Kotzebue Sound’s commercial chum fishery is unique. It's the nation’s northernmost salmon fishery. The cold, Arctic waters — and distance the fish travel along the Kobuk and Noatak Rivers — leads to higher quality salmon, according to Mike Scott, the managing partner of Arctic Circle Wild Seafoods. Scott’s company is one of two buyers for the fishery.
“The meat is a little leaner and stands up a little more,” Scott said. “The eggs are just beautiful. If you've ever seen a skein of those eggs, holy smoke. For American caviar, it's really the egg to have.”
But the salmon aren't prized solely for their eggs. Commercial and subsistence harvesters depend on salmon to fill their freezers and wallets to make it through long winters. And lately, fishermen and buyers are coming up empty-handed.
Last year’s commercial season had the worst returns on record. This year, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game expected a harvest of 50,000 to 150,000 fish.
The state hasn't released final numbers since the fishery closed in late August, but a biologist with the department said the harvest was below initial projections and historic averages.
“This is really bad,” Scott said. “There's no way to color code it any other way. It's bad, and we need more data.”
Many Alaskan salmon fisheries use escapement numbers, which count how many fish make it from the ocean and through a weir or test fishery on their way to spawning grounds. The numbers allow state biologists to set fishing openings and closures and to get a sense of the overall health of the fishery.
But the Kotzebue test fishery that helped track those numbers, located near Kiana along the Kobuk River, closed several years ago.
Karen Gillis is the plant manager of Copper River Seafoods in Kotzebue. She’s worked in the fishing industry for four decades. Gillis said the season wasn’t great, but she’s hopeful for next year. Chum salmon have a four-year cycle. Gillis said she expects next year will be better, based on numbers from 2022. Still, she said better data could have allowed for more openers and a better harvest this year.
“They used to have counters up river, so you would know how much fish had gone up river and then you could have some real numbers to base your openers on,” Gillis said.
Kotzebue does not have a fish biologist stationed locally, unlike other communities elsewhere in the state.
“We've made an effort to increase our presence at meetings and just during commercial openers for sampling, but we're a very small office with by far the largest area in the state to manage,” said Luke Henslee, assistant biologist for Kotzebue and Norton Sound. Henslee’s office is in Nome.
Henslee says the reasons for the below-average season are complicated. The fishery itself covers a massive spawning area, which is a logistical problem.
“The concerns that the fishermen and the user groups Kotzebue have are similar to the ones that we have,” Henslee said. “I'm sure that folks in the region can relate with how difficult it is to sort of wrap your mind around what's going on in such a complicated system.”
Over the last few years the region has seen record breaking rain and high water along the rivers where salmon spawn — a direct result of warming Arctic temperatures. Henslee said high water is one reason the test fishery had to close. It wasn't able to get reliable escapement estimates and lost its funding last year. But he said his department is planning research studies to better manage the fishery.
The department has received federal funding for a feasibility study on using sonar to calculate escapement numbers. Henslee said the state used sonars on the Noatak River back in the 1980s, but there are a lot of unknowns about how recent high water could affect sonar measurements.
He said local commercial and subsistence fishermen are a good source of information.
“If they have observations, contact us and let us know, because really a great source of information is the folks that are out there that are using the resource,” Henslee said. “We don't have the ability to provide that kind of coverage right now.”
Henslee said the department also received funding for genomic testing of Noatak and Kobuk river stocks, but he did not give a timeline for the start of either project.
