Applications are now open for the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association (ALFA) Crew Training Program. ALFA’s Natalie Sattler and skipper Eric Jordan joined KCAW’s Erin Fulton to talk about the application process and their hopes for the upcoming season. Listen to the full interview here:

You can apply online now through the end of March for the 2024 fishing reason.

Barring a stay, or a successful appeal, or other eleventh-hour legal action, there will be no troll fishery for king salmon in Southeast Alaska either this summer or winter.

The fisheries have been canceled by order of the US District Court of Western Washington on largely procedural grounds, stemming from a violation of the Endangered Species Act, and the failure of the National Marine Fisheries Service to fully address the impact of Alaska’s king salmon trollers on an endangered population of orcas in Puget Sound called Southern Resident Killer Whales. 

No other salmon species or commercial gear group or sport fishery – anywhere on the entire Pacific Northwest Coast – is affected by the order, just commercial trolling for king salmon in Southeast Alaska.

Heading out every July 1 in search of Alaska’s most valuable salmon – also called Chinook – has been an annual ritual across the region since before statehood.

Shortly after the court order came down, KCAW’s Robert Woolsey met with trollers Eric Jordan, Jacquie Foss, and Jim Moore to discuss what no king salmon season will mean for them, personally and professionally. This is their conversation, in three parts.

Part 1: The practical implications of a summer without Chinook

Foss: The cost of a boat exists whether or not the king salmon fishery happens or not. You have to pull it out of the water, you have to maintain your zincs. There’s work that you have to have just to make sure your boat stays fishing. And so that’s still happening for us. How we’re gonna pay for it is less certain.

Moore: I’m confident that we’re going to have a season. I’m confident that the king salmon season is going to open July first. I feel that we have so much support. Our congressional delegation is working behind the scenes. The State of Alaska is throwing its full weight into the fight. The Alaska Trollers Association are [intervenors and] co-defendants with the National Marine Fisheries Service and the State of Alaska. And everybody’s working pretty hard to make sure that we’re out on the water this summer. I don’t know exactly how it’s going to happen. It’s a legal court case. And so different parties hold their cards close. But I’m confident we’re gonna go ahead. So I’m planning on going ahead.

Foss: I always appreciate sitting next to Jim and his optimism, because I don’t always go there. The decision last week (May 3, 2023) was a gut punch. And fishing is how I can afford to raise my family in Sitka. So it’s really affected me in sort of a more existential way: Who are we if we’re not fishermen? Who are we if we’re not catching king salmon on our boat?

Jordan: It’s already affected boat values. I just had a survey on my boat, on what I would say as a very optimistic estimate. Even though I’ve made improvements since the last survey, [my boat] has lost about 20% of its value. Right away. People can’t sell their boats. I spent a whole week before this latest [court] decision preparing to sell gear at the Fisherman’s Flea Market because I’m getting ready to retire and I have thousands of dollars of really good surplus gear that’s basically worthless right now, except for the chum troll and coho gear. But thousands of dollars of king salmon plugs and spoons are just basically worthless.

Emotionally, I have to call my crew and tell them the situation. Some of them just love fishing king salmon. We do really well chum trolling, and Jim [Moore] and I helped pioneer that, but I’ve had crew members cry when I’ve told them that we’re gonna go chum fishing instead of king salmon fishing.

Foss: You know, it’s more of a spiritual problem than a financial one. Because fishermen are scrappy people. We will always figure out how to make expenses somehow. It’s just…we’d be broken in some way doing that, if that makes sense?

You know, not catching king salmon has a huge, huge impact to our financial bottom line: 40% of our income. And so there’s the argument, ‘Well, you can find the other 40%.’  That 40% allows us to make the other 60%. So it’s not like you can just make up that amount of income somewhere else on the water or in some other fishery. It’s really holistic.

Jordan: There’s a miraculous, wondrous thing about catching king salmon and pursuing them all over the coast, from Dixon Entrance – like Jim’s fished – from Forrester Island to Cape Suckling. And the chum troll fishing is not going to save us. It’s gonna help.

Moore: Having fished a long time, I’ve seen a lot of changes in the fishery. And I have to say that when I bought my first boat, people said, “There’s no future in it. It’s over. It’s had its heyday and it’s going down.” But I’ve seen this cycle of boom and bust, optimism and pessimism several times. And that’s one reason why, you know, if we’re looking at grief over this court case, I’m in the first stage: denial.

