I am proposing to the Alaska Board of Fish that 5 AAC 21.310(b)(6). Fishing seasons be changed as follows:
In the Outer and Eastern Districts in the Lower Cook Inlet commercial salmon opener, the season will be open from [JUNE 1 TILL CLOSED BY EMERGENCY ORDER].
I proposed this change because I’ve been fishing in this area for 39 years and since the late 1980’s many of my traditional fishing areas have not been surveyed or opened for commercial fishing. I’ve tried every avenue I can think of to get ADF&G to monitor the runs and open them for fishing and nothing I’ve tried is working.
In fact, in 1993 Jeff Hettrick, the manager of the Trail Lakes Hatchery operated by Cook Inlet Aquaculture, told me “You’ll never see another commercial opening in Resurrection Bay” for any other harvest – not pinks, and not any of the runs I traditionally fished. It’s been CIAA’s goal to keep all harvesting in Resurrection Bay limited to their farmed reds and now, in other proposals, they want to keep all the reds to themselves too, effectively forever.
To add injury to insult, in the ADF&G 2010 Report [RC 3 – October 2010] on Salmon Stocks in Resurrection Bay the department acknowledges that they rarely monitor Resurrection Bay and they propose to drop all escapement goals and monitoring 4 viable streams that used to produce a significant amount of pink salmon.
I know these runs like the back of my hand and I’ve commercially fished them since I was 12 years old. The streams had a hard time because of the 1986 flood and the 1989 oil spill and after that, CIAA came in and ADF&G pretty much stopped monitoring the streams – even when I called in to report significant returns, my “on the ground” reports were ignored.
According to the ADF&G “2006 Lower Cook Inlet Annual Finfish Management Report” from 1980 to 1986 586,000 pinks were commercially harvested in Resurrection Bay. I continue to monitor these streams and take photographs of the returns and even the eggs in stream.
No amount of failure to monitor is going to change the fact that there really are fish there and ADF&G staff just doesn’t want to spend the time or money monitoring them.
In 1996 the ADG&G biologist created an imaginary line down the middle of the Bay and abandoned all responsibility for management of the creeks on the west side of Resurrection Bay. Not because of conflict with sport fishing boats – we seiners have sport fishing boats weaving around our nets all the time, every year, on the east side of the Bay and there’s no conflict. Boat traffic spreads out as soon as it clears the breakwater, so there’s no conflict there either.
I have asked ADF&G to add another biologist to their staff, if the burden of monitoring the entire 4 districts is too much for a single individual, and received back ambiguous replies that neither address the specifics nor suggest alternatives. They offer to solve nothing at a time when I am being economically impacted due to the BOF granting CIAA ALL the legally commercially harvestable fish in Resurrection Bay.
I continue to protest a lack of attention to the Outer and Eastern District to every level of ADF&G and am given many excuses, but the bottom line is that I am prevented from fishing my traditionally fished areas by bureaucracy and not due to lack of fish.
Opening up Eastern and Outer Districts on June 1st will allow ADF&G to monitor the early catches via fish ticket to determine run strength in all areas fish are caught in because they have no intention of monitoring in person or aerially. If they fear over fishing, they can put stream guards in place.
It makes openings in the Lower Cook Inlet harvest area consistent with each other. Currently Kamishak District opens on June 1 and that works well for that district and I believe it will work just as well in the other two districts.
Additionally, it will encourage fishermen to return to traditionally fished areas that have not been surveyed or fished in years, if there is adequate return. It would allow fishermen to timely harvest early return males, which would prevent the full escapement from being mostly male fish, as it is now, and allow the fishermen to receive top dollar for those early caught fish.
I will not give up trying to re-open wild Alaskan stock of pinks that have been traditionally and historically harvested by Lower Cook Inlet seiners.
Please join me at the Board of Fish meeting in Homer, AK Nov. 15-18 and SUPPORT Proposals #2 & #3. Here’s a link to the proposal download link pages, they are large PDF files.
Tom
