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The 2024 commercial Tanner crab and golden king crab season in Southeast opens Feb. 17 at noon, and the registration deadline for both fisheries is Jan. 18. For the 2024 golden king crab season, fishermen will be required to call-in to the department every single day. Mandatory call-ins the day before to state what management area they plan to fish in is new this year, beginning Feb. 16. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G) announced the guideline harvest level (GHL) in Registration...
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Alaska fishermen will be able to harvest red king crab for the first time in two years, offering a slight reprieve to the beleaguered fishery beset by low numbers likely exacerbated by climate change. There was no such rebound for snow crab, however, and that fishery will remain closed for a second straight year, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game announced earlier this month. “The Bristol Bay red king crab fishery for the prior two seasons were closed based on low abundance and particularly low abundance of mat...
Local fishing industry representatives met with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G) in Petersburg last week looking for a Golden King Crab compromise. The department acknowledged frustrations voiced by the fishermen this year regarding management hindering the golden king harvest. King and Tanner Task Force (KTTF) meetings were organized to brainstorm and come to a common understanding. In the latest KTTF meeting held at the Petersburg Public Library on Sept. 28, the industry and the...
Golden king crabs appear to have returned to Frederick Sound en masse after years of low commercial harvests, but it remains to be seen how much crab will be up for grabs for fishermen next season. The commercial golden king crab fishery in Southeast, which typically opens in mid-February, is regulated by an annual recommended harvest strategy developed by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G). Under the harvest strategy, the department establishes a guideline harvest level (GHL) and a...
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game has closed the commercial red and blue king crab fishery for the 2023-2024 season, the sixth year in a row, citing stock survey numbers that remain well below the regulatory threshold. The survey estimated 119,000 pounds of legal male red king crab are available for harvest, significantly below the 200,000 pounds required to open the commercial fishery, said Adam Messmer, lead king/tanner crab biologist for ADFG. While that’s an improvement from last year, where the survey estimated 95,000 pounds, i...
Less than five years ago, prospects appeared bright for Bering Sea crab fishers. Stocks were abundant and healthy, federal biologists said, and prices were near all-time highs. Now two dominant crab harvests have been canceled for lack of fish. For the first time, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game in October canceled the 2022-2023 harvest of Bering Sea snow crab, and it also announced the second consecutive year of closure for another important harvest, that of Bristol Bay red king crab. What has happened between then and now? A sustained... Full story
SEATTLE (AP) — Alaska officials have canceled the fall Bristol Bay red king crab harvest, and for the first time, have also scrapped the winter harvest of smaller snow crab. The move is a double whammy to a fleet from Alaska, Washington and Oregon chasing Bering Sea crab in harvests that in 2016 grossed $280 million, The Seattle Times reported. The closures reflect conservation concerns about both crab species following bleak summer populations surveys. The decisions to shut down the snow crab and fall king crab harvests came after days of d...
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...
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...
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...
January The assembly approved of a COVID-19 dashboard which tracked cases in the community. Local businesses received a total of $15.08 million in aid in the first round of COVID-19 aid released through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. PMC vaccinated approximately 350 residents aged 65 or older at a vaccine drive in the community gym. PMC was given permission by the borough to apply for a second PPP loan totaling $1.8 million. PMC applied and received a loan of...
Unlike in the Bering Sea, there's good news for crab in the Gulf of Alaska. A huge cohort of Tanner crab that biologists have been tracking in the Westward region for three years showed up again in this summer's survey. "We were optimistic and we did find them again. Pretty much all the way across the board from Kodiak all the way out to False Pass we found those crab and in good quantity," said Nat Nichols, area manager for the Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game at Kodiak. The bairdi Tanners are...
Are toxins from road runoff a threat to salmon in Anchorage’s most popular fishing streams? A Go Fund Me campaign has been launched so Alaskans can chip in to find out. The push stems from an organic compound in tires called quinone that was newly identified by researchers at the University of Washington, said Birgit Hagedorn, a geochemist and longtime board member of the Anchorage Waterways Council. “The little flakes that rub off of tires, especially larger truck tires, can be transported into the streams via stormwater. And they leach out...
The number of boots on deck in Alaska has declined and most fisheries have lost jobs over the past five years. Overall, Alaska’s harvesting sector ticked downward by 848 jobs from 2015 through 2019. A snapshot of fish harvesting jobs is featured in the November edition of Alaska Economic Trends by the state Dept. of Labor. The findings show that after hitting a peak of 8,501 harvesters in 2015, fishing jobs then fell to around 8,000 for the next two years before dropping again in 2018 to about 7,600. In 2019, average monthly fishing e...