Part 2: The importance of king salmon to the identity of trollers

Jim Moore bought his troller in 1970. This summer will mark his fifty-third year as a professional salmon fisherman. Eric Jordan wasn’t born on a troller, but when he was still an infant, his parents rigged a bunk for him in the cabin of their boat, a 32-foot double-ender named “Salty,”  and he could watch them fish for king salmon through a porthole. Having fished every year since, Jordan is about to turn 73 years old.

Jacquie Foss doesn’t yet have that kind of seniority, but she might one day. She and her husband fish as a family, with their 8- and 10-year old children on board.

These three Sitka-based trollers are typical of the Southeast Alaska fleet: They have exceptional longevity in a difficult profession, and a multi-generational investment in their businesses.

Foss: Every year the fish – it’s exactly the same and nothing alike. You’re in the water, you’re dragging hooks. But are they going to hit the herring this year? Or is it going to be this spoon? Or is it gonna be the spoon that you have buried in there that worked 10 years ago that might work now? It’s about the puzzle. And it’s about the fact that our entire year really starts July 1. That’s our New Year: our whole life is centered around that July 1 opener.

Moore: I’m just so blessed to have found a livelihood doing something so interesting and creative. Every single day is different. And it presents a whole new set of problems to solve. “You know, I think I’ll try that green thing that I used 15 years ago,” and then have them hit it – that’s a tremendous feeling: success.

Foss: And it’s just this anticipation and joy, and just the puzzle of king salmon, because they could be where they’ve always been, they could not be there, you could have a 10 fish day, you could have a 300 fish day. That’s 300-fish day is a feat. 100 is a lot –  just your arms are tired, but you’re not tired. It’s hard to come up with the words.

Jordan: What I said in my deposition on this Wild Fish Conservancy suit: because we handle each fish individually, our connection with them is strong. And we care about them, we respect them. And that comes from my friend Amy Gulick’s book captures, The Salmon Way in Alaska from the indigenous origins 1,000s of years ago, right to the present. We honored these creatures, and in trolling, especially those that offer themselves to us, for us to sustain our bodies with the finest food on Earth. But we also sustain them by fighting to protect their spawning grounds, their passageways, their lives. And that’s what breaks our heart because we are fighting for them. And now we’re being excluded from their harvest.

Foss: It’s hard to not develop a connection, when you are intimately involved with ending a creature’s life. And it’s not something that anyone takes lightly. And you’re right… you’re right there. And it’s not easy, but it’s good. Because you know that you’re taking care of the creature quickly, as painlessly as you can. If you’re going to take life and you’re going to extract a resource and you’re going to eat meat, it’s really important to do that as respectfully to the creature that you’re taking it from as possible.

Jordan: Let me tell you, there’s a lot of grief in the troll fleet. A lot of grief, and families and people need help. So not only do we have to think about making financial arrangements so people can make or delay their payments with the state or CFAB [Alaska Commercial Fishing and Agriculture Bank] or whoever else. Banks. We also need to think about mental health counseling for people who are devastated and don’t know how they’re going to feed their families – literally.

Moore: You know, I’m proud of the product that we produce. This whole battle, this court battle with Wild Fish Conservancy trying to shut down a food-producing industry, without considering: there’s 300 million people right now – not killer whales – 300 million people are starving to death. There are 2 billion people that are ‘food insecure,’ as they say. And I just feel sick about all of the energy being spent, all the resources being spent, just to try to be able to continue to produce food for people.

Part 3: Trollers and conservation

In a state where fish landings are most often measured in the millions of pounds and millions of fish, the Southeast Alaska troll catch of king salmon is a small fraction of the overall harvest. This coming season – if there is a season – Southeast trollers will take just 149,000 Chinook.

Those fish are mixed into a salmon pie that is shared by Alaska, Washington, Oregon, and Canada – a pie that is sliced by an international agreement called the Pacific Salmon Treaty. Over the past couple of decades, Southeast trollers have accepted smaller slices of the pie to preserve the health of salmon stocks covered by the treaty, and they’ve even accepted deep cuts in the harvest of kings which originate in Alaska’s rivers – and aren’t subject to the treaty – to make sure that those stocks thrive.

In short, Southeast trollers have nothing to gain and everything to lose if king salmon don’t survive. They are conservationists, whether or not they use the label.

Foss: I want to make it very clear that trolling is 100-year old fishery, and if it was not sustainable for a long period of time, it would be evident. And I have not ever seen another resource extraction group begrudgingly-but-willingly not go fishing to ensure the longevity of the species. Is that the right thing to do? Absolutely. When it became apparent that we were going to take a hit on king salmon in the last (Pacific Salmon) treaty cycle for political and conservation purposes, we could weather it because the emphasis is making sure there’s fish in the future.

