Federal appeals court ruling eliminates — for now — legal threat facing Southeast Alaska fishers

Alaska Beacon

By James Brooks

August 16th, 2024

A three-judge panel at 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has overturned a lower-court decision that could have temporarily halted troll fishing for salmon in Southeast Alaska.

The appellate court decision, announced Friday, clears the way for the region’s troll fishery to continue. It had been threatened by a lawsuit from the Washington-based Wild Fish Conservancy, an environmental group.

The group filed suit in 2020, arguing that National Marine Fisheries Service rules applied to the fishery were inadequate when it came to protecting endangered killer whales that live in Puget Sound.

A U.S. District Court judge in Washington state agreed with the group, ruling in May 2023 that the biological opinion — a document that underpins fishing rules — was inadequate. Southeast Alaska’s troll fishery would be shut down as a consequence.

Read full article here

Charter fishermen blamed for closure of Alaska’s summer king salmon troll season

Seafood Source

By Cliff White, published in Supply & Trade

August 16th, 2024

The August king salmon season in Southeast Alaska will not happen after Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G) determined there was a catch overage in the first retention period earlier this summer.

Commercial trollers caught 82,000 kings in the first season, above the target of 66,700, forcing ADF&G to end fishing on 8 July. While the agency’s 2024 preseason forecast estimated commercial fishermen would be left with 15,000 kings to catch in the second season in August, sport fishermen caught around 52,000 kings, exceeding their allocation by 14,000 fish. Following a controversial management plan approved in 2023, that total was deducted from the commercial troll allocation.

“Following this reduction, the remaining annual troll allocation does not provide a sufficient harvest target to open a competitive second summer commercial troll fishery Chinook salmon retention period,” ADF&G said in a 6 August release. “However, if there is an adequate number of Chinook salmon remaining on the all-gear treaty allocation, a limited harvest troll fishery may open. Any plans to open a limited harvest fishery would be announced later this month.”

Read full article here

Tenure Rights/USA: By, and from, the Sea

International Collective in support of Fishworkers

By Brittany Tholan and Linda Behnken

June 2024

Permit banks and collective ownership in Alaska return individual fishing rights to the collective, harking back to the early days of fishing

More than 12,000 years ago, people on Haida Gwaii, an archipelago off British Columbia about 48 km south of Alaska, were cooking salmon. They are the earliest known humans to do so.

As with all early human societies who lived by the sea and off it, the first relationship with the ocean beyond the northwest coast was one of collective tenure. There were locally-derived systems of norms, rules and practices that evolved over time and gained social legitimacy. Men caught halibut via hook-and-line from canoes; women fileted, deboned and dried the fish. The Haida, Tlingit and Tsimshian peoples of present-day southeast Alaska fashioned large, v-shaped hooks out of wood to snare fish up to 500 pounds (227 kg). Potlaches, traditional feasts that involved dancing, fed, impressed and welcomed guests. The rights of Alaska Natives to access, steward and honour relate to, safeguard and/or share (for example) elements of their coastal territories and culture that have fluctuated over time, Tribal members have continued to work hard to keep their cultural traditions alive.

Read full article here

Bringing Salmon home to the Columbia River

The Tyee

By Mark Thomas, Chief Keith Crow, and Jason Andrew

August 15th, 2024

An Indigenous-led, cross-border approach has seen great successes. But it needs BC and Canada’s ongoing financial support.

The Columbia River was once the source of the greatest salmon runs in the world. Millions of life-giving sockeye and giant chinook swam upriver to spawn each year.

The beloved performing arts showcase is back this September on Granville Island.

The Columbia’s headwaters are in British Columbia. The upper 40 per cent of the river winds through the province before entering the U.S. in Washington state and emptying into the Pacific in Oregon.

An epic 2,000-kilometre journey.

But massive dams, beginning with Grand Coulee in Washington, have blocked salmon from returning to the headwaters of the Columbia River for almost a century. In the 1960s, under the Columbia River Treaty, more dams were built without consultation with our Indigenous nations on our unceded territories in B.C.

Read full article here

Dream of Crewing an Alaskan Fishing Boat? Start Here

The Tyee

By Brendan Jones

June 28th, 2024

As a student at Vermont’s Middlebury College, Lea LeGardeur loved being on the water. Her diminutive size, booming voice and natural ability with the rudder made her a fit for the coxswain position with the Middlebury men’s rowing team. She spent 2 1/2 years steering the group.

