Chinook Bycatch Shutters Central Gulf of Alaska Whitefish Fishery

An unprecedented bycatch of some 2,000 Chinook salmon prompted NOAA Fisheries to shut down the whitefish fishery in the Central Gulf of Alaska on Sept. 25, leaving some 50,000 tons of pollock in the water and presenting the makings of economic disaster for Kodiak.

Salmon are a prohibited species catch in the whitefish trawl fishery.

Two trawlers that caught the bycatch in their nets immediately stopped fishing when they realized the bycatch and alerted the other 17 boats in the fleet to avoid the area, so based on available information, those vessels were compliant with federal regulations, NOAA Fisheries officials said.

NOAA Fisheries was continuing to evaluate the data as it became finalized by the observer program to determine if additional in-season management actions were necessary. As of Sept. 27, data gathered by the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) indicated the prohibited species catch (PSC) estimate for Chinook salmon in the Central Gulf totaled 19,665 fish.

The Alaska Region administrator for the NMFS, Jonathan M. Kurland, said the action was necessary to prevent exceeding the 2024 Chinook salmon prohibited species catch limit for vessels fishing for pollock using trawl gear in the Central Gulf.

“The take home message is the management structure worked,” said Julie Bonney, owner and executive director of the Alaska Groundfish Data Bank, a member-based organization representing Gulf of Alaska shoreside trawl catcher vessels and processors, primarily based in Kodiak.

“This was unprecedented,” Bonney said, adding that in the 20 years she has been involved with groundfish fisheries, she’d never seen that much salmon caught in one tow.

When you see more incidental catch, it implies the biomass is higher.

“Because they set up a salmon hot spot agreement in the beginning, as soon as we heard what happened, we recommended that the fleet stand down, which they did,” she said.

The ripple effect of shutting down that fishery means the loss of millions of dollars for everyone engaged in that whitefish fishery in Kodiak, from the owners, captains and crew of the 19 trawlers to processing companies and their employees, who would have processed that other 50,000 tons of pollock into fish sticks, surimi and other products.

“Kodiak is a local commercial fishing community; the fleet is primarily locally owned and operated, has the largest resident processing workforce, and countless support businesses that rely on our fisheries, including pollock, to operate,” Bonney noted in a Sept. 25 statement by the Alaska Groundfish Data Bank.

The economic impact hits the residential workforce, including Trident Seafoods, OBI Seafoods, North Pacific Seafoods and Silver Bay Seafoods. Some vessels will scramble to try other fisheries in trawl, but there’s no way to make up for the pollock, Bonney said.

The economic impact is expected to also hit about 100 families in Kodiak, as well as those aboard those 19 boats, she said.

Since fishery information is confidential through both the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act and Alaska state law, federal officials declined to release the identify the vessels. Independent journalist Nathaniel Herz of the news site Northern Journal identified Kent Helligso, part of a Kodiak-based family partnership, as a co-owner of one of the vessels.

The vessel had made a tow and probably towed way too long, Helligso told Herz.

While federal regulations require all salmon to be retained for enumeration and genetic sampling at the processing plant by independent observers, PSC is prohibited from entering commerce and must be discarded or donated, NOAA officials said.

Processing plants in Kodiak participate in the PSC donation program that allows salmon that are marketable and suitable quality for food to be donated.

Source: https://fishermensnews.com/chinook-bycatch-shutters-central-gulf-of-alaska-whitefish-fishery/