No resolution between gillnetters and managers at task force meeting
- Chilkat Valley News
- 13 hours ago
- 7 min read
By Will Steinfeld
Chilkat Valley News
One bad year for Chilkoot salmon or serial mismanagement? That’s the distance between state fisheries managers and area gillnetters, who spoke last week at an annual post-season meeting about a decades-long controversy, and the future of the Lynn Canal’s wild-run salmon stocks.
At the center of the debate is a stretch of water along the Hawk Inlet shoreline, where Icy Strait hits Admiralty Island. The passage, near the mouth of the Lynn Canal, is a migratory path for fish heading toward the Chilkoot and Chilkat rivers. It’s also productive fishing grounds for the Juneau-area seine fleet, which is allowed to fish the area in years when pink salmon is deemed abundant.
The seine fishermen are who Lynn Canal gillnetters pointed to this summer, when Chilkoot sockeye failed to show up in their usual numbers. As the theory held by many gillnetters goes, that was because the bulk of the run was harvested at the Hawk Inlet shoreline, before they could reach gillnets in the Lynn Canal or spawning streams further north.
By the end of the summer, the number of sockeye spawning at Chilkoot failed to make the state sustainability goal for the first time since 2009. And on top of low spawning numbers in the river, sockeye harvest out in the canal — the most profitable wild-run salmon for the fleet — was roughly half of recent averages. That left fishermen increasingly reliant on chum, 99% of which in the canal is hatchery-raised, to make their profit.
All told, it made for a difficult season, gillnetters said. And at last week’s meeting, some of them made it clear they thought that was a management issue — and avoidable.
“The worst managed year I’ve seen in 60 years of fishing,” was what longtime gillnetter Bill Thomas called it.
“Why would you jeopardize opening Hawk Inlet when Chilkoot wasn’t meeting escapement?”
“This is the same old grind where you’re going to defend your decisions that weren’t great decisions,” said Steve Fossman to the gathered fisheries managers during the Dec. 2 meeting. “Meanwhile, the river doesn’t make escapement and harvest is a real sad situation.”
Managers, however, disagreed on both the severity of Chilkoot underescapement and the relevance of the seine fishery.
“We try to manage to meet escapement every year, but sometimes there are going to be misses,” said Southeast finfish management coordinator Troy Thynes in an interview this week. “We’ve been hearing these exact same arguments for decades… Chilkoot has made escapement when there’s been large seine fisheries and also without.”
More broadly, Thynes told gillnetters at the meeting that limiting Hawk Inlet sockeye catch was an “allocative issue” — something to be addressed at the next Board of Fisheries meeting in 2028, and not by managers during the season.
Disagreement with the management
That was an unsatisfying answer for many in the fleet, who find fault with both the current management plan and how it’s being implemented.
As current regulations stand, the Hawk Inlet fishery is opened specifically to target pink salmon, meaning managers must first determine a “harvestable surplus” of pink salmon before opening. Some gillnetters at the meeting questioned whether Fish and Game managers had evidence of abundance this year before the first Hawk Inlet openings in July.
That included Ryan Cook, who pointed to the state’s test fishery in the area, which catches fish to estimate abundance and the ratio of wild to hatchery fish.
“The first test fishery showed 15% of the average for pinks while Chilkoot sockeye were flatlining,” Cook told state managers. “What gave you the justification to open?”
One test fishery — though not the first — did indeed catch pink salmon at only 15% of the 10-year average. That was the last test fishery day of the year, on July 18. Prior test fishery dates on June 27, July 5, and July 11 also caught pink salmon well below normal rates, at 27%, 19%, and 53% of the 10-year averages.
Juneau area manager Scott Forbes said that rather than rely solely on the one-boat test fishery, he leaned on aerial surveys to show abundance.
“Abundance of pinks was obvious on aerial surveys,” Forbes said.
Even assuming pink salmon abundance, however, gillnetters argued Chilkoot escapement should have been given more weight. The current management plan states that Hawk Inlet openings “must consider the conservation of all salmon species.” As Cook argued, Chilkoot’s “flatlining” escapement numbers should have caused Fish and Game managers to add restrictions, or decrease openings, along the run’s migratory path.
Thynes said it wasn’t immediately apparent that Chilkoot would be an issue by mid-summer due to last year’s pattern, in which harvest and escapement started slow, but climbed after Lynn Canal restrictions were put into place.
“It was very similar circumstances to the 2024 run, where we saw the run was delayed going through the weir, and we took some unprecedented management actions in the gillnet and subsistence fisheries, and we ended up meeting escapement by a fair amount,” Thynes said this week. “Certainly the goal is to make escapement every year in all of our systems. With any wild-run salmon there’s uncertainty with the run.”