Jordan: Trollers have been the allies of conservationists for decades. Salmon fishermen all over this state fight things like Pebble Mine, things like the borax mine in Misty Fjords. Trollers have worked to protect the salmon habitat throughout the region from mines in British Columbia. I’ve written op-ed editorials on those mines, working with Salmon State and others. We are the greatest allies of people who want to conserve king salmon and other salmon species. And for us to be vilified and attacked is just plain wrong.

Foss: It’s really easy to look at a problem and decide that someone else should pay for it. It’s really, really hard to look internally to see what you’re doing and how you’re contributing to that problem. And I really feel like that’s what’s happening here [with the Wild Fish Conservancy lawsuit].

Moore: This fishery is the poster child for sustainability. There’s never been – that I know of – any run of salmon that’s been wiped out by a hook-and-line fishery. When I first started fishing, there was the criticism that it’s too inefficient. Well, we’re not hearing that much anymore (laughs). But anyway, we’re hearing these narratives that are just outright lies. Like ‘the increase in greedy corporate fishing.’ My kids grew up on the back deck of the boat, you know, this is ‘greedy corporate fishing,’ you know. They learned that they could work hard and produce something tangible. And your success depends on being able to understand and connect with something you can’t see directly. From that standpoint, it’s like science. I can’t decide whether it’s more like art or like science. It’s both.

Jordan: And one of the things that happens, as both Jim and Jackie have mentioned, is the connection you develop with these places, the ocean, the ecology, the fish that you’re pursuing. It’s really a love affair.

Foss: You just love it. You love everything about it.

Moore: You know, I love the killer whale. I’m connected with the killer whale. This is not about saving the killer whale, this battle. It’s about destroying this industry. That’s the stated agenda: the Wild Fish Conservancy, they want to eliminate ocean fishing, mixed-stock fishing, and they want to eliminate the hatchery program. That’s a small minority viewpoint – a very small minority viewpoint. They had an opportunity to move their agenda, and they took it. But it’s an immoral decision. It makes me sick.

Natalie Sattler and Eric Jordan with the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association Crew Training Program are looking for applicants. Jordan says the idea originated when his wife “retired” from the family fishing business and his own sons grew up and bought their own boats. Since then, under ALFA’s management, over 100 people have participated in the program, including KCAW’s Erin Fulton (2015). Applications are open through March; no experience is necessary. Apprentices can work all or part of the season, in a variety of gear groups.

The annual meeting of the Sitka Maritime Heritage Society will be held this Thursday, February 23. The event will feature a panel of Sitkans sharing stories of remote fish buying in Southeast Alaska. Bruce Gazaway and Eric Jordan joined KCAW’s Erin Fulton to discuss the upcoming event. Listen to the full interview here:

A legislative resolution in support of Alaska’s salmon troll fleet has cleared its first hurdle, although it has a way to go before seeing a full vote of the Alaska House and Senate.

House Joint Resolution 5 is the first piece of legislation introduced by Sitka Rep. Rebecca Himschoot, who was elected to a first term last November, and was sworn in this past January.

Note: The US District Court of Western Washington could issue a final Report & Recommendation on the Wild Fish Conservancy lawsuit any day. Additional reporting on this story, including comment from the Conservancy, is coming shortly from KFSK in Petersburg.

HJR5 was heard in the House Special Fisheries Committee on February 14, Valentine’s Day. Rep. Himschoot used the day as a springboard to focus attention on Southeast trollers, whose livelihood has been jeopardized by a lawsuit in the federal court in Seattle.

“I want to start by wishing everyone a Happy Valentine’s Day,” Himschoot opened. “And if there’s one thing Alaskans love, it’s our fishermen. So we’re going to talk about some fishermen today.”

Himschoot and co-sponsor Ketchikan Representative Dan Ortiz are the only two Southeast Alaskans on the Special Fisheries Committee. Himschoot explained the significance of the troll fleet to the other members.

“You’ll find trollers in every community of Southeast Alaska,” she said. “I don’t know if there’s a community without at least one troller no matter how small the community. So it’s a very important fishery for Southeast Alaska. And 85% of the trollers in the fleet are Alaska residents. So these are people who are hook-and-line fishing. When they put their line in the water, it’s a very sustainable fishery, they’re going to pull up a salmon. So this incredible homegrown fleet of fishermen doing the hard work that brings in about $85 million to our economy in Southeast Alaska is under attack. And they’ve been attacked by the Wild Fish Conservancy. There’s a lawsuit that started in 2019. And this resolution is going to urge state and federal agencies to continue defending our trollers.”