“I got accustomed to spending time with guys twice my size.”

Which proved an asset for LeGardeur, who, after teaching geography at Middlebury, decided to commercial fish in Alaska.

LeGardeur’s break came when she discovered the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association, or ALFA, based in the small fishing town of Sitka, Alaska. The organization had an extensive record of fighting foreign fishing, trawling and depletion of resources. ALFA had recently secured a grant to fund its Crew Training Program, or CTP.

Read full article here

Progress Report: Update on the Sitka Community Boatyard at GPIP

July 19, 2024

by ALFA Staff

The City of Sitka is moving toward the construction phase of a haul out and boatyard at the Gary Paxton Industrial Park.  Below is an update from the July 18, 2024 GPIP meeting provided by Jeremy Serka of Sitka Custom Marine.  Jeremy is under contract with ALFA to assist with boatyard development and fleet outreach.

Michael Harmon, the cities engineer working on the haulout project, described how the City settled on the final scope of work to be completed by the contractors. The final price is $9,281,000 and is set as a “do not exceed” limit for the contractors: Western Marine, K and E Sitka, and Sitka Electric.

PND- preconstruction, permitting and design services = $1,347,537 or 14% of the project,

Western Marine- piers = $6,279.362 or 68% of the project

Travel Hoist purchase = $1,377,800 or 15% of the project

Construction management and CBS indirect costs = $276,341 or 3% of the project.

The scope of the project was reduced due to unexpected pile depths. The following was cut from the project: Total cost around one million dollars.

·      Concrete and hydronic heater coils for wash pad ($500,000). The sump and filtration will be installed but a temporary liner (tarp) will need to be use when washing boats. There is currently no funding for this item but some talk of maybe a potential operator supplying the liner.

·      Electrical hook up and lighting at wash pad ($165,000) – the engineers designed a light pedestal that had some large outlets for plugging in spider boxes to provide power to adjacent vessels near the wash pad.

·      Special investigations and testing: ( $80,000) – there are a handful of potential environmental inspections that could be required ; such as concerns with sea stars and bubble curtain mitigation.

·      Civil / storm drains and expansion of yard around piers to accommodate parking and access to floating dock. ( $310,000)  The engineers had two more storm drains in the uplands to aid in the filtration of any runoff from the yard. Now they will need to grade the yard into one primary storm drain. The overall footprint of the waterside fill was shortened. The extended fill would have extended towards the creek side of the piers to give more room for parking and loading ramp for people exiting their vessel onto a dock.

Possible sources of money to finish phase 1 or contingency .

·      GPIP funds that were never allocated, or money left over for certain projects, may include $100,000 that was allocated towards wash pad in the early days of the project.

·      Interest that has accrued on the 8.1 million hospital money. The money has been earning 4% interest over the last two years, which equates to $648,000. Thor Christianson suggested that these funds should go towards the project; the city administrator appeared to disagree.

Permitting

Permitting is set to be finished in October and is currently in the public comment process. There is some worry that Sitka Tribe may have some opposition to the project as this has happened in the past. Objections could delay the start of construction.

Marine travel lift purchase

A final price of $1,377,800 was settled on for the 150 ton lift from Kendrick Equipment. The machine is set to be built but the contract is still not signed because Kendrick Equipment must provide proof of a bond before the city can sign. We are waiting on them but they say it won’t hold up production.

RFQ ( Request for Qualifications) for haul out operations

·      The GPIP board approved sending the RFQ to the assembly for approval and then solicitation. The RFQ is simply looking for qualified individuals to develop the scope of work to be incorporated into an RFP that will eventually select an operator based on the lowest bid.

·      The administration suggested that there may be some out-of-town interest in running the yard. Bidders who meet the requirements of the RFQ will work with a city group to determine what should be included in the RFP.   The scope of work will include such things as:  pricing for the haul out, storage, electricity and washdown services, lease of available workspace, management of workspaces, maintenance of equipment and property, liability insurance. environmental reporting, billing, etc.

Farm Bill Progress to Support Fishing and Seafood Industries

National Fishermen

NF Staff

June 12th, 2024

On Tuesday, June 11, Senate Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry Committee Ranking Member John Boozman released a Farm Bill framework that includes several provisions advancing significant and meaningful benefits to fishing and seafood businesses and communities.