Bering Sea crabbers will soon know how much they can pull up in their pots for the upcoming season that opens October 15. This week the Crab Plan Team, advisers to state and federal fishery managers who jointly manage the fisheries, will review stock assessments and other science used to set the catches for Bristol Bay red king crab, Tanners and snow crab. Normally, the biggest driver would be data from the annual summer trawl surveys that have tracked the stocks for decades. But this year, the...
All systems are go for keeping close tabs on fish and crab stocks in waters managed by the state, meaning out to three miles. While constraints from the coronavirus resulted in nearly all annual stock surveys being cut in deeper waters overseen by the federal government, it’s “closer to normal” closer to shore. “While it’s not business as usual, we are conducting business in as close to normal fashion as we can,” said Forrest Bowers, deputy director of the commercial fisheries division of the Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game. “We have kept all...
Sherry Tamone, a professor of biology at University of Alaska Southeast, held a virtual lecture this month as part of the Petersburg Science Series on her research in crab species in Southeast and the effect that warming sea temperatures has on their molt timing. Crustaceans grow in size through a process called molting, said Tamone. Molting is when a crustacean sheds its exoskeleton and builds a newer, bigger one. The process begins when they're newborn larva and lasts through adulthood. When i...
The State of Alaska wants input on plans to distribute nearly $24.5 million in federal disaster relief funds for stakeholders and communities hurt by the 2018 Gulf of Alaska cod crash. Better make it quick – the deadline to comment is April 10. Cod is Alaska’s second largest groundfish harvest (after pollock), but the Gulf stock dropped by 80% in 2018 following a three year heatwave that disrupted food webs, fish metabolism and egg survival on the ocean floor. It combined to push down cod catches to just 28.8 million pounds, compared to nea...
Alaska’s 2019 salmon season was worth $657.6 million to fishermen, a 10% increase from the 2018 fishery. Sockeye salmon accounted for nearly 64% of the total value, topping $421 million, and 27% of the harvest at 55.2 million fish. Those are the lead takeaways in a summary from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game that reveals preliminary estimates of salmon harvests and values by region. The final values will be determined in 2020 after processors, buyers, and direct marketers submit their totals paid to fishermen. Pink salmon were the s...
They are certainly cute but the voracious appetites of sea otters continue to cause horrendous damage to some of Southeast Alaska’s most lucrative fisheries. How best to curtail those impacts will be the focus of a day long stakeholders meeting set for November 6 in Juneau. “All of the people who have anything to do with the otters hopefully will all be in the same room at the same time,” said Phil Doherty, co-director of the Southeast Alaska Regional Dive Fisheries Association (SARDFA) based in Ketchikan. A 2011 report by the McDowell Group...
Hundreds of fishery stakeholders and scientists will gather in Anchorage next week as the state Board of Fisheries (BOF) begins its annual meeting cycle with a two-day work session. The seven-member BOF sets the rules for the state’s subsistence, commercial, sport and personal use fisheries. It meets four to six times each year in various communities on a three-year rotation; this year the focus is on Kodiak and Cook Inlet. The fish board and the public also will learn the latest on how a changing climate and off kilter ocean chemistry are a...
Federal agencies are meeting now through next March to define U.S. dietary guidelines for 2020-2025, and a high powered group of doctors and nutritionists are making sure the health benefits of seafood are front and center. For the first time in the 40 year history of the program, the dietary guidelines committee has posted the questions they are going to consider. They include the role of seafood in the neurocognitive development in pregnant moms for their babies, and in the diet of kids from b...
Bering Sea crabbers saw upticks in crab recruits during a good fishery for the 2018/2019 season, along with strong prices. The crab season opens in mid-October for red king crab, Tanners and snow crab (opilio), and while fishing goes fast for red kings in order to fill orders for year-end markets in Japan, the fleet typically drops pots for the other species in January. Crabbers said they saw strong showings of younger crab poised to enter the three fisheries. Only male crabs of a certain size are able to be retained for sale. “For Bristol Bay...
The Panhandle plans to be the next Alaska region to give new life to old fishing gear by sending it to plastic recycling centers. The tons of nets and lines piled up in local lots and landfills will become the raw material for soda bottles, cell phone cases, sunglasses, skateboards, swimsuits and more. Juneau, Haines, Petersburg and possibly Sitka have partnered with Net Your Problem to launch an effort this year to send old or derelict seine and gillnets to a recycler in Richmond, British Columbia. “We’re going to be working in a new loc...
When most people think of Alaska crab, they envision huge boats pulling up “7 bys” for millions of pounds of bounty in the Bering Sea. (7 bys refers to the 7’x7’x3’ size of the crab pots.) But it is the smaller, local crab fisheries that each winter give a big economic boost to dozens of coastal communities across the Gulf of Alaska. They occur at a time when many fishing towns are feeling a lull while awaiting the March start of halibut and herring openers. The gearing up means a nice pulse of extra work and money for just about every bus...