Although the Southeast king salmon fishery is the target of the lawsuit, the defendant is the National Marine Fisheries Service, which oversees the management of the nation’s commercial fisheries. In broad terms, the Wild Fish Conservancy argues that NMFS violated the Endangered Species Act when it failed to fully account for the impact of Alaska trolling on the food supply of a population of endangered killer whales in Puget Sound. Although experts believe that NMFS can correct this supposed error, it’s now in the hands of a federal judge in Washington whether or not to shut down trolling for king salmon in Alaska until it is remedied.

Other members of the committee tried to tease out a better understanding of the problem. Committee chair Sarah Vance of Homer asked Alaska Trollers Association director Amy Daugherty if harm to killer whales was an ongoing concern.

“Has there been concerns about impact to the orcas prior to this?” Vance asked.

“Never,” Daugherty responded. “In fact, it’s our understanding that every other orca population up and down the coast is healthy, and in fact increasing, except for this localized Puget Sound population.”

This is probably the most incongruent aspect of the lawsuit for trollers, who regard themselves as an environmentally sensitive fishery: Shutting down commercial trolling for king salmon in Alaska may not have any effect at all on killer whales in Puget Sound.

Sitka troller, environmentalist, and fisheries advocate Eric Jordan could barely contain his frustration.

“This existential threat to close down our Southeast troll fishery and fundraising charade by the Wild Fish Conservancy is a brutal assault on us that won’t save one orca,” Jordan said. “ It is the most vicious, misguided assault I have witnessed and a lifetime of experience with fisheries conflicts.”

Tad Fujioka, board chair of the Seafood Producers Cooperative in Sitka, argued that the Wild Fish Conservancy lawsuit failed to accurately trace the problem for Puget Sound’s killer whales. If it did, the line would lead right back to Puget Sound.

“The lack of salmon isn’t really the problem that Southern Resident Killer Whales face,” he explained. “If it was, we wouldn’t see that the Alaska and British Columbia orca pods growing so steadily. If our fishery was the reason for trouble, the local orcas would be suffering a lot more than the ones hundreds of miles away. The real problem for Southern Residents is the pollution in Puget Sound. There are 5 million people that live in the Puget Sound area, and with all the heavy pollution and road runoff it makes the local fish toxic. The Washington Department of Health recommends that people eat no more than two servings of Puget Sound king salmon per month. And of course the local killer whales eat a whole lot more than that. And that’s made them some of the most contaminated marine mammals anywhere in the world.”

The House Special Fisheries Committee unanimously passed House Joint Resolution 5 out of committee. Its next stop is the Rules Committee, where it could be scheduled for a floor vote.

Although wild salmon remains one of Alaska’s most lucrative seafood industries, it’s also one of the state’s most vulnerable, as climate change and population growth increase pressure on the world’s oceans. As it looks more and more likely that demand will eventually outstrip the productivity of salmon and other wild seafood stocks, researchers have turned to another method for producing protein from fish – by culturing it in a lab.

KCAW’s Tash Kimmell recently traveled to California to taste some of the world’s first lab-produced salmon, and sent this report. 

It’s a typical overcast morning in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood when I arrive at the headquarters of the biotech company Wildtype. In a city known for tech, Wildtype isn’t an anomaly, but in the world of sustainable seafood they’re making waves. 

KCAW – Hey, how are you doing? 

Dalton Thomas – Nice to meet you. I’m Dalton. 

KCAW – Nice to meet you.

Inside the Wildtype offices, a group of young scientists mills around in sneakers, and graphic-t’s obscured by white lab coats. Dalton Thomas, the company’s head of food service sales, seats me at a kitchen bar. Behind it, an in-house sushi chef prepares me a plate of their product before it hits the US market –  lab grown salmon.  

It’s a square block of marbled pink flesh, almost indistinguishable from traditional salmon – except this fish has never touched the ocean. 

Thomas – So we have the nigiri version of the wild type salmon. It’s already brushed  with soy sauce, so it’s just ready to eat. Here are some mustard, miso, and chives. And then this is more like a typical salmon avocado roll. 

Wildtype’s fish is intended to be enjoyed raw, a decision made in part because of the sheer size and profitability of the sushi industry. However, as Thomas explains, “cell cultured” salmon is simply not as appetizing when cooked. 

KCAW – It does have a sea flavor. But it’s like not as soft.

Thomas – It’s not fishy.

KCAW – It’s really smooth, that’s how I’d describe it. 

Thomas – Kind of homogenous.

KCAW – It does taste like fish, which is weird.

Thomas – It’s not weird, because it’s fish!

While lab-grown salmon may seem futuristic, the technology and the product are already here on my plate. But is it really fish? 

