I totally agree the high seas fishing is hurting all the runs up and down our coast. Problem is those huge operations are able to "donate" huge sums of money to the right people so they can keep things as they are now. The huge Cook Inlet runs were built off of 350-500 thousand escapements. When F&G started letting 1-2 million escape to fill the system for dip netters and red snagging they ended up with more spawners than the system could support. You got smaller weaker fry that could not survive. No different that putting 100 head of cattle on an small plot of land. F&G should be allowed to manage for highest sustainable yield and that would make for a bigger slice of the pie for all.
How do you selectively allow high king escapement and long, long red openings?
I have long held there is o nly one way to do it... change the state Constitution on one point, fish traps. Kick all Commie fishermen to the curb... trap every fish possible, releasing ALL kings. Retained fish are divided to each of the former Commies. Leave enough reds in the river to achieve their exact goal just to see how badly they can screw that up.
I've watched this fiasco for decades and long ago came to the same conclusion as Art. Trap em all at the river mouth and release as needed. The snaggers can back their pickup up for their quota or better yet truck subsistence fish into Anchorage. Sell the remainder and distribute funds among netters for a decade.
What you are proposing is pure Marxist Communism...
You want the Government to sieze control of all the fish and distribute as they see fit === Communism
Swamplord,
You're right, it does sound like pure Marxism. The democratic way to manage the fish would be to appoint a Board Of Fish to regulate allocation of the resource and then appoint a majority of the BOF from the commercial fishing industry to ensure the highest sustainable yield from the resource. What could go wrong?
Comrade Vern
Well played!
Mark Begich, Joaquin Jackson, and Heller resistance... Three huge reasons to worry about the NRA.
Thanks for posting this…. I can’t believe that in this day and age we allow the trawlers to destroy our marine environment. If the damage was visible they’d have been shut down years ago. They claim to have cut their bycatch from 50% down to 5% but they fail to acknowledge how decades of killing that MASSIVE amount of biomass has significantly reduced the overall health of our oceans as well as the recovery of the individual species affected.
“ It’s called bycatch. Roughly two-thirds of the total halibut caught in the Bering Sea since 2006 has been bycatch taken in trawler nets most of which is dumped. In 2021, when subsistence fishermen were prohibited from fishing for chinook and chum salmon on the Yukon River, pollock boats swept up more than half a million individual salmon from the Bering Sea. And while red king crab and snow crab fisheries have been shuttered this year, the trawl industry has still been permitted to discard up to 4.3 million individual snow crab and 32,000 red king crab though they don’t always reach their cap.”
�Politicians are the lowest form of life on earth. Liberal Democrats are the lowest form of politician.� �General George S. Patton, Jr.
Thanks for posting this…. I can’t believe that in this day and age we allow the trawlers to destroy our marine environment. If the damage was visible they’d have been shut down years ago. They claim to have cut their bycatch from 50% down to 5% but they fail to acknowledge how decades of killing that MASSIVE amount of biomass has significantly reduced the overall health of our oceans as well as the recovery of the individual species affected.
“ It’s called bycatch. Roughly two-thirds of the total halibut caught in the Bering Sea since 2006 has been bycatch taken in trawler nets most of which is dumped. In 2021, when subsistence fishermen were prohibited from fishing for chinook and chum salmon on the Yukon River, pollock boats swept up more than half a million individual salmon from the Bering Sea. And while red king crab and snow crab fisheries have been shuttered this year, the trawl industry has still been permitted to discard up to 4.3 million individual snow crab and 32,000 red king crab though they don’t always reach their cap.”
Sickening isn't it AcesNeights?
Are there fish farms outside of Cook Inlet, do you know? I have heard that these Farmed Salmon Operations, which produce Salmon that taste like dog food to me, produce a lot of Sea Lice. These Sea Lice latch onto the smolts and kill them.
Not to derail, but what do you think about the Skeena being closed to recreational salmon fishermen like us?
Leave it up to the government and they will destroy everything good!
Thanks for posting this…. I can’t believe that in this day and age we allow the trawlers to destroy our marine environment. If the damage was visible they’d have been shut down years ago. They claim to have cut their bycatch from 50% down to 5% but they fail to acknowledge how decades of killing that MASSIVE amount of biomass has significantly reduced the overall health of our oceans as well as the recovery of the individual species affected.
“ It’s called bycatch. Roughly two-thirds of the total halibut caught in the Bering Sea since 2006 has been bycatch taken in trawler nets most of which is dumped. In 2021, when subsistence fishermen were prohibited from fishing for chinook and chum salmon on the Yukon River, pollock boats swept up more than half a million individual salmon from the Bering Sea. And while red king crab and snow crab fisheries have been shuttered this year, the trawl industry has still been permitted to discard up to 4.3 million individual snow crab and 32,000 red king crab though they don’t always reach their cap.”
Sickening isn't it AcesNeights?
Are there fish farms outside of Cook Inlet, do you know? I have heard that these Farmed Salmon Operations, which produce Salmon that taste like dog food to me, produce a lot of Sea Lice. These Sea Lice latch onto the smolts and kill them.
I can guarantee you 100% that there is not one fish farm in the state of alaska. They are outlawed under the state's constitution.
I work for one of the Private Non-profit aquaculture associations up here and it always cracks me up when people suggest that the hatcheries are to blame. Just like a lot of the people working at the hatcheries blame the whales for eating their fish. Do they eat some? Of course. Do the huge schools of juvenile cod eat more of them? I think so. Its just that the whales are more visible.
