A Good Year in Egegik

The commercial harvest of sockeye salmon in Bristol Bay continues to trickle in but it is obviously going down with each passing day. The total harvest this season is over 29.7-million sockeye and climbing. In many respects the system that paced the 2009 sockeye season in Bristol Bay was Egegik. The total run to the district is over 12.2-million and the total harvest is over 11.2-million sockeye. That puts escapement at 1.14-million sockeye salmon. The escapement goal was between 800-thousand and 1.4-million with a midpoint range of 1.1-million. That means that Fish and Game hit their target in the Egegik District. Paul Salomone is the Area Management Biologist for the District. He made an announcement last Tuesday, which was essentially the last act of actively controlling the fishery. It opened the entire district to set and drift fishing through 9-am Friday July 24th. He said, “What I effectively did with the announcement was just open those 2 days that it would have been closed over the weekend, which helps to prolong opportunities for folks. We don’t really have any conservation needs associated with keeping the fishery closed. If we close the fishery down tender assets and markets have a tendency to dry up. This way we give the opportunity for those assets and markets to stay in place”. The fall fishing schedule in the Egegik District will take effect at 9-am on Monday July 27th and will allow fishing effort from Monday’s at 9-am until Friday’s at 9-am. The sockeye return to Egegik was much larger than expected this season. The preseason forecast called for a run of 9.6-million strong and it ended up exceeding 12-million. The preseason forecast predicted a commercial harvest of 8.2-million sockeye but in reality the harvest will be well in excess of 11-million. The sockeye salmon allocation plan for Egegik calls for the harvest to be split among gear types, with the drifters getting 86-percent of the catch and the setnetters getting 14-percent. The current allocation split is 85 drift and 15-percent set, which is the same split as last year. Next up for Salomone and his staff are some more aerial surveys of escapement and then spawning surveys. Salomone will also be working on a season summary and then preparing Department comments for the proposals that will be before the Alaska Board of Fisheries during their Bristol Bay meeting in early December in Anchorage. There are a handful of proposals that will be before the Board specifically addressing the Egegik District. Proposal 38 put forward by Kim Rice calls for the allocation splits between drifters and setnetters to be suspended when the drift fleet in the district is less than 400 vessels or when the fishing fleets are on limits, which they were again for most of this season’s peak. Another proposal that is sure to spark some debate at the Board of Fish meeting is Proposal 39 put forward by Larry Christensen, which calls for the removal of all set gillnet gear when the setnetters are closed. Christensen claims that the current situation is a hindrance to navigation. You can find all of the proposals that will be before the Board of Fisheries on the Alaska Department of Fish and Game website. Salomone implied that 2009 was a good season and moral was high. He said, “We had a lot of fish to work with. At least Egegik had a fair amount to play with early on. So we had pretty consistent fishing all the way through the year, which makes my job easier. We just had a good year. You have a lot of smiles during good years and a lot of frowns during bad years”.