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Date Posted: 13:05:47 06/12/10 Sat
Author: Don Johnson
Subject: KING SALMON ESCAPEMENT

The Problem Is At Sea


Like everyone else, I have also been watching the Kenai River's ADF&G sonar slowly count off escaping early run kings.
Everyone I know has been watching with great interest as they hope we will at least reach the
minimum king escapement goal of 5,300 kings. Many are asking why it is so difficult for us to reach
this minimum escapement goal. Some folks get so focused on a specific run of fish that they
fail to consider how we got to this place or this problem.
The Kenai River is just one of Cook Inlets many rivers and its early run of king salmon is just one of
the many runs of salmon which are experiencing problems. The real question is not so much directed
at the Kenai River as it is at Cook Inlet, the Gulf of Alaska, the Alaska Peninsula, the Pacific Ocean and
what it takes to produce a salmon?
It is a fact of life that we are looking at a variety of problems when we try to figure out why we are having
such a difficult time achieving minimum king escapement goals all over Cook Inlet. People are asking why
our once healthy runs of king salmon are failing all over Cook Inlet. The answer is not simple because
there are many valid reasons for the lack of kings returning to their spawning grounds. I can list a few
just for starters.
Nitrogen is the primary building block necessary to produce a Kenai river king salmon and herring are
produced somewhere up the food chain after that. If you fail to return the nitrogen back to the ocean,
you cannot get the resulting plankton and that means starvation or low ocean survival rates for our
out-going baby salmon. Some people hear the word nitrogen and instantly turn their brains off because
they cannot connect nitrogen with that big slab of king salmon on the grill.
Well its true, if you don't let some of those salmon die and rot in the rivers, some day you won't have
that nice big fat slab of salmon to grill.
Its good to remember our fisheries history now and then, it helps us remember where we came from
and where were going. Our oceans used to be a nitrogen soup because of all the rotting salmon. Now our salmon
are in general gill-netted, hauled off to a processor and then sold for MONEY. Very few people actually care
that our oceans are currently nitrogen depleted, actually at a 50 year low now, therefore why should anyone
care about the herring or the kings, right? Very few people also actually care that this nitrogen depletion
began 50 years ago, right at the same time we began gill-netting and selling the majority of our salmon.

Our salmon runs in Alaska were very healthy around the turn of the century, before fish-traps began. After that
they were totally trashed by the traps. Alaska had huge salmon runs back then, maybe because the number
of fishermen weren't that large. From 1896 to 1906 fishermen were just trying to figure it out and then they tried fish-traps.
It didn't take long for them to discover that they could get rich with traps, so they wiped out everything.
Those fish-traps appeared in 1906 and were legally banned by 1959 but by then they had already totally wipe-out
all of Alaska's salmon fisheries. Alaska spent from the late 1950's to the late 1960's rebuilding the stocks with
everyone basically shut-down. Then commercial fisheries demanded to be able to jump on them AGAIN.
Along came the blossoming sport fishery to fight the commercial fishery for the fish and here we are today.
I have seen the ADF&G king catch record for the fish-trap years and they extremely impressive.
Those king catch numbers make our catches today appear like a shadow of back then.
As far as there being more or less commercial effort today or back then, I don't believe the effort is the main point.
I think the point is that the runs were much larger back then and that there are a bunch of factors preventing those runs
from returning today. Low nitrogen water ratios, low herring production, lots of additional users, many by-catch issues
and many environment changes.

Kodiak, the Alaska Peninsula and the Gulf of Alaska commercial fisheries have greatly expanded since the mid 1980's.
So have Cook Inlet's commercial and sport fisheries. Everyone wants to catch the same fish for what-ever reason and that makes
an infinite demand. Our fisheries do not have an infinite supply therefore someone is going to lose out.
Limited Entry Law was written so that if we ever ran out of fish, that the public would get their fish first and commercials would
get whats left over. Unfortunately our Board of Fish doesn't understand how Limited Entry was intended to function.
The by-catch issue is commercial fisheries imposing on common user fisheries and it should not be happening.
We have already seen Alaska's salmon fisheries wiped out by aggressive commercial fisheries. We have regulations in place
which should prevent these fisheries from being able to devastate our public fisheries again like what happened in our past.
So why is the public currently having a problem catching fish? Why is the ADF&G having a problem reaching our minimum
king salmon escapement goals? Why are we seeing our ocean nitrogen levels plum-it? Why do commercial fisheries believe
they cannot stop their by-catch of non-target species?
I wish we could fix all these issues at once but I don't think that is possible. I believe there are two general ways to think
about all of these issues. One is that the problem is in the fresh water, the other is that the problem is in the salt water.
It is an established fact that this king salmon escapement problem is so wide-spread that it cannot be a problem with
an individual river or stream, therefore I believe the starting point is for us to assume from the start that the problem is at sea.
Because this problem is obviously not local, we are therefore forced to expand our vision and get to work to resolve it.
We need to address commercial by-catch issues, water nitrogen issues and reason our Alaska Board of Fish has
failed to restrict commercial fisheries in favor of common user fisheries.
Tom Vania is a Regional Management Biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and he also believes that the
main problem we are having with our fisheries "is at sea" and not in our back yard.
http://news.seafoodnet.com/NewsStory.aspx?StoryId=758537
I believe that is our starting point, the problem is at sea.



Don Johnson

ccpwow@gci.net

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