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The weekly write up about Alaska’s fishing industry began in 1991 in the Anchorage Daily News. Since then, subscribership has grown to nearly 20 news outlets across Alaska and nationally. The goal always has been to make readers aware of the seafood industry’s economic, social and cultural importance to all Alaskans. Just one extra penny per pound at the docks means millions of dollars more for state coffers! Commercial fishing puts more people to work than any other private industry in Alaska and provides two-thirds of the nation’s wild caugh...
The arrival of herring signals the start of Alaska’s spring fisheries and this year’s commercial catch limits from each of the three main areas are record breakers. But much of the catch will go unharvested — there is no market. Combined harvests from three prime producing areas total 118,346 tons, or nearly 237 million pounds. The limit for the Sitka Sound harvest in late March is set at over 45,164 tons, followed the first days of April at Kodiak where a harvest of 8,075 tons is allowed. Alaska’s largest roe herring fishery at Togiak in Brist...
Salmon returning home to Alaska hatcheries again accounted for nearly one-third of the 2021 statewide catch for commercial fishermen at 64 million fish. It was the 8th largest hatchery home-coming since 1977 and at a payout of $142 million, the salmon produced 25% of the overall value at the Alaska docks. An additional 220-thousand salmon that got their start in a hatchery also were caught in Alaska sport, personal use and subsistence fisheries. Nearly 70 million adult hatchery salmon returned...
Gotta give the Dunleavy Administration credit for being the first to try and get to the bottom of one of Alaska’s most troubling fishing issues: bycatch. The governor in November 2021 created an Alaska Bycatch Review Task Force (ABRT) “to help better understand unintended bycatch of high value fishery resources in State and federal waters.” He defined bycatch as “fish which are harvested in a fishery but are not sold or kept.” The 13-member group will issue a final report based on those better understandings in November 2022. “Once the structur...
March means more fishing boats are out on the water with the start of the Pacific halibut and sablefish (black cod) fisheries this past Sunday, followed by Alaska’s first big herring fishery at Sitka Sound. For halibut, the coastwide catch from waters ranging from the West Coast states to British Columbia to the far reaches of the Bering Sea was increased by 5.7% this year to 41.22 million pounds. Alaska always gets the lion’s share of the commercial halibut harvest, which for 2022 is 21.51 million pounds, a nearly 10% increase. Exp...
Waterbody, operated by Angie Flickinger, of Wrangell, won the grand prize for its Deep Blue Sea Bath Soak at the Alaska Symphony of Seafood awards ceremony on Feb. 24 in Juneau. Made with bull kelp and sea salts, the soak is described as “smelling like that first breath of fresh sea-salted air as you resurface from a skinny dipping swan dive.” Flickinger started her business in 2015 as Gathered and Grown Botanicals, when she wanted to give handcrafted soap as a gift. She later changed the name to Waterbody and expanded her offerings. The Ala...
The U.S. grows less than one-100th of 1% of the world’s $6 billion seaweed market, but Alaska has the goods to grow into a major contributor. A new report assesses the pros and cons of six communities as locations for seaweed processing facilities to assist companies interested in operating in Alaska. It was compiled by McKinley Research Group for the Alaska Fisheries Development Foundation, which has played a central role in keeping Alaska seaweed in the resource development spotlight. The six study communities were evaluated based on three c...
Frigid February fishing in Alaska features crabbing from the Panhandle to the Bering Sea, followed in March by halibut, black cod and herring. Southeast crabbers will drop pots for Tanners on Friday, and they’re expecting one of the best seasons ever. Fishery managers said they are seeing “historically high levels” of Tanners with good recruitment coming up from behind. The catch limit won’t be set until the fishery is underway but last year’s take was 1.27 million pounds (504,369 crabs), which weighed 2.5 pounds on average. Crabbers know they...