“The basic idea is we cultivate real salmon cells,” said Justin Kolbeck, co-founder and CEO of Wildtype. “And we combine those with a plant based scaffold or sort of a three dimensional matrix to help create a really nice appearance and taste and texture.”

He goes on.

“The super cool thing is we’ve actually been able to replicate fat and this sort of connective tissue – that white stuff and you’re biting into a piece of raw salmon that kind of gets stuck between your teeth and then the fatty parts – without having to use  any genetic engineering.”

To make this product, technicians harvest stem cells from wild salmon. Then, in the same way a baker might feed a sourdough starter, they feed the cells with different proteins, amino acids, salts and sugars. The “scaffold” as Kolbeck calls it, works like a 3D lattice, made of different plant cells. The fish cells mesh with the scaffold, which  then directs the cells to grow into fat or tissue, giving the salmon its texture and shape. But Wildtype’s creators say their mission goes beyond the novelty of growing meat in a lab. 

Kolbeck says the company’s aim is only to supplement the existing seafood industry – not supplant it. The company has even gone so far as to invest in conservation efforts around one of the world’s biggest sockeye salmon fisheries in Bristol Bay, Alaska.  

“If you look at the long run trends, returning stocks of Pacific salmon in general along the Pacific coast have been declining pretty substantially over the last 40-50 years,” Kolbeck said. “The FAO (Food and Agriculture Association) predicts we’re going to need something like 30 million more tons of seafood to satisfy demand by the end of this decade. I found myself asking – and I know a lot of others have asked – where’s all that fish gonna come from?”

“I don’t think it is a solution as much as a diversion,” said Eric Jordan, a multigenerational commercial fisherman. For most of his lifes he’s made a living trolling for wild salmon in the waters of Southeast Alaska. He says he doesn’t believe  lab-grown salmon poses a threat to his livelihood, but does have  other concerns. 

“I catch these creatures that are the most wonderful food on Earth,” said Jordan. “I can’t imagine this lab-produced flash is going to taste anything like wild Alaska Salmon. So I’m not threatened by that. I am concerned about the existential climate change threat, and trawl bycatch.”

Alaska is  one of the biggest producers of wild caught salmon in the world. But in recent years, the state has struggled with the environmental stressors of a warming planet. Salmon runs virtually disappeared from of Western Alaska’s largest river systems in the last couple of years. And now the famous Bering Sea crab harvest has crashed, too. Even so, Jordan feels a seafood alternative might be taking resources away from conservation efforts. 

“There’s a lot of places you can invest money to protect wild salmon without investing in producing an alternative to eat,” said Jordan.

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Salmon are more than food; they are sacred

Eric Jordan’s antipathy toward lab-cultured salmon is not just about its potential role in human food consumption. Jordan notes it’s also about an animal which has sustained Alaskans for millennia, and is sacred to many. 

“Salmon are sacred,” says Jordan “And part of that is respecting them. And part of that is why we outlawed finfish farming in the state of Alaska is because it doesn’t respect these creatures, which are meant to swim the wild ocean and not to be caged in pens. You’re mistreating a creature that’s destined to swim the wild oceans and find its way back home after traveling 1,000s of miles. We need to respect the sacred creatures who offer themselves for us to eat.”

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But momentum is growing for cell-cultured foods. David Kaplan, a professor of Biomedical Engineering at Tufts, says Wildtype is far from alone.

“In the US, there is an incredible number and growing number of companies out there trying to grow just about any food you might want to eat or have eaten,” said Kaplan. “There’s a company now trying to emulate that.” 

Kaplan runs the university’s lab studies in tissue engineering. In his view, the work has become essential. 

“There is absolutely no way we can meet the protein needs and the meat needs that are growing around the world,” he said. “Consumers want meat, they like meat, and that’s not going to go away.” 

 ________________________________

Lab-cultured foods and conservation

Justin Kolbeck’s dream of cell-cultured salmon one day being as cheap and accessible as a big mac may sound like a fisherman’s nightmare. But Prof. David Kaplan echoes the sentiment that lab meats are only meant to be a piece of the puzzle in conserving wild populations. 

“I think, generally, though, the idea is that this will be a way to help preserve natural cultivars, like of salmon, or tuna, or, you know, clams and mussels, and shrimp, because you’ll have an alternative way to make these things,” Kaplan said. “So it will be less impactful on existing natural sources, which I think is a good thing long term.”

______________________________________

The  Food & Drug Administration has yet to approve any cell-cultured meat for consumption in the US, however approval is expected within the next year. And Wildtype’s Kolbeck is banking on the future, hoping to one day transition his cell-cultured salmon from a niche market, to something more universal.

