Editor’s note: Robert Begich, area management sport fish biologist for the Upper Kenai Peninsula with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, did not return multiple calls seeking comment for this story.
By Jenny Neyman
Redoubt Reporter
While news that the Kenai River would re-open to early run king salmon fishing on a catch-and-release basis at 12:01 a.m. Saturday elicited a widespread sense of relief that the run strength was not as weak as initially feared, the relief for some was tinged with “too little, too late” frustration that fishing was closed in the first place.
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game Division of Sport Fish announced June 3 that the Kenai River would close to all king fishing downstream of the outlet of Skilak Lake at 12:01 a.m. June 5, citing low numbers of returning kings through May and the first week of June, and concern that the mandated lower end of the escapement threshold would not be met.
The announcement came as a surprise to many fishermen in the area, as it is the earliest Fish and Game has ever pulled the plug on the early run king fishery, and is an economic blow to a wide array of tourism-, recreation- and sportfishing-related businesses, with aftershocks rippling throughout the economy.
“I’m not a school teacher. I’m not a part-timer. This is how I pay my mortgage and feed my kids. You know we’ve lost our May fishery, and now we’re on the cusp of losing our June fishery,” said Greg Brush, of Soldotna, with EZ Limit Guide Service, who has been a sportfish guide for 20 years. “But it can’t come across as just, ‘Poor Greg’ or, ‘Poor Kenai River guide.’ It’s more than that. Extreme roller-coaster changes affect the entire community. It’s the kid washing boats for college money. It’s the waitress at Harry’s who doesn’t have tables to wait on now. It’s everyone here, and it’s the future.”
Fish and Game decided to re-open the Kenai at 12:01 a.m. Saturday to catch-and-release fishing for kings 20 inches to 54 inches, and for harvest of kings smaller than 20 inches or larger than 55 inches. On Monday, Fish and Game announced that harvest of kings less than 46 inches or 55 inches and greater would be allowed starting at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday.
Even though the full closure of early run Kenai king fishing only lasted a week, the economic effects will be felt for a long time to come, Brush said, as people canceled plans to come to the Kenai because of the closure, and will think twice about coming in the future.
“This hurts everyone, and it’s not just this week. Consumer confidence is severely impacted. What ADFG told the public about our community is, basically, ‘Don’t come to the Kenai Peninsula,’” Brush said.
Outcry against the decision to curtail early run king fishing in the Kenai came swift and loud, but presented with the caveat that everyone wants to protect the resource. No matter how much money sportfishing generates in the local economy, keeping fishing open isn’t worth risking future salmon runs, Brush said.
But as Brush and others see it, halting king fishing June 5 was too harsh a reaction to a problem that hadn’t yet been proven to warrant such an extreme solution.
“Nobody should misinterpret my frustration or our frustration as, ‘Greg or the fishing guides don’t care about the resource,’ because we absolutely do, and we put the resource first. If there is need for a full shutdown, then absolutely we are behind it 100 percent. That’s the bottom line. But that’s not what’s happening here. The unprecedented closure occurred too early in the run and was extremely severe. This is proven by the fact that we are now, about one week later, fully open to catch and keep with escapement goals well within reach. Obviously, this was handled very poorly” Brush said.
Restricting king fishing to catch and release first would have been more appropriate, he said, an approach that is outlined as a possible response to a low return of fish in the Kenai River Early-Run King Salmon Management Plan.
“There’s a step-down plan, and the first step is to go to catch and release when managers are concerned about reaching their goals. For them to go from full throttle to complete closure without using all tools available in the management plan was crazy,” Brush said.
On June 9, the Kenai River Sportfishing Association sent out a response to the closure, outlining its reasoning for favoring a step-down approach to the low sonar counts in May and the first few days of June, rather than a full shutdown of fishing. In it, KRSA lauds the Division of Sport Fish for, “an exemplary job of putting in a robust assessment system for the Kenai River early-run king salmon fishery,” and also praises the significant investments made to restore and protect riparian habitat, and the extensive time and effort spent on the regulatory process that results in the fishery management plan.
The letter also chides the Division of Sport Fish for a decision it characterizes as not properly utilizing the assessment tools available and not following the steps of the management plan.
