Public and local representatives meet with sport and commercial fishing officials

About 15 members of the public, a couple of state legislators or their aides, one borough assembly member, and the Matanuska-Susitna Borough Fish and Wildlife Commission met with representatives of both the Sport Fish Division and the Commercial Fisheries Division of ADF&G this past Monday evening at Fire Station 61 in Wasilla.

The purpose of the meeting was to hear AFG&G’s take on how the 2017 season was managed for both commercial and sports fisheries in the Central and Northern Districts of Cook Inlet. The meeting was originally scheduled to run two hours but ended up going almost four. The long meeting resulted from both lengthy questions asked of the department by the commission and some long and detailed explanations of why certain management actions were taken by the department managers.

In a nutshell, I don’t think we learned much new beyond the same old answers the managers have given over the past several years in these end-of-season encounters. The items that interested me the most came after the canned questions and answers were completed.

Commission members were asked if we had any further questions. My question was basically a two-parter: how would the department specifically define the term “minimize” and what constitutes providing “reasonable opportunity through the duration of the season.” These terms are used in the preamble of the Northern District Salmon Management Plan (5 AAC 21.358).

This plan specifically states that the department is to “minimize” the harvest of northern bound Coho in the commercial fisheries while managing the catch of sockeye, pink, and chum salmon. During late July and early August, most of the silvers moving through Cook Inlet are northern bound fish, to the tune of 90 to 95 percent of the silvers present. The department is also further instructed by the plan to manage Coho to provide “reasonable opportunity through the duration of the season” for inriver users targeting Coho salmon.

The examples I used in asking the questions were the various management actions taken during this past season’s Coho run to the Northern District. One fisheries manager stated that one method the department uses to minimize commercial catches involves time and area restrictions where commercial fishing is allowed. The drift fleet caught 186,000 Coho in 2017 with about half (90,000) coming from two 12-hour openers on July 31 and August 3. Another biologist confirmed that the sport catch of Coho will run between 30-50,000 fish for the entire season in the Northern District. The numbers themselves don’t suggest a “minimized” commercial catch.

Further, if time and area allowances are the main tools used to minimize commercial Coho catches, why did the two referenced commercial openers occur district-wide rather than seeing the drifters restricted to the expanded harvest zones or Area 1 or the “three-mile corridor” or some combination of these areas? The remaining sockeye, which were supposedly the target fish during these two openers, would have been harvested had the boats been restricted to the expanded harvest zones while significantly fewer Coho would have been intercepted at the same time.

This argument about how to minimize the Coho catch doesn’t stand up here!

How about reasonable opportunity? Again, according to the fisheries managers, the management plans state that not restricting inriver harvest of fish during the season constitutes reasonable opportunity. After the August 3 commercial harvest of nearly 45,000 Coho, the Sport Fish Division manager issued an emergency order prohibiting the Little Susitna River bait opener scheduled for August 6 from happening. Up to that point, only a few hundred Coho had passed the weir and there was concern about achieving the escapement goals for the system.

So much for the reasonable opportunity argument the department presented!

Yes, we did eventually see a good return of silvers. Timing was the problem. The early fish were harvested in the commercial fishery. The second half of the fish run showed up late, after the tourists had left, the kids were starting school, the state fair was commencing, and folks were getting ready to go hunting. The “perfect storm” of bad timing had occurred.

I also suggested that perhaps now was the time to alter the drift management plan to include a second species of fish. Right now, everything is based on Kenai sockeye salmon numbers and timing. That includes fishing for Coho as well. Perhaps we should add triggers to the plan to shift management from sockeye to Coho to minimize the Coho catch while still allowing the mop up of the remaining sockeye. Something to think about!

Howard Delo is a retired fisheries biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. This column is the opinion of the writer and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman or its parent company, Wick Communications. You can leave Delo a message by emailing sports@frontiersman.com.