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State and federal fisheries managers predict that Southeast Alaska fishermen will harvest about 29 million pink salmon in 2025, making for an “average” harvest based on catch data going back to 1960. The prediction comes from a joint National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries/Alaska Department of Fish and Game 2025 Southeast Alaska Pink Salmon Harvest Forecast that ADF&G released last Tuesday. NOAA and ADF&G forecast that throughout the 2025 commercial salmon season, seine, gillnet and troll fishermen across Southeast Alaska wil...
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced this month that it finished revamping its scientific documentation for state-managed salmon fisheries in Southeast Alaska after a U.S. District Court judge ruled in May of 2023 that the 2019 authorization that NOAA created for the regional salmon fisheries did not comply with the National Environmental Policy Act process, nor the Endangered Species Act. NOAA’s new documentation responds to a 2020 lawsuit by the Seattle-based nonprofit Wild Fish Conservancy. WFC sued federal f...
The commercial dive fishery for sea cucumbers will kick off across Southeast Alaska on Monday, Oct. 7, and divers this season can harvest up to 1.76 million pounds of sea cucumbers across the region, up from last season's "guideline harvest level" of 1.67 million pounds, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game announced on Aug. 28. Commercial sea cucumber fishery openings will be announced on a weekly basis with different fishery areas open during different time windows until each individual area's specific guidelines harvest level has been...
A handful of Alaska seaweed farmers and oyster growers hung up their bibs this week to mingle with droves of professors, tech industry representatives, state and federal government staff, bankers and consultants who converged in Ketchikan's Ted Ferry Civic Center for the third-ever international Seagriculture USA conference, the first such conference in Alaska. All eyes of the 190-some conference participants were on the promise of developing a profitable seaweed industry in Southeast Alaska, with people traveling to Ketchikan from California,...
Three young humpback whales were found dead off the west coast of Prince of Wales Island in just two weeks at the end of August. One subadult female was found on Aug. 22 in waters south of El Capitan, while a subadult female and a young male were found in waters near Craig on Aug. 30 and Sept. 2, respectively. On Aug. 30, longtime Craig resident whale-watcher Kathy Peavey heard about one of the whales, the subadult female that was found dead in Squam Bay north of Craig, from Michelle Dutro, an Alaska State Sea Grant fellow who helps monitor...
Heavy fishing on chinook salmon by sport fishermen — including nonresident charter customers — is taking fishing opportunity from Southeast Alaska’s commercial troll fishing fleet this summer. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game announced last Tuesday that trollers in August and September will likely lose out on the remainder of the summer troll fishery allocation for Chinook because sport fishermen across Southeast are on track to exceed their summer 2024 allocation by about 14,000 Chinook, and because of a regulation change that the depar...
An emerging seafood company is preparing to purchase its first loads of pink and chum salmon from a handful of seine boats in Metlakatla this summer while also building a high-tech floating freezer barge at a Washington shipyard that the company plans to operate in Southeast Alaska next year. Circle Seafoods, which was founded by Pat Glaab, Charlie Campbell and Eren Shultz, is renting out a portion of the Metlakatla Indian Community’s Annette Island Packing Co. plant this year while starting up a statewide operation that’s geared at buying and...
Suspense can be felt on docks throughout Southeast Alaska as commercial troll fishermen gear up to chase Chinook salmon during the first general Chinook fishing opener of the summer season. Trollers beginning at 12:01 a.m. on Monday, July 1 can target a total of approximately 66,700 Chinook salmon in an opener that will be closed by emergency order when catch estimates approach that harvest target, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game announced last Thursday. Fish and Game estimates that trollers will catch 66,700 Chinook in six to seven...
Commercial purse seine fishermen in Southeast Alaska this month are preparing for an interesting summer salmon season with no confidence that they will earn a good price for the pink and chum salmon that they catch, and with seafood processing companies Silver Bay Seafoods and E.C. Phillips and Son each starting out their first year of operations in the former Trident Seafoods plants in Ketchikan and Petersburg, respectively. Southeast seine fishery openings will kick off for the 2024 season...
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game announced it expects Southeast Alaska commercial fishermen next year will harvest around 19 million pink salmon — close to an average number based on 63 years of commercial harvest data collected since Alaska became a state. The department’s forecast, released in November, predicts a pink salmon catch of between 12 million and 32 million fish. Pink salmon harvest varies greatly from odd-numbered years to even-numbered years, and the commercial catch in the 10 most recent even years has averaged 21 mil...
The Alaska Board of Fisheries voted 4-2 against requiring in-season management to more effectively hold the sport fishery Chinook catch within its harvest limit. The board voted on Friday, Dec. 1, at its meeting in Homer, which was primarily devoted to Southcentral fisheries issues. The controversial proposal would have tightened in-season management of the Southeast Chinook catch to better guard against resident and nonresident sport fishermen exceeding their share of the overall sport and commercial harvest. The proposal’s intent was to b...
A team in Coffman Cove helped set free two killer whales that had been trapped in Barnes Lake on northeast Prince of Wales Island since mid-August for six weeks, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The orcas presumably stranded themselves by chasing prey into the lake during a high-tide cycle. Transient, or Bigg’s, killer whales are a genetically and culturally distinct population of orcas that live in the Pacific Northwest and feed primarily on marine mammals, according to NOAA. Barnes Lake has two entrances f...
Tom Fisher, a commercial troll fisherman and the president of the board of the Southern Southeast Regional Aquaculture Association, has been catching salmon out of Ketchikan and surrounding communities since 1973. When he heard that a federal judge in Washington made a ruling last Tuesday that could shut down the small boat troll fishery in Southeast Alaska, Fisher was "flat dumbfounded." "Currently I'm at my boat in Wrangell," Fisher told the Daily News during a phone interview last Thursday. "I was slated to get hauled out of the water...
