State officials are planning to meet with locals next week as they wait for the kings to arrive.
Alaska's Fish and Game Commissioner, Sam Cotten, and his staff will be in Bethel next week to learn more about the Kuskokwim River king salmon crisis. Next Wednesday, June 21, Cotten, along with the directors of the Division of Commercial Fisheries and the Division of Subsistence, will be joining the Kuskokwim River Salmon Management Working Group meeting to learn more about the region and to visit and chat with locals.
The public is welcome to attend the Working Group meeting. Check our website at www.kyuk.org for the latest updates.
Ken Stahlnecker, manager of the Yukon Delta Wildlife Refuge, says that during the first opening on the Kuskokwim Delta, about the same number of salmon were caught as last year, but the big difference was that there were a lot fewer kings in the nets this spring.
"Last year, I think of that 5,300 or so Salmon we estimated, that nearly 4,500 of those were chinook, where this year, of the 5,500 or so salmon overall that were caught, only 2,300 or 2,400 of those were chinook. "
Fish biologists say that subsistence fishermen can use other gear to catch fish, but not nets because a king caught in a net is a dead king. Aaron Tiernan, a fisheries biologist with the state Department of Fish and Game, says that fishing can happen as long as kings are released alive to swim upstream,
"Folks can use a pretty good suite of live release gear types such as dipnets, beach seines, fish wheels, hook and line fishing. If they do happen to catch a chinook salmon in one of those it must be returned to the water alive. But other than that, folks can still harvest chum, sockeye, pike, lush, sheefish; any kind of whitefish."
This year biologists predicted a harvest of kings based on 40,000 swimming by nets to the spawning grounds, but unless the numbers pick up significantly, fisherman on the Kuskokwim may have to make do with other species of fish.
Nick Kameroff chairