Ready for the Board of Fisheries workshop

This coming Monday, Oct. 15, kicks off the beginning of this year’s Board of Fisheries cycle with its annual workshop. While Cook Inlet fisheries are not scheduled to be addressed this cycle (they come up in the 2020-2021 cycle year), there are a few items coming before the board that would be of interest to Southcentral anglers.

Following the agenda scheduling for the workshop meeting (Oct. 15-16 at the Egan Center in Anchorage), the first item of interest, probably coming up around mid-day Monday, is a report detailing how to improve delivery of sport fishing regulations in Alaska. According to a department news release issued Oct. 10, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G) surveyed nearly 4,000 resident and non-resident sport anglers online, asking how well they understood and could access Alaska sport fishing regulations.

The 308-page survey report, compiled and prepared by DJ Case and Associates, has seven specific recommendations to ADF&G about how to help anglers better understand sport fishing regulations and identified preferences on how fishers want to receive that information from the department.

Those recommendations are: reduce and simplify regulations; build a smartphone app; lower the burden of interpretation; continue to improve the regulations booklets and ADF&G website; support indirect forms of communication; rephrase regulations; and significantly rewrite news releases for Emergency Orders.

This should make for interested listening, especially if you are one of those folks who scratch their heads trying to figure out what’s legal where and when, even after reading the booklet. The meeting should be streaming online on the BOF website if you can’t attend in person or you can read the entire survey report posted on the BOF website under meeting information for the workshop to get more detail of what the report contains.

The last item on the agenda scheduled for Monday afternoon is discussion on Agenda Change Requests (ACRs). ACRs 1 and 2 are concerned with excessive hatchery production of pink salmon with resultant straying into surrounding systems and seeking to cap overall statewide hatchery egg take capacity at 75% of the year 2000 permitted level.

Both ACRs are related to a discussion scheduled for Tuesday afternoon concerning salmon hatchery production in Alaska and its unknown effects on the status of wild salmon across the state. This forum is slated to start at 1:30 pm and is open to public participation within guidelines established by the BOF. This is another discussion that will be interesting to listen in on. I worked 15 years for the state in their salmon hatchery program, so I have maybe more interest than most about what’s happening.

Cook Inlet salmon fisheries are the topic of ACRs 5, 6, and 7. ACR 5 seeks to prohibit fishing in the waters of the Homer Spit Marine Terminal barge basin and was proposed by Homer Spit Properties, LLC. ACR 6 wants to provide the department emergency order authority to utilize time, area, methods and means or possession limits to restrict Kenai and Kasilof Rivers personal use fisheries and require daily reporting of harvest in these fisheries.

Ironically, this ACR was submitted by the United Cook Inlet Drift Association, the industry group which represents the drifters in the Central District. UCIDA is asking for a sharing of the burden of conservation in years of low returns, a concept they have fought bitterly when the inriver users asked for the same considerations in years’ past.

ACR 7 asks the board to open and close the commercial set gillnet fishery within 600 feet of the North Kalifornsky Beach area independent of fishing time restrictions described in various management plans.

The three criteria for an ACR to be accepted by the board in an out-of-cycle year are: for a fishery conservation purpose or reason; to correct an error in regulation; or to correct an effect on a fishery that was unforeseen when a regulation was adopted. If the board decides that any of the ACRs fulfill at least one of the above criteria, then they can vote to accept the ACR and schedule it for an upcoming meeting.

Because of the contentiousness of Cook Inlet salmon fisheries management, accepting an ACR out-of-cycle is rarely done. The BOF usually prefers that the ACR reappear as a proposal in-cycle to allow the affected user groups to prepare arguments which can be submitted in either oral or written form for or against the proposal. Public testimony is not allowed during workshop meetings.

If you have the time, stop by the Egan Center beginning around 8:30 am Monday.