“Over the past 25 years, ADF&G has never closed the early-run fishery without first lowering the harvest potential by going to catch and release. The plan provides for progressive steps depending upon the run estimate and allowing catch and release is the step that should have been taken prior to a complete closure,” the response states.
“In spite of well conducted expensive assessment and a codified management plan that authorizes catch and release as a tool, this year ADF&G allowed for harvest until such time as they felt they had left themselves no other option than to close the fishery on 36 hours notice … . By not implementing catch and release, we lost a chance to put the great expenditure to work sustaining fish and providing maximum benefit. We passed on the chance to use all the tools available to manage this fishery. KRSA is very disappointed that past investments of time, money and resources of the (Board of Fisheries), ADF&G, the recreational fishing industry, sport anglers and fishery conservationists were not utilized in our present situation.”
According to KRSA, the decision to flat out close fishing was premature and failed to take into account several factors. For one thing, the Kenai River experienced an unusual flood event in late May and early June. High temperatures in the uplands prompted rapid snowmelt, without much rainfall to temper the cooling effect meltwater had on the river, resulting in high water levels, cold water and debris in the river. Those conditions could have delayed the returning king run from pushing into the river and would explain the low run numbers in May and early June, KRSA states, especially since escapements from the king runs that would have spawned this year’s run were within normal levels and didn’t elicit cause for concern that there would be a disastrously weak run this year.
Sure enough, a return to more normal water conditions toward the end of the first week of June coincided with a leap in daily king counts, KRSA states. Given that, a longer period of wait and see was warranted before going to such drastic protection measures, KRSA states.
Tim McKinley, fisheries biologist with Fish and Game Division of Sport Fish, said that a multitude of factors go into fishery management decisions.
“We very carefully make these decisions. We track this stuff more than daily. It seems like sometimes people don’t realize that,” he said. “You do weigh everything.”
Several factors are considered with the early king run. Sonar and in-river fish counts and harvest estimates from creel surveys weigh heavily. Kenai-area managers also coordinate with managers from elsewhere in the region, who in this case relayed that returns to other king streams in Cook Inlet, such as the Anchor and Deshka rivers, were also low, indicating the possibility of something occurring in the ocean that affected the strength of the entire early king run regionwide.
“It definitely affects your thinking, and it should,” McKinley said.
Another factor is returning fish age. In a good early run king return, there tends to be a preponderance of older, larger fish that hit the river in May, followed by a mix of age and size classes for the first few weeks of June, and another pulse of older, larger kings later in June.
“If it’s a poor run it’s common have a mix of size and age fish for May, and that’s what we got this May,” McKinley said.
The preseason forecast already was predicting a below-average early run of 8,000 to 10,500 kings, under the long-term average of 16,500 fish. McKinley said he doesn’t put much stock in preseason forecasts alone, but when matched with other indicators of a weak run, he takes the whole picture seriously.
“That definitely weighs into our thinking coming into the season. With all these things, they’re all pointing in the same direction. It’s not rose-colored glasses, for sure, but they all gave the same tint to us,” he said. “… The emergency order authority in the management plan is scripted out for those things.”
KRSA doesn’t argue that there were indications of the run strength being weak.
“No one thought that this was going to be a great year. From the start the sonar counts were very low and no other in-season indicator gave anybody much hope that a large run was lurking out there somewhere,” KRSA states.
However, the organization says it would rather have seen Fish and Game institute a step-down restriction of harvest sooner, rather than waiting until it felt there was no choice but to close fishing altogether. Going to catch-and-release fishing would have allowed more time to gather information without posing much risk to the run, KRSA states.
The organization’s response includes an estimation of the impact catch-and-release fishing would have had at the time of the closure. Figuring a 10 percent mortality rate and estimating that only about 100 to 150 kings would have been caught in the Kenai the weekend of the closure — based on the poor fishing conditions, low fish counts and resulting low fishing participation — that results in about 15 king mortalities from catch and release over the June 5 and 6 weekend, KRSA states.
“Bottom line, we took out the fishery on a Friday night in early June rather than allowing it to continue restricted to catch and release to achieve a saving of 15 or less fish. Every fish can be important, but a number of this magnitude is ‘lost’ in the statistical uncertainty around every other estimate used to assess the fishery,” KRSA states. “… A catch and release fishery could have been implemented with no risk to escapement or future runs. The fishery closure decision was based on a premature and erroneous run projection. A catch and release regulation would have provided an appropriate contingency for the low early counts until such time as an accurate in-season forecast could be made.”
