three or six salmon, respectively. Be aware that silver salmon are limited to two fish per day of the three-fish daily limit.

To remove a fish from your possession limit, the fish must be "preserved." The definition of a preserved fish, according to the regulations, means "fish prepared in such a manner, and in an existing state of preservation, as to be fit for human consumption after a 15-day period, and does not include unfrozen fish temporarily stored in coolers that contain ice, dry ice, or fish that are lightly salted."

Canning or freezing an individual's daily catch effectively removes that catch from the person's possession limits. The angler is then free to go out the next day and legally try for another daily or possession limit of salmon.

Let's do some math here. Say a person sets up a camp along a good salmon stream somewhere in the Valley and has either a canning setup or access to a freezer, fishes every day for two weeks, and catches the legal daily limit of salmon other than kings. The two-week time limit is arbitrary, but is the legal maximum length of time a camp on state land can remain before regulations require it to be taken down or moved to a new location.

Suppose that each fish yields five pounds of edible product, not an unreasonable assumption for either red or silver salmon. Three fish per day at five pounds each yields 15 pounds of salmon per day. Fishing over a 14-day period and catching the legal daily bag limit every day would allow that angler to take home 210 pounds of preserved salmon.

Now assume that same angler also has limited out with five king salmon for the season. The author and his wife, between them during one recent season, caught six king salmon and put 150 pounds of fillets in the freezer. This averages 25 pounds of fillets per fish.

Five kings at 25 pounds each yields 125 pounds. Add the 210 pounds of "other salmon" and that lucky angler could be taking home a total of 335 pounds of salmon, or almost five full "fish boxes."

If the angler has also spent some time fishing for trout or traveled down to Homer or Seward and chartered out for halibut, cod or rock bass, then the number of full "fish boxes" waiting to be loaded on the plane for the ride home could be even larger.

What are the chances someone could really catch this much salmon or other fish legally? Consider that most of the European tourists over here to fish and some Americans up from Outside probably spent as much as a month or two at some fishing lodge located on a remote and relatively inaccessible salmon stream. They probably fished every day with guides whose job was to put their clients on fish. Given that scenario, the stack of boxes at the airport shouldn't be a surprise.

What impact would hundreds or perhaps thousands of anglers fishing at this level have on the fishery resource? Dave Rutz, the Northern Cook Inlet Area Management Biologist for the Division of Sport Fish of ADF&G, said that, "in years with strong runs of the various species of salmon, fishing pressure at this level would probably not have a noticeable impact. However, in years with weak returns of salmon, this amount of legal harvest could be significant."

Rutz said that if a specific stream, for example, Lake Creek, where several fishing lodges are located and is heavily fished by clients of these lodges, was targeted with this level of fishing pressure, local populations of salmon could be severely impacted during a weak return.

What are some steps that could be taken to address both the illegal overharvest of salmon, as well as the potentially huge number of salmon that can be legally harvested?

An obvious approach toward curbing the illegal harvest of salmon would require putting more FWP troopers in the field performing both routine patrols and undercover stings. With across-the-board department budget cuts a political certainty, this option is not likely.

Further, with the pending merger of the FWP Division with the Alaska State Trooper Division, and the probable shift in enforcement priority toward criminal law enforcement rather than fish and game enforcement, fewer troopers will be doing fisheries enforcement work after the merger than are currently working in the field.

Sgt. Mark Agnew of the FWP Post in Big Lake suggested a couple of points which would make enforcing the existing regulations easier.

"The current hunting regulations for guides and lodges catering to hunters require the guides and/or lodges to keep records for each specific animal harvested," Agnew said.

"If the fishing regulations were tightened up to that same level of recordkeeping for the guides and lodges servicing anglers, with appropriate penalties for failure to comply, it would be a lot easier to track and enforce clients' possession limits of fish," he continued.

However, Agnew said he didn't think current conditions in the industry would allow this tightening of fish records to happen.

"The sportsfishing guide associations and the lodges would all object to any increase in recordkeeping as a time and financial burden on their businesses. They would say the burden for documentation should fall on the individual angler, as it currently does in regulation," he said.

Agnew also said increasing the fines or penalties for illegal sportsfishing activities, perhaps with a differential scale between resident and non-resident anglers, would also serve as a strong deterrent.

Rutz said restricting fishing times or totally closing areas that could not withstand heavy fishing pressure would serve to protect the fishery resource in that area. The down side to taking this approach, he said, would be the loss of fishing opportunity in many areas where light to moderate fishing pressure could be accommodated by the fish populations present.

Rutz also suggested the Board of Fish could establish a season possession limit for all species of salmon and trout and possibly restrict how many fish any individual can export out of state.

"If the board decided to institute seasonal possession limits for salmon, those limits would likely apply to both resident and non-resident anglers," he said.

The idea of establishing a season bag limit for each species of salmon is not a new thought. Craig Medred, writing in the July 3, 1994, Anchorage Daily News advocated this approach. He made the point that all personal use dipnet fisheries around Southcentral Alaska have a season bag limit.

He raised the question that if the Board of Fish saw the need to limit the number of fish a resident Alaskan could take home from a "meat fishery," which the dipnet fisheries all are, why are the hook and line sports fishers, resident and non-resident alike, free to take home as many fish as they can legally catch in a season?

Medred stated, "Subsistence dipnetters on the nearby Kenai River can take only 25 red salmon a year from that waterway, but a sport angler here could pretty easily catch twice that in a summer -- all very legal." He concluded his thoughts with the comment, "If the state Board of Fisheries, in its wisdom, thinks 15 salmon is enough for a Copper River dipnetter, then 15 salmon ought to be enough for the average tourist."

This sentiment might sound good to Alaskan residents. However, the "average tourist" might not see things the same way and could choose to vacation somewhere else where he feels his sports fishing dollars would be better appreciated. After all, if he's spending the big bucks to come and visit Alaska, why should he be restricted in the number of fish he can legally catch or possibly even send home?

To illustrate this point, recent fishing restrictions and closed periods on the Kenai River king salmon fishery have raised howls of protest from tourists who had planned their fishing vacation to Alaska around the affected dates of the restrictions. Local businesses have also complained about lost revenues ranging from canceled trips with fishing guides to empty motel rooms and vacant restaurant tables.

At some point, the businesses and residents of the State of Alaska will have to make some decisions. They will need to decide which is more important, tourist dollars or a healthy and thriving salmon fishery resource. And probably the biggest decision of all still needs to be made -- how many fish are enough?