The first Farm Bill was the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, part of the New Deal, in response to the drop in U.S. crop prices after the First World War. In 2013, the Farm Bill emerged from the U.S. Senate with two amendments to help the fishing industry, introduced by Mass. Senator Cowan. One amendment called for catch insurance similar to crop insurance and low-interest loans available for the fishing industry to cope with the economic disaster, which was declared in 2012 by Commerce Secretary Rebecca Blank.

Similarly, in June 2023, Senator Murkowski and Senator King introduced bipartisan legislation called the Fishing Industry Credit Enhancement Act to expand financial support to America’s fishing communities. This bill was another step forward in providing fishing businesses with access to the same loans as agriculture businesses through the Farm Credit System.

Read full article here

OPINION: Peltola pulls for Alaska fishermen

Anchorage Daily News

By Linda Behnken

June 9th, 2024

Fish news out recently shows us once again that Alaska’s fishermen have a rare champion in Rep. Mary Peltola. Mary introduced two bills that focus on funding NOAA’s bycatch reduction program and advancing critical regulations on trawl gear.

Wild seafood provides food security and livelihoods across the country, but nowhere is that more true than in Alaska. We are fortunate to have a leader who not only has her own boots in fisheries but is bold enough to drive hard conversations around our biggest challenges.

In the North Pacific, that includes bycatch management and habitat protection — not only as a foundation for sustainable management, but as a critical part of climate resilience. We’ve seen the complete collapse of two iconic Alaska crab species, and elimination of subsistence fishing on major rivers with communities highly dependent upon that food resource. We’ve witnessed the abrupt crash of Gulf of Alaska cod following the 2014-2016 marine heat wave. As fish stocks and ocean conditions change more quickly and more substantially than ever before, we need conservation tools that match the pace with that change to safeguard ocean health.

Read full article here

NMFS issues Positive 90-day finding on wild fish conservancy petition to list alaska chinook populations under the endangered species act

NOAA

On Friday, May 24, the National Marine Fisheries Service issued a positive 90-day finding on the Wild Fish Conservancy’s petition to list Chinook stocks that spawn in rivers that flow into the Gulf of Alaska as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act. These stocks include Chinook populations that range from Kodiak Island, Cook Inlet and Prince William Sound to Southeast Alaska. The Wild Fish Conservancy, an anti-small boat commercial fishing group from Washington State, claims that Alaska is degrading Chinook habitat, overharvesting Chinook, and failing to implement measures that provide protections for Alaska’s Chinook stocks. 

NMFS’ 90 day finding begins a 60-day public comment period seeking information about Gulf of Alaska Chinook salmon from the public, government agencies, Alaska Native organizations, scientists, conservation groups, fishing groups, and other interested parties. The agency seeks information on Chinook ecology and abundance trends, fishery impacts, threats, habitat conditions, and the effectiveness of ADF&G management measures. The comment deadline July 23, 2024. Fishermen can submit comments to Gulf of Alaska Chinook Salmon Petition, docket# NOAA-NMFS-2024-0042 at the regulations website: https://www.regulations.gov The Wild Fish Conservancy’s petition is available at: https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/endangeredspecies-conservation/candidate-speciesunder-endangered-species-act .

Peltola Introduces Pair of Fish Bills to Restrict Bottom Trawling, Reduce Bycatch

Alaska Fish News

By Laine Welch

May 23rd, 2024

On May 22 AK Representative Mary Peltola introduced a pair of bills to restrict bottom trawling and reduce bycatch – the bipartisan Bycatch Reduction and Mitigation Act and the Bottom Trawl Clarity Act.

“Since coming to Congress, I’ve worked to make fish and fishing policy the issue of national importance it deserves to be,” said Rep. Peltola in announcing the bills. “I know fish, I know Alaska, and I know how to work with people in both parties to get stuff done.”

The Bycatch Reduction and Mitigation Act supports Alaskan fishermen working to reduce bycatch by:

• Authorizing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s Bycatch Reduction and Engineering Program (BREP) at $10 million for five years.

• Establishing the Bycatch Mitigation Assistance Fund, to be administered by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, and used to help fishermen and vessel owners purchase new gear or technology to reduce bycatch – such as camera systems, lights, and salmon excluders.

The Bottom Trawl Clarity Act limits bottom trawling in vulnerable ocean by:

• Mandating each Fisheries Management Council that permits the use of any bottom trawl gear to define the terms “substantial” versus “limited” bottom contact.

• Requiring the designation of Bottom Trawl Zones, limiting the areas where gear that scrapes the seafloor is allowed.

Read full article here