Board of fish issues, and fish and gam closures

Fish and Game has been very busy issuing sport fishing emergency orders recently. I received seven different notices. For all practical purposes, all king salmon fishing (sport and personal use) has been closed for the 2023 season all over Southcentral Alaska, including in the salt waters of Cook Inlet.

These closures include the Susitna River drainage, the Kenai River, the Kasilof River, the Anchor River, Deep Creek, and West Cook Inlet fresh waters. The Little Susitna River is restricted to catch-and-release only (no harvest). The only location where harvest will be allowed is at the Eklutna Tailrace since that fishery is entirely supported by hatchery stocked fish.

The only exception to the saltwater closures is in Lower Cook Inlet. Quoting from that news release, “In favor of protecting early-run and late-run Cook Inlet king salmon and ensuring sport fishing opportunities in the future, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G) is reducing the bag and possession limit from two to one king salmon of any size, south of the latitude of Bluff Point (59° 40.00' N. lat.). The waters of the Nick Dudiak Fishing Lagoon and the Seldovia slough and lagoon are excluded from this change.”

I would expect Andy Couch will go into more detail about these closures in his column.

I haven’t done anything outdoors oriented recently, other than working with my contractor to “stabilize” my collapsed storage building. I’ve been spending time on the phone with my insurance adjusters for both the building and contents.

By the time this sees print, I will have hosted an insurance field adjuster to ascertain damages to my building and a private sector estimator representing the company I hope will do the repairs on my small motorhome, which was stored in the collapsed building. I expect the insurance field adjuster for the motorhome to view and photograph damages in the next week or so.

I hope to have met with the person I would like to do repairs to my riverboat before this is printed. As things settle down regarding the building and the RV, I will be filing a claim on the riverboat under its own insurance policy with the same company who insured the building. I’m trying to do this a piece at a time so things don’t get too confusing, primarily for me!

The timeline for all this can get confusing too. We can’t do any more on the building until the snow melts and the ground firms up. Then the building will be dismantled. We’ll probably start rebuilding in June or maybe July. If everything works out regarding insurance on the motorhome, I’ve been told repairs could probably begin in May, hopefully, to be completed before June.

I’m still working on the riverboat, but the damages to it, as far as I can tell, are relatively minor and shouldn’t take very long to fix. The biggest “problem” will be patching the paint where it was chipped on the roof and edges of the cabin enclosure.

The repaint doesn’t have to look brand new, but I would like it to look decent and protect the aluminum cabin from oxidation. I’m looking down the road toward when I’ll be too old to operate the boat or the RV and I would like them to be usable and looking as good as possible when the time comes to sell them.

This has been a tough year for us. My wife had two auto accidents this past summer resulting in one totaled vehicle and another sustaining several thousand dollars in damage. Now we have a collapsed building with probably four figures in damages to our RV, a leaser amount to the riverboat, and the need to replace our storage building with a much stouter structure. Such is life!