Preparing proposals for the next Upper Cook Inlet Board of Fisheries meeting

The first outdoor show of the season is in the books and the second is coming up next weekend. Breakup is well on its way to clearing the snow and drying out the ground and proposal deadlines are looming.

The next Upper Cook Inlet Board of Fisheries meeting is scheduled for February-March of 2020, but the deadline for submitting proposals for that meeting is April 10. The Matanuska-Susitna Borough Fish and Wildlife Commission has been working on drafting a series of proposals aimed at improving fisheries management in our area and getting more fish passed through the Cook Inlet fisheries gauntlet and returning to their natal northern streams.

The BOF and ADF&G use management plans to aid and direct the management of salmon returns to specific freshwater systems throughout Cook Inlet. Amazingly enough, there are relatively few fisheries management plans for our Northern District river systems.

The Deshka River has decades of king salmon return information, yet Fish and Game has never developed a management plan for that species. Over the past several years, the MSBFWC has worked with Fish and Game to develop a king salmon management plan to deal with management during times of below average returns.

King salmon management in the entire Susitna Drainage is often based on what is happening in the Deshka and while the Deshka is the major producer in the Susitna Drainage, it doesn’t always represent what is happening in the other drainages. A second king salmon management plan was developed to address the other Susitna tributaries and the Yentna River system.

The Little Susitna River also has decades of king salmon data yet no king salmon management plan. The MSBFWC again worked with Fish and Game to develop a plan to manage when king numbers are below average.

We hope these three plans will be deliberated and passed into regulation at the next UCI meeting since they were developed in conjunction with Fish and Game and we were told that the department would support the management aspects of the proposals while remaining neutral on the allocation aspects of the plans. The commission still needs to work out some “bugs” in one plan, but we plan to submit all three proposals by the April 10 deadline.

The commission is also planning to submit a proposal dealing with the Central District Drift Net Management Plan. In 2014, the BOF made some sweeping changes to that plan that have allowed more silver salmon to clear the Central District and reach Northern District waters.

In 2017, the BOF undid some of those changes, allowing the drift fleet to have a major impact on the interception of northern bound silver salmon. Dates for restriction of the drift fleet were pushed further into August and an addition area-wide fishing period was added after July 31. That one 12-hour period allowed the fleet to harvest over 43,000 silvers this past season. Combined with the normal period which happened the end of July, almost 95,000 silvers were taken in the drift fishery before August 6, effectively eliminating the front half of the Northern District silver return.

Since we have been seeing our silver returns occurring later than normal, commercial harvest into August has been having a greater impact on those returns—exactly what we were trying to minimize with the 2014 management changes.

The commission is also looking at the possibility of submitting a proposal regarding the Northern District King Salmon Management Plan which would better align that plan with the three river system management plans being submitted and which would partially address the sharing of the burden of conservation between the sport and commercial king salmon fisheries in the Northern District.

This draft contains a couple of paired restrictions which would only be used in the event of a below average return. Basically, if the sport fishery is restricted, then the commercial fishery is also restricted.

The sharing of the burden of conservation between user groups is contained in regulation and calls for as equal a sharing as is possible between groups. This is where the “devil is in the details” when trying to pair restrictions between sport and commercial fisheries.

There are many ways the sport fishery can be restricted: no bait, single hook, artificial lure, restricted bag limits, restricted harvest days, etc. Coming up with a list of meaningful restrictions for a commercial net fishery is much tougher. Restricting fishing times, fishing areas, and amount of allowed gear are possibilities, but they can be much more punitive on the commercial fisher compared to the sport angler.