Moving forward
In the coming years, it seems gillnetters will look for substantive changes to the management plan. That could include changes to a specific measure meant to address sockeye interception.
The current management plan includes a 15,000 fish limit on wild sockeye harvest by Hawk Inlet seiners between July 1 and July 22. Hawk Inlet wild sockeye harvest during the limit period this year came in at 14,000 fish — within the limit. But just after the end of the limit period, in the last week of July and first week of August, another 40,000 wild sockeye were caught in the Hawk Inlet fishery, Forbes said.
Much of that catch would have been limited prior to 2018, when the Board of Fisheries voted to shorten the limit period, moving the end date from Aug. 1 to July 22. Based on this season, Steve Fossman told managers, the longer limit period was “super critical and needs to be reinstated.”
In comparison, according to preliminary Fish and Game numbers, the Lynn Canal fishery took in a total of 61,319 sockeye over the course of the season, roughly half of the recent average harvest.
The main substantive change gillnetters pitched in fact had little to do with outright limits on seine fisheries. As it stands now, it’s hard for gillnetters and managers to see eye to eye partially because of how much speculation is involved: no one knows exactly how many Chilkoot sockeye were caught before the mouth of the Lynn Canal.
That’s why multiple gillnetters last week argued for genetic testing in the Hawk Inlet fishery, which would show the estimated ratios of different stocks, including Chilkoot sockeye, caught in seine nets. According to gillnetters, managers would then be able to see when struggling stocks were passing through and put in corresponding restrictions.
Former Haines area commercial fisheries manager Mark Sogge, who attended the meeting, called genetic testing a solution to the “difficult problem” of managing the Hawk Inlet fishery.
“(Fish and Game managers) need to do enough test fishing or testing of seiners so they know what the stock composition of the sockeye is,” Sogge said. “It’s not an insolvable problem, it’s just a question of how much money you can spend. The truth is, to do a good job managing the fishery you more or less have to have that information.”
Such testing already exists in the Lynn Canal commercial gillnet fishery, where Fish and Game calculates how much of the sockeye catch is Chilkoot origin vs. Chilkat origin. And genetic testing exists in the Hawk Inlet fishery, but only to test for proportions of wild-run vs. hatchery raised sockeye.
“(Genetic stock identification) testing would make your job obvious whether to open or not,” Fossman told managers.
Another gillnetter, Joe Baxter, in particular pressed managers on the issue of increased genetic testing. “I’d like to hear about (genetic stock identification) so that you as managers can use real data instead of fake data extrapolated from all these different sources,” Baxter said. “Is the department interested in getting any of that information?”
Thynes and Forbes did not have a direct answer for Baxter and others, saying a genetic sampling program was currently not feasible because of funding and logistical challenges. Four weeks of in-season genetic testing would run the state $155,000, said Kyle Shedd, of Fish and Game’s Gene Conservation Laboratory. As for logistics, Forbes said it would be hard to get pure samples due to the fact that boats often fish multiple areas on the same day. And if samples were taken on test fish boats, locations would also be a problem. The test fishery sets are mostly further north than the rest of the fishery, meaning the samples wouldn’t be directly representative, Forbes said.
When asked this week if increased genetic testing would be useful to managers independent of money and logistics challenges, Thynes did not say yes or no.
“As far as the utility of it… there could be some utility for earlier indications of sockeye heading to Northern Southeast,” Thynes said. “It kinda gives you an idea of the relative index of abundance from year to year… but if the tides are off, or something else happens, it may not be the most representative.”
Gillnetters, however, have been less receptive to the funding and logistics arguments, partly because they see it as tilting in favor of the other fleet. “You see it in the criticisms,” Sogge said, after observing the meeting back and forth.
“It’s in the benefit of the seiners not to have the scientific information. Because once you have that there’s this information to say, ‘we have to stop this fishery even though there’s an oversupply of pink salmon.’”
Beyond the specifics of management plans and genetic testing, the broader issue of fairness between the two fishing fleets seems unlikely to see much resolution in the near future.
Discussing hopes for the future, Baxter told managers he hoped that when the Lynn Canal fleet was “restricted for good reason, seiners shouldn’t be able to fish expanded areas 20 miles in front of us.”
But Thynes told Lynn Canal gillnetters he thought the seiners were already equally, if not more restricted. “Throw in the fact that the seine fishery is completely closed in even years, and I don’t know if those are comparisons you can make or want to make.”
When Baxter, near the end of the discussion, asked for a commitment from managers to make management restrictions consistent between seiners and gillnetters, Thynes again demurred.
“In our view, we’re already doing that,” Thynes said. “That’s where we differ. That’s where we’re going to stand.”
• This article originally appeared in the Chilkat Valley News.
