Kotzebue Sound’s commercial chum salmon season is off to a stronger start than last year, according to the fishery’s only registered buyer.
“We had over 6,000 pounds, and last year we had nothing,” said Karen Gillis, manager of Kotzebue’s Copper River plant.
She said it’s a good start for the nation’s northernmost commercial fishery after years of dismal returns and a crash two years ago.
Six boats were out fishing for the July 10 opener, which Gillis said was close to average for this time of the year.
Copper River is offering 57 cents a pound for chum iced in the boat and 60 cents a pound for iced and bagged fish. That’s a nearly 20-cent jump from last year.
So far Gillis has been pleased with the fish coming in.
“The fish look beautiful — the big slabs with silver, they just look great,” she said.
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game is forecasting a harvest of 50,000 to 150,000 chum for the fishery this season, the same range predicted last year.
Last year’s harvest came in under that projection, at about 35,000 fish.
Kevin Clark, the department’s area management biologist for the region, said the estimate is based on historic trends, and determining harvest estimates isn't an exact science. He said last year’s run included a large number of three-year-old fish, which can signal a stronger return the following year.
“I’m not saying that there’s gonna be a lot of fish,” Clark said. “I’m just saying it's likely to be like last year, maybe a little better.”
Kotzebue Sound is managed differently than many other salmon fisheries statewide. Many rely on escapement counts — actual numbers of fish moving upriver to spawn as tracked by sonar, counting towers or weirs. Instead, biologists in the region use catch numbers to determine when the state sets openers or closures, which is how most of the state’s fisheries were managed in the 1960s.
The last time the state ran a sonar feasibility study for Kotzebue Sound was in the early 1990s. A newer effort, a test fishery near Kiana on the Kobuk River, also closed several years ago.
Clark said persistent high water on the Kobuk River, tied to a warming Arctic, made the data unreliable. Funding and staff issues also played into the state’s decision to close the test fishery.
“It got to the point where the commercial fishery was actually a better indicator of run strength than the Kobuk test fishery was,” Clark said. “Then there were some budgetary constraints, and that was the low-hanging fruit that got cut.”
Clark said his department secured funding for a new sonar feasibility study, but there is no firm timeline yet. He said it could start as early as next summer.
Some, like Gillis with Copper River, say relying on catch numbers instead of escapement leaves a large gap in the data, which affects the overall harvest numbers.
“It reminds me of a football game where someone scores three points and decides to sit on it the whole entire game,” Gillis said. “If you can't fish, how do you know what's out there?”
Gillis is hopeful the season continues to build.
“All I know is it's been slow so long, we're bound to get killed one of these days,” she said.
She said if – or when – that happens, Copper River will be ready for it.