“We haven’t scaled this up to the point where we can make this product super cheaply yet,” said Kolbeck. “It would be amazing if we could make one of nature’s healthiest foods so accessible that it would be as cheap and available as a Big Mac. That is the thing that gets me out of bed in the morning.”

While we may not be seeing the golden arches carrying a lab grown McFish anytime soon, there’s no doubt that the landscape of the seafood industry is changing, and cell-cultured salmon will be making its way to the market sooner than later.

Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to correct a misspelling of Wildtype CEO Justin Kolbeck’s last name.

The bycatch of chinook and chum salmon is on the agenda, as the spring meeting of the North Pacific Management Council gets underway in Sitka this week (June 9-14).

In addition to hearing how much salmon is being intercepted in the Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea by the trawl fisheries, the council will review a proposal to supplement the human observer program with electronic monitoring.

Note: Find links to the Council’s agenda and meeting livestream here.

The North Pacific Fishery Management Council regulates the so-called “federal fisheries” which take place outside the three-mile limit of Alaska’s state waters, and within the exclusive economic zone of the United States which extends 200 miles offshore.

Strictly by the numbers, that’s dozens of different species of bottomfish and crab, and the council will divide its time over five days among many of them. But the headline issues – as determined by the number of comments the council has received – are the bycatch of salmon by the trawl fleet in the Bering Sea and in the Gulf of Alaska, and the related issue of Electronic Monitoring, or the installation of cameras aboard trawlers to ensure compliance with existing bycatch reporting methods.

Salmon bycatch has come to the forefront in recent years due to steep declines in chinook stocks in many of Alaska’s major river systems, and severe cutbacks in opportunities for subsistence, sport, and commercial fisheries in many areas of Alaska. Among the stack of comments on the issue, the Council has received a letter from the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, Western Interior Alaska, Eastern Interior Alaska, and Seward Peninsula Subsistence Regional Advisory Councils requesting a significant reduction in the chinook and chum salmon bycatch in the Bering Sea commercial fisheries. The groups want to see the bycatch cap of kings reduced from 45,000 to 16,000, and the cap of chum salmon reduced from 500,000 to 250,000.

For others, that’s not enough. The Sitka Fish & Game Regional Advisory Council last October took strong position against halibut bycatch in the Gulf of Alaska; one of the authors of the Sitka letter, Eric Jordan, doesn’t mince words in his latest comments regarding salmon bycatch: “To me the issue isn’t bycatch,” Jordan writes, “Trawling is not an acceptable way to harvest fish and like salmon traps and high seas salmon traps it must be prohibited area by area starting with halibut nurseries and crab savings grounds.”

Regardless of whether it lowers the cap on salmon bycatch during its Sitka meeting, the Council will consider how to better enforce the existing cap. Since 2020 some trawl vessels have been equipped with Electronic Monitoring – or EM. The Electronic Monitoring systems aren’t intended for “catch accounting,” or to identify and record every salmon caught in a trawl net; rather, EM is intended for compliance monitoring when the catch is offloaded at a processor. Comments to the Council overwhelmingly support adopting EM, but for two: One, a fisheries observer, argued that EM greatly increased the workload for herself and her colleagues who sampled fish at processors. A second commenter said simply, “Don’t put 100% cameras on our trawlers, it will be game over for the trawl fleet. The council shouldn’t bow to a group of whiners that are too lazy to move to better fishing.”

The North Pacific Fishery Management Council meets in Sitka through June 14.

The Sitka Fish & Game Advisory Committee has voted to support a third herring management proposal submitted by the Sitka Tribe of Alaska — but only by the slimmest of margins. An effort to reconsider two earlier tribal proposals, however, was voted down.

The committee met on November 10 and, after almost two-and-a-half hours of discussion and testimony, voted 7-6 to support proposal 158, which would adjust the harvest threshold for herring in Sitka, to prevent the overharvest of older herring.

One committee member abstained. (Read the full text of Proposal 158 here.)

The support for proposal 158 led one member to ask whether the committee was premature in voting down two similar proposals from the Tribe — proposals 156 and 157 — which also would require the commercial herring fishery in Sitka Sound to be more selective in avoiding older fish, which are regarded as very important to the subsistence harvest of spawn-on-branches.

Eric Jordan was in the majority opposing 156 and 157. He motioned for reconsideration.

“I feel that this is such an important decision for subsistence, and herring conservation, and the industry, that we need the benefit — if we’re going to advise the Board of Fisheries — on the staff analysis that they’re going to have in front of them then, so they will know, this community, this advisory committee in this community has all the information they are going to have in front of them, before we made our recommendation. And we didn’t have that when we voted on (proposals) 156 and 157.”

The Sitka Advisory Committee — known as the Sitka AC — has spent the last three weeks on just the three herring proposals from the Sitka Tribe of Alaska. There are several other proposals about herring from other parties that the committee has yet to address, as well as several proposals regarding the management of king salmon. The committee has until December 22 to pass along its recommendations to the Alaska Board of Fisheries.

Committee member Tad Fujioka felt reconsidering the two previous proposals would be a disservice to all the proposals still to come. 

“At the rate, very slow rate, that we’re going through these proposals, I’m not in favor of undoing what little progress we’ve made at this point preemptively,” said Fujioka. “If we have time at the end of this process to revisit proposals, then I willing to go back and look at them. But I don’t want to take our recommendation, even if it’s a preliminary recommendation, off the books at this time.” 

Committee member Karen Johnson did not want to go back to the starting line with the Tribe’s earlier proposals.

“I don’t think we should undo what we’ve done and start over,” Johnson said. “If we have time at the end, okay. But let’s not go backwards at this point. We had a lot of good information, a lot of good comments. And I think we should hold on to that.”

The motion to reconsider tribal herring proposals 156 and 157 failed.

Proposal 158, however, passed — but without the support of Eric Jordan, who said he supported the conservation of herring, but he could not see how the fishery could occur without also taking older fish.

Jordan nevertheless gave credit to his fellow committee members, the Tribe, Fish & Game staff, and the public, for putting in the effort to help manage the state’s fisheries.

“I just think this is amazing process,” said Jordan. “And I’m part of the reason I’ve made so many of these motions tonight, which I changed my position on after hearing from committee members is I want the public to know that we are listening. And I think everything that went on here tonight shows that we are and we respect the perspectives. And this committee has led this state in efforts to conserve herring here. And I think that’s part of the reason we still have a healthy herring stock here is because of the efforts of this committee and the department and the Tribe and everybody, things from minimum threshold before we have a fishery, to protected areas that other places don’t have even yet.”

The support — or lack thereof — of the Sitka AC can help guide the Board of Fish in making regulatory decisions, but it doesn’t seal the fate of any individual proposal. The Board of Fish Southeast Finfish meeting begins in Ketchikan on January 4.

The Sitka Fish & Game Advisory Committee has gone on record urging the federal government to cap the excessive bycatch of halibut, salmon, and other valuable species in the Bering Sea trawl fisheries, which primarily target pollock.

The group penned a letter as part of its increased work schedule, as the December deadline to make recommendations for state-managed fisheries also looms large.

Note: The next meeting of the Sitka Fish & Game Advisory Committee will be 6 p.m. Wednesday, October 27, via Zoom. The meeting will begin with a presentation on local brown bear and deer populations by area management biologist Steve Bethune. The Advisory Committee will review herring proposals at its meeting on November 4.

Bycatch is one of those terms that puts people to sleep who aren’t involved in the state’s commercial fishing industry.

But halibut can grab headlines in the state, especially as over 3 million pounds of mostly juvenile fish have been killed in trawl nets in the Bering Sea — and that’s just as of early September of this year.

The National Marine Fisheries Service, which manages harvests in the federal waters offshore of Alaska, is considering several options for reducing bycatch — the most favored of which is a so-called “hard cap” based on the abundance of halibut.

Advisory Committee member Eric Jordan offered a very broad motion to address the issue.

“I move that the Sitka Advisory Committee comment to the North Pacific Fishery Management Council that we favor, reducing halibut bycatch as much as possible as soon as possible. Additionally, we feel bycatch of other species, such as salmon and shellfish need to be reduced as much as possible as soon as possible. That’s my basic motion,” said Jordan.

The problem is not limited to halibut, but to other species as well. Trawlers drag enormous nets along the ocean floor. It’s an effective form of fishing — but also completely indiscriminate. 

Member Karen Johnson suggested specifying “sablefish” by name — also known locally as black cod. Advisory Committee chair Heather Bauscher wanted to emphasize salmon in the group’s comment.

“In 2019 there was an observed trawler, so they were already on better behavior, because they were observed. In one pass of that net, they caught more king salmon as bycatch than the average troller caught in Southeast that season,” said Bauscher. “The scale of this bycatch waste is, is absurd, really”.

The committee ultimately incorporated Jordan’s motion into a letter urging NOAA Fisheries to select Alternative 4 of its Draft Environmental Impact Statement, and to craft a bycatch plan based on abundance, rather than the fishing schedules favored by the deep-sea trawlers. The letter, signed by Bauscher, reads “It should not be up to the small boat fleet to carry the burden of the trawl fleet’s inability to catch their target species without collateral damage.”

