Salmon education scheduled

For those of you interested in pursuing a draw hunt permit for the next hunting season, now is the time to start.

The drawing permit application period opened yesterday and will close Dec. 17 at 5 p.m. This year marks the first time applications will only be accepted online, including party permit applications. However, for those without Internet access, telephone assistance is available. The number is listed on the front page of the drawing permit supplement. Successful applicants will be announced on Feb. 15, 2013 at 5 p/m.

The biggest change for this year is that an applicant can now apply for up to six moose hunts, only three of which can be for bulls. All six can be for antlerless moose hunts. Right now, I plan to apply for at least bison and moose. I just hope all the antlerless moose permits in 14A aren’t cancelled again because of a tough winter.

My sheep and goat hunting days are behind me and I’ve never had a strong interest in shooting a brown/grizzly bear. I was in the last group (2007) where successful bison permit applicants had to wait five years before they could reapply. The current wait is 10 years.

On Nov. 7-8, the Mat-Su Salmon Partnership will host the 2012 version of the Mat-Su Salmon Science and Conservation Symposium at the Central Mat-Su Public Safety Building in Wasilla. The theme of this year’s meeting is “2100: The Future of Wild Pacific Salmon,” a rather timely topic given our current situation in the Northern District of Cook Inlet. General registration is over, but I don’t think anyone would object to drop-ins visiting the symposium.

I first discovered this symposium four or five years ago and was extremely impressed with the number of agencies involved and the types of projects being done here in the Valley to preserve, reclaim or improve salmon habitat. There were a few presentations on salmon themselves, but the symposium tends to focus more on habitat concerns.

I was one of the welcoming speakers a couple of years ago and tried to make the point that having good salmon habitat is a fine thing, but it becomes superfluous if there are no salmon to use that habitat. The Mat-Su Borough Fish and Wildlife Commission (MSBFWC) plans to host a discussion group during the symposium to again make that point and explain how folks can get involved in the process of trying to secure more fish for the Northern District.

Since I brought up getting involved, here’s a starter. On Nov. 15, a public meeting will be held at the Curtis D. Menard Memorial Sports Center in Wasilla beginning at 6 p.m. where the results of this past season’s Cook Inlet salmon management actions and system escapements will be discussed by both the Sport Fish and Commercial Fisheries managers and their supervisors. Several of our state and Valley legislators will be present and asking questions, along with representatives of the local fish and game advisory committees and the MSBFWC.

The 2012 sports fishing salmon season in the Northern District was one of the worst in memory. Tens of millions of dollars were lost by businesses involved in the sports fishing industry in the Mat-Su. Until Valley folks start attending these fisheries-oriented meetings in numbers, even if only for a day, our fisheries resources will continue to be ignored.

The commercial industry normally has hundreds of folks attending the Board of Fisheries (BOF) meetings. Representatives of the sports fishing industry can usually be numbered in the tens. In a perfect world, how many of each side that show up for a meeting would have no bearing on the outcome of setting management regulations? But that’s in a perfect world.

The reality is that some BOF members count noses for each side and vote accordingly. They don’t always vote for the health of the resource first or argue to do “the right thing.” They look around and see who shows up and count that as how interested folks from that respective group are about how the resource is being managed.

Personally, I disagree with that approach, but that’s the reality of the fisheries political world. If more folks from the sports fishing side of the coin attended the meetings, testified and met with board members to explain why certain things need to be done, we would be much further into management of healthy salmon stocks than we currently are.

Howard Delo is a retired fisheries biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. You can leave him a message by emailing sports@frontiersman.com.