McKinley pointed out the bright side to the brief early run closure — that fish counts are up and fishing opportunities have been reinstated. But for Brush and many others whose finances sink or swim on the health of the Kenai sportfishing industry, that’s small comfort when facing lost revenue this year, and when pondering how much business has been scared away in the future.
“I think the damage has been done,” Brush said. “This is not just some hardship for five days or 10 days. This is longstanding damage that we will see the repercussions of in 2011 and 2012. Visitors to our area talk, and word gets out in the Lower 48. The word — whether it’s truth or not doesn’t matter — is very negative. The perception is that our fisheries are in dire straits and the message has been sent by ADFG — ‘Don’t come to the Kenai Peninsula.’”
FISH FIRST OR NO FISH! The thinking in this article will destroy our fisheries. If these people can’t stand the vagaries of this run they need to go get regular jobs. It is a very small run and consequently very vulnerable. Why are people basing their economic well-being on such a small fragile fishery? It suggests a real ignorance of nature, fish life, weather and climate cycles and a lack of commitment to the long-term health of our fisheries. Why is the Redoubt Reporter catering to this hysteria? Stop until you can take a more informed and reasoned approach in your coverage. We don’t need any more poor quality coverage of our fisheries. This kind of pressure has driven our politics and fisheries management to the detriment of our state. Try for a higher standard. If you can’t immediately get an opinion from Fish and Game wait until you can. Remember the pressure that Craig Medred brought to fish politics: vicious and suspect coverage of commercial and subsistence fisheries and apparently driven by ignorance. It was never clear to this reader that the fellow so much as passed a basic statistics class in college or in any way knew how to interview a scientist to get good information. The array of information in his articles suggested that he did not bother to understand or could not. Don’t go his route. Seek the best information you can. Try to learn how to interview the scientists at Fish and Game and elsewhere. Interview the old timers here. Maybe take some more classes in school so that you understand statistics and maybe read the scientific papers available about our fisheries. You could make a real contribution. This hysterical article is bad for our community (it’s peace and it’s fish) and this otherwise good newspaper. This summer may see a truly disastrous sockeye return to the Kenai River. People here may really suffer. Please prepare to cover it with the best information available as it may be a very difficult summer for all of us. Take the time to find out as much as possible about the decisions of the Department of Fish and Game from all sides, including theirs. You would be doing a real service for all of us. Thanks. Best wishes.
Hello Phisht,
Thank you for your comment. I would like to point out the editor’s note stating that multiple attempts to contact Fish and Game to get their information for this story were not returned. I realize that without their voice the article may seem unbalanced, but if they’re unwilling to comment, we can’t speculate for them.
- Redoubt Reporter
Regular updates on the early run Kenai River king salmon are available at the KRSA web site, http://www.kenairiversportfishing.com.
The issue with the closure of the early run king salmon on the Kenai was that it was made at a very early stage of the run, without many data points, which leads to a large uncertainty for a projected forecast. In such situations, the management plan calls for a step-down process, the next step being going to catch and release.
The lower end of the biological escapement goal is 4,000, while the lower end of the optimal escapement goal is 5,300, which is the target on the lower end to manage for in the plan.
ADF&G chose to go directly to closure on June 2, with less than 25% of the average run return – when in past years, like 2002, they waited until June 11, when more fish have gone past the sonar (usually about 50% by this date) so that the projection of going under the minimum escapement is based on more data, which gives a more accurate projection.
In 2002, the last time the river was closed to fishing during the early run king salmon, ADF&G waited until June 11, at the mid-point of an average return, to make the call to close to fishing.
As it turns out, this year’s run was late, probably due to the in-river flood event in late May and early June, and the fish counts have returned to normal and now the run is projected to go over the top end of the OEG of 9,000 if bait is not introduced into the fishery soon.
The reason the management plan has a step-down provision to go to catch and release as the first step down measure is specifically for instances that occurred this year – when a run return was late or delayed by an unexpected natural occurrance, like the in-river flood event in late May / early June, when the river was at peak water flow levels.