It all comes down to ocean conditions, especially for fish that are as wide ranging as a king salmon. I talked to some NOAA researchers that were researching the "blob" and they could point to a direct downturn in a lot of fish stocks, not just pacific salmon.
The past few years have been great for herring spawn, which is a big food source for these salmon yet the salmon numbers still are decreasing. Why?
I sure don't have the answers. I do know that without the hatcheries in place the fisherman would have decimated the wild stocks long ago.
Here's some food for thought when someone tells you that ocean ranched (what we do here in alaska) salmon are the same as a farmed salmon-
Generally speaking the fish are released into the wild in alaska at the following weights,
Pinks- 1.0-1.5g Chum- 2.0-4.0g Sockeye- .24g for fry stocking up to 20-25g smolt stocking Coho- 22.0-25.0g Chinook- ~25.0g
These numbers have been pretty consistent at all the hatcheries I have worked at up here in AK (about a dozen). If you take into account their size when they return as adults, the overall percentage of that fish's body weight being put on by a commercially prepared food is minuscule. It put on its weight eating a natural diet. A farmed fish however puts on nearly 100% of its weight eating commercially prepared fish food. Can probably guess which one is going to taste better.
It's different in Canada, there are a ton of fish farms on both the East and West Coasts, which are farming Atlantic Salmon.
I am not saying that Hatcheries are the problem, I am saying that the combination of all combined are to blame for this situation in both the USA and Canada.
Nobody will ever convince me that sport fishermen/fisherwomen are to blame for this dismal situation. As far as I am concerned it's overfishing by the commercial industry. It happened in Canada long ago with the total collapse of the cod fishery, and the commercial industry was well on its way to destroying the Atlantic Salmon stock as well.
I have done enough sport fishing for both Atlantic and Pacific Salmon since 1974, to know a little about it. Not to say that I am an expert on any of this, I am just an observer that loves to fish.
I do appreciate your insight and opinion, maybe we are both correct and all of these factors have led us to where we are today.
I do believe that these situations are brought on primarily by overfishing by the "Commercial Fishing Complex" and not the sport fisherman or fisherwomen. I have seen this movie years ago on the east coast. Different part of the world, same movie.
When I hear the word ByCatch, IPUKE!
How about this concept? If you do not catch it YOURSELF, you are not permitted to eat it! Ban Commercial Fishing and the oceans would fill up fast!
Dunno about other systems, but I'm sure an unlimited number (legally decreed) of Kenai River Guides rapaciously strip-mining the river for kings for decades had absolutely nothing to do with the Kenai area being mostly closed to king fishing last year, and now this. Likely the same scenario on other major CL streams - the Su, Deshka,Wollow etc.
Just ask them.
Not the only cause, - perhaps not a major one even -but perhaps the final nail in the coffin. This situation was clearly indicated as coming at least 40 years ago- they just kept kicking the boat down the river. Hoping......
I'm a sockeye eater, so don't care if I ever catch aother king, but I sure hate to see any once health stock of anything decimated.
We have found the problem, and it is us. I know of one guide that moved up here from Washington just to mine the river in it's heyday. He was running 18 boats, two runs a day, and grossed $600,000 in 6 weeks. Killing kings.
Surviving guides will just switch to really hammering the Red and Silver runs, more than they have. The Kenai Sockeye runs may survive into the future as sport fishable runs, the Coho is more problematic, I think.
Hardly anyone wants pinks for the freezer tho they are fun to catch. They are safe, at least until the Hunger Game arrives. Cat food.... tho not bad table-fair caught fresh in salt or soon thereafter.
I floated the fish trap idea some years ago at an advisory board meeting (dominated even then by commercial fish/guide guys, of course). A lead ballon would have seemed filled with helium..... . I and several others not directly associated with the river-guide business were gone the next year.
Our advisory board had seats supposedly dedicated to the varied interests- commercial, guiding, hunting, trapping, sport use, local business, several "at large" seats. 99.5 % or more of our meetings dealt with fishing. One year, we spent a total of about 45 minutes on non-fishing (read guiding/commercial) issues. The whole year - 12 meetings!
The guides sandbagged the annual election meeting (which few of the general public showed up to). They brought in all their non-guide friends and associates, packing the election night, and appointed all their sympaticos to the non-guide/commercial seats. It was a smart political move. And that is how it is done. Probably not just on the local level, but all the way up. If they are not directly associated with the industry, but are friends or have associated business interests (like resturants, tackle stores, etc in my case), they are not barred from serving on the regulatory boards, and it looks good on paper to the un-informed public- if they even care.
I attended meetings as an alternate - serving once when they needed a quorum - for the next year, but it was a total waste of my time, and I haven't been back since - that was about 20 years ago.
There have been reports of escaped Atlantic salmon from West Coast farms found in Alaska spawning streams. These also represent a potential threat to wild Pacific salmon fisheries. The farmed Atlantic salmon fish don't even taste very good- tho the feral ones might.
Another reason I almost never eat fish in restaurants.
There have been reports of escaped Atlantic salmon from West Coast farms found in Alaska spawning streams. These also represent a potential threat to wild Pacific salmon fisheries. The farmed Atlantic salmon fish don't even taste very good- tho the feral ones might.
Another reason I almost never eat fish in restaurants.
las, I grew up fishing for and eating Wild Atlantic Salmon, it is the best salmon you will ever eat. I bought a slab of Farmed Atlantic Salmon for my birthday years back, I took 1 bite and threw it all in the garbage. It's dog food in comparison.
Watched part of the video, it was too depressing I had to turn it off, it confirmed everything I said above.
. I and several others not directly associated with the river-guide business were gone the next year.