The Sitka Fish & Game Advisory Committee consists of 17 members, all of whom have a stake in the state’s commercial, sport, and subsistence fisheries, as well as in sport and subsistence hunting. The committee will meet weekly between now and December 22 to review over 100 regulatory proposals set to go before the next meeting of the Alaska Board of Fisheries beginning in January in Ketchikan.

Sitkan Cathryn Klusmeier has been commercial fishing for nearly a decade. When she’s not on the boat, she’s writing, pushing toward her first book one essay at a time. She recently won a prestigious national literary award, the Pushcart Prize, for an essay that contrasts fishing and her experience grappling with her late father’s chronic illness.

KCAW spoke with Klusmeier about her process and what it feels like to swap a keyboard for a gaff hook every summer. 

“When the salmon aren’t biting—which is a lot of the time—Eric and I sit with blood caked on our faces and talk about neon squid lures and diesel engine mechanics and my father’s unraveling brain. As we wait—and even when the fishing is good, we do a lot of waiting—we talk about wind speeds and water temperatures. We talk about gaff hooks and hydraulic gurdies. We wax poetic about properly sharpened filet knives and salted herring threaded on barbed treble hooks.“

Cathryn Klusmeier grew up in Northwest Arkansas, in the Ozarks– lake country.

“My dad was a very big outdoors person, and so we were just constantly outside,” she says. “We spent most of our time on the rivers and on the lakes, actually. We were always, always, always on the lake, on the water.”

She says that’s why she feels so at home in Sitka. She was living in Sitka in 2014, finishing up an artist residency, when commercial fisherman Eric Jordan offered her a job.

“Eric had long fished with Sarah, his wife for forty-something years. And Sarah finally said, ‘I’m retired, I’m done.’ And she’s like, ‘I’m stepping off the boat.’ And so Eric, for the first time, he’d always fished with his family. And so for the first time, he was like, ‘Well, I need to find crew.'”

It was a tumultuous time in Klusmeier’s life. Her father was suffering from a chronic illness, and her family was struggling to keep up with his medical bills. She says that summer in Sitka, and on the boat, was “stabilizing in a strange time.”

“I was thinking just constantly about life and death and sickness, and all of these things that felt very heavy and weighted for a really long time,” she says. “And it made me terrible dinner party conversation, because I was just unable to talk very normally because my life was so immersed in all of this.”

“When I stepped on the boat, and I started fishing, we were cleaning all these fish…I remember thinking like, ‘Oh, this is this feels familiar to me.'”

And conversations with Jordan were easy.

“Eric was somebody that I immediately connected with for many reasons. His father had passed away when he was very young,” she says. “And so he just implicitly understood the situation that I was in, which was just, like, financial precarity and just a lot of emotional things going on. And we just started going fishing together.”

She’s been fishing with Jordan for seven years now. That’s what her essay “Gutted” is about.

“Every morning from May through September we rise at first light to discuss the state of the tides, the swells, the current. We talk about how much sleep we haven’t gotten, how much food we have left. We discuss very seriously the right angle to place the knife so it glides down the salmon’s belly just so. We never talk about how bad the other person smells.“

In the writing, Klusmeier draws parallels between her experiences fishing and searching for her father amid a mysterious illness that took years to diagnose. 

“And it caused him to basically just stop talking one day when I was around 18 years old. And we spent years looking for answers to what was going on. We didn’t have insurance at the time, he had lost his job,” she says. “Doctors couldn’t seem to tell us, we were doing all kinds of scans and everything.”

“I just have memories of us searching. We were constantly searching for answers,” she says. “It was like we were looking for my dad.”

Ultimately he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease. He passed away in 2016.

“I’ve found — and I guess this is just the way I’ve processed things — but I feel like I do a lot of the processing in the moment,” she says. “And so I’ve spent so many years like thinking through a lot of what happened to us and to my family. So by the time I’m now writing about them, it feels like I’m doing something with all of this pain that we went through, you know, and all this pain that all kinds of people who have chronic diseases and chronic illnesses go through.”

“So when I’m writing about it, I feel like I’m doing something with it,” she says.

Klusmeier says she hopes her writing can give comfort to readers who have faced similar experiences. She’s currently studying at the Iowa Writers Workshop, where she’s working on a longform project. She says “Gutted” is an intense section of a book she’s writing about her father and fishing and finding healing in unexpected places. 

Read Klusmeier’s Pushcart Prize winning essay “Gutted” here