The Alaska Department of Fish and Game released its management outlook for the Kotzebue Sound commercial chum salmon season earlier this month.
After the fishery’s record low return last year, state biologists expect this year’s season to be about average for the country’s northernmost commercial fishery.
This year state biologists expect the harvest to fall within the range of 50,000 to 150,000 fish.
“[The numbers] are based on historical runs,” said Kevin Clark, area manager for Alaska Department of Fish and Game. “Last year, we had a pretty bad run, but that was kind of the outlier compared to the last 20 years.”
Last year, Clark’s department called the chum season, “below expectations and poor,” following the lowest return in three decades. Clark said the low return caught him and local fishermen off-guard.
According to state data, just over 5,000 commercial salmon were harvested. Nearly all of the fish harvested were sold to one of the fishery’s two buyers, Alaska-based Copper River Seafoods.
Karen Gillis is the manager of Copper River’s Kotzebue plant. She said in a text that the company is “happy to be returning after a disastrous season last year.”
KOTZ was not immediately able to contact the fishery’s other buyer, Arctic Circle Wild Seafoods.
Fish and Game expects the season to be better than last year based on the likelihood of 4- and 5-year-old fish returning to the region. But Clark said it is just his “best guess.”
“It’s not necessarily written in stone,” he said. “It’s all paper fish until they start coming in.”
Fish and Game has been looking at alternative ways to assess the health of the fishery. The department previously operated a test fishery in Kiana, upriver from Kotzebue, to help calculate escapement numbers. But that closed, in part because of funding issues and the high water on the Kobuk River.
“It is difficult to sort of observe how these high waters are influencing and impacting salmon stocks, trying to work around those high waters or monitor escapements, either from an airplane or more traditional methods like weirs or towers,” said Luke Henslee, the assistant area manager for the Arctic region with Fish and Game. “It simply complicates everything.”
Henslee said the high water is an important issue facing the fishery that needs to be explored as well as how warming Arctic temperatures can affect salmon before they spawn.
The Northwest Arctic Regional Advisory Council, the group that advises the federal government on subsistence issues, offered written support to Fish and Game to explore other options for calculating fish abundance, as recently as last month.
This year, Fish and Game plans to use numbers from the commercial fishery as well as the catch rates compared to historical data to set openers and predict the overall health of the fishery.
The Kotzebue Sound commercial salmon season is scheduled to open on July 10 and close at the end of August, unless an unexpected strong late run extends the season.
