Fishing boats in the Haines small boat harbor. (Jillian Rogers)
The first commercial gillnet opening in Lynn Canal saw a strong chum harvest. Still, wild sockeye are slow to make their way back to the Chilkat and Chilkoot Rivers.
Chum salmon filled the nets of fisherman in District 15 this week. Fishermen set out for the first commercial opening of the season on Sunday.
Wyatt Rhea-Fournier is a management biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game in Haines.
“We caught a lot of chum down there on the lower end,” says Rhea-Fournier. “Although we put in some area and some time restrictions on our fleet, we ended up with about 100 permits fishing. And they caught probably a little over 65,000 chum.”
That trends pretty close to last year’s numbers.
“Last year of course was one of our largest chum years and we caught about 78,000,” says Rhea-Fournier. “So we’re pretty close to last year but we had maybe around 20 less boats.”
Rhea-Fournier says fishermen caught good size salmon.
“Pretty good haul for everybody,” says Rhea-Fournier. “The chum were big and bright, you know nine and a half, 10 pound chum were being caught. There were some big sets down there on the southern line. With all this southern wind they actually blew the chum all the way up the canal and people were catching them all the way up by Sherman Rock.”
These are hatchery chum, from the Douglas Island Pink and Chum hatchery.
“Sometimes we call them enhanced chum, that are returning to the boat harbor terminal harvest area and also the Amalga Harbor terminal harvest area,” says Rhea-Fournier. “These chum come in pretty early and it’s the very beginning of the run, but it’s looking very very strong.”
While the hatchery chum return is off to a good start, so far the wild sockeye run is not.
“Sockeye were very scarce. Very below average on our sockeye harvest,” says Rhea-Fournier. “In fact, until we go this sun and the water started moving, we didn’t have very many fish in the weirs either. Now we’re starting to get some fish coming into the weirs. I think we’re about 150 fish over at the Chilkoot.”
Rhea-Fournier says low sockeye numbers are on par with other areas around the state. In part, he says recent low water levels may have affected fish returning to the Chilkat and Chilkoot Rivers. Though, that’s changed in recent days.
“We had some sun here but we didn’t have any snowpack,” says Rhea-Fournier. “So we really had to wait until the sun got way back there on those glaciers before we could really start getting some flow. And that really just happened in the last 48 hours.”
This week, high water levels set off flood warnings in Haines and led to a road closure in the Upper Valley.
“We’re at full bank on the Chilkat River,” says Rhea-Fournier. “And then our crews that travel up to the lake have to go up the Tsirku River and its flowing really fast right now. There’s a lot of fish coming down right now. And that’s good, that’s what a lot of these fish will be doing, they’ll mill out in these inlets and wait until that water flow and temperature and chemistry is just right for them and then that’s the signal for them to push up the river.”
Rhea-Fournier hopes to see more sockeye in the departments fish weirs soon.
The next commercial gillnet opening is this Sunday at noon.
“And we’ll close down again Tuesday at noon,” says Rhea-Fournier. “So we’re still in Chilkat Chinook salmon management. Our Chilkat Chinook salmon are in our commercial fishery for the first three weeks. We see quite a few of them historically in the catch. So for the first three weeks of the season we’ll have these limitations as we try to maximize the number of Chinook that can make it through the fishery and make it up into the river to spawn. And that’s our strategy to help rebuild the Chilkat king salmon stock.”
Earlier this year, the Board of Fish designated Chilkat Chinook at a stock of concern. Local fisheries are under strict management to try to protect the fish.
“We’ll see a little bit more of our night closures, we’ll have a little bit more of our six inch max net restriction, but we will have a little bit more area on the bottom end,” says Rhea-Fournier.
Rhea-Fournier says he expects to see a few more boats in District 15 this coming week, as the chum salmon catch is leading other districts.
Is anyone in Fish and Game even remotely interested in the fact that the “enhanced chum runs” have been doing excellent to record breaking WHILE King Salmon and Sockeye salmon are being decimated? Get it? Record Breaking CHUM record breaking LOW king and sockeye! Is anyone in Fish and Game even slightly interested in investigating this?
Apparently not. Its Ocean Mortality. We don’t know why. But we do know that it is not the record breaking enhanced chum run, That we do know. Alaska Fish and Game violating the Alaska constitution by failing to ensure sustainable salmon runs for ALL ALASKANS. Complete failure by F&G.