Seafood is Alaska’s biggest export by far, and state legislators want the federal government to get tougher on trade policies that they say unfairly hurt global sales. Two resolutions (Senate Joint Resolution 16 and SJR17) were advanced last week by the House Fisheries Committee that address Russia’s ban on buying any U.S. foods since 2014 and also punitive seafood tariffs by China since 2018. Meanwhile, the U.S. is importing an increasing amount of seafood from both countries. Both resolutions were introduced by Kodiak Sen. Gary Stevens and...
Where do most Alaska fishermen live? Which Alaska region is home to the most fishing boats? The answers are in an economic report by the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute for 2019/2020 that includes all regions from Ketchikan to Kotzebue. Nearly 40% of Alaska’s more than 31,000 fishermen live in the Southcentral towns of Anchorage, Kenai, Cordova, Seward, Homer, Valdez and Whittier. They earn more than half of their paychecks from fisheries outside of the region, with the Bristol Bay driftnet fishery their main source of income. S...
Kodiak fishermen are getting an advance price of $8.10 per pound for Tanner crab in the fishery that opened Jan. 15. High crab prices have led all other seafoods during the COVID-19 pandemic as buyers grab all they can to fill demand at buffet tables, restaurants and retail counters around the world. “Our strategy was to get a price before the season even started. It’s simply bad business to go fishing without a price,” said Peter Longrich, secretary of the 74-member Kodiak Crab Alliance Cooperative which negotiated the deal with local processo...
Wow, there is a lot of fishing going on across Alaska! Salmon is the heart of Alaska’s seafood industry but winter is when the fishing action really begins. Hundreds of boats are out on the water on the first day of each new year, beginning a predictable rhythm for the seafood industry as millions of pounds of fish begin to cross the docks around the clock at Alaska’s working waterfronts. Here’s a sampler: Starting January 1 boats drop pots and baited lines for cod, rockfish and other whitefish in the Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea. Alask...
Since 1991 the weekly Fish Factor column has highlighted Alaska’s seafood industry with its annual “Picks and Pans - a no holds barred look back at some of the year’s best and worst happenings, and my choice for the year’s biggest fish story. Here are the choices for 2021, in no particular order - Most business potential – Seaweed mariculture. The market value of U.S. seaweed is pegged at $41 billion by 2031. Driving the demand is increased use in pharmaceuticals, health supplements, as a natural thickening agent and in animal feeds. Best fish...
An Alaska Salmon Research Task Force Act was introduced in Congress last week by Alaska Senators Murkowski and Sullivan that, if passed, aims to gain better understanding about causes of salmon declines, especially in the Northwest regions. The task force of up to 19 people would conduct a comprehensive review of salmon science and management in Alaska. The bill also would establish a working group specifically focused on salmon returns in the Arctic-Yukon-Kuskokwim (AYK) region of Western and...
Strong global and U.S. demand for sockeye salmon has 2021 pushed prices to near record highs and boosted fishermen’s paychecks. Both Silver Bay and Peter Pan Seafoods a few weeks ago increased their base prices to fishermen to $1.45 per pound, a 20-cent increase from the summer. Other Alaska companies are likely to follow suit. That compares to a final price in 2020 of just $1.06 “Obviously, the base price is announced earlier in the season. Now that we can see where sales are going and really have a confident look, we’re excited to celeb...
Low-cost LED lights can help Chinook salmon escape trawl nets. A 2020 study by the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission and NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center showed that LEDs are very effective in directing Chinook salmon to escape openings in trawl nets targeting Pacific hake, the largest groundfish fishery on the West Coast that typically takes more than 500 million pounds a year. The study showed that Chinook are much more likely to exit the nets where lights are placed — 86% of escaped salmon used the LED-framed openings — w...
Pacific halibut stock appears to be on an upswing and could result in increased catches for most regions in 2022. At the interim meeting of the International Pacific Halibut Commission last week, scientists gave an overview of the summer setline survey that targets nearly 2,000 stations over three months. The Pacific resource is modeled as a single stock extending from northern California to the Aleutian Islands and Bering Sea, including all inside waters through British Columbia and Alaska. The survey showed that coastwide combined numbers...
More than one million pounds of old fishing nets and lines from Alaska have made it to recycling markets, where they are remade into plastic pellets and fibers. The milestone was reached with a recent haul of nets from Unalaska, and more are already adding to the total. Shipping vans filled with old gear collected at Haines were offloaded in Seattle last week and another container from Cordova is on its way. Unalaska was the first to sign on four years ago with Net Your Problem (NYP), a small Seattle-based company that jump-started fishing...
A hearing on seafood bycatch didn’t satisfy a bipartisan group of Alaska legislators at a meeting of the House Fisheries Committee on Nov. 15. The bycatch issue came up again this summer when all Yukon River salmon fisheries were canceled due to so few returning Chinook and chums. Along with ocean and climate impacts, villagers questioned the takes by huge trawlers that catch and process fish at sea. A presentation of the committee hearing by Glenn Merrill, regional administrator at NOAA Fisheries/Alaska, showed that in the 2019 Bering Sea p...
It’s a fish trifecta for Alaska’s 2021 salmon season. The fishery produced the third-highest catch, fish poundage and value on record dating back to 1975. According to preliminary harvests and values by region from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, the catch of nearly 234 million salmon had a dockside value of almost $644 million, and weighed in at 858.5 million pounds. That compares to 117 million salmon harvested in 2020, valued at just over $295 million and a combined weight of 517.5 million pounds. All regions saw salmon earnings dou...
It’s hard to believe, but Dungeness crab in the Gulf of Alaska is now Alaska’s largest crab fishery – a distinction due to the collapse of stocks in the Bering Sea. Combined Dungeness catches so far from Southeast and the westward region (Kodiak, Chignik and the Alaska Peninsula) totaled over 7.5 million pounds as the last pots were being pulled at the end of October. Ranking second is golden king crab taken along the Aleutian Islands with a harvest by four boats of about 6 million pounds. For snow crab, long the Bering Sea’s most product...
Pollock protein noodles, southern-style Alaska wild wings, candied salmon ice cream, fish oils for pets, fish and chips meal kits and finfish earrings are just a small sample of past winners of Alaska’s biggest seafood competition — the Alaska Symphony of Seafood — which has showcased and promoted new, market-ready products since 1993. The annual event draws from Alaska’s largest and smallest seafood companies, whose products are all judged blind by an expert panel. Eighteen entries are in the running for the 2021 contest, the first leg of...
Optimism is the word that best sums up the attitude among most Alaska salmon fishermen after a good season, according to people in the business of buying and selling permits and boats. Most fishermen in major regions ended up with good catches and dock prices were up from recent years. That’s pushed up permit prices, including at the bellwether fishery at Bristol Bay where drift net permits have topped $200,000. “The highest has been $210,000. But it’s a pretty tight market,” said Maddie Lightsey, a broker at Alaska Boats and Permits in Homer....
The preliminary value to fishermen of the nearly 41 million salmon caught this summer at Alaska’s largest fishery at Bristol Bay is nearly $248 million, 64% above the 20-year average. That figure will be much higher when bonuses and other price adjustments are paid out. But as with the fish dollars tallied from Alaska’s cod, pollock, flounders and other groundfish, the bulk of the Bristol Bay’s salmon money won’t be circulating through Alaska’s economy because most of the fishing participants live out of the state. In 2017, for example,...
Lost fishing gear - be it nets, lines or pots - continues "ghost fishing" forever, causing a slow death to countless marine creatures and financial losses to fishermen. Now new "smart buoys" can track and monitor all types of deployed gear and report its location directly to a cell phone or website. Blue Ocean Gear of California created and builds the buoys that also can track ocean temperatures, depth, movement, even how much has been caught. The small, three pound buoys are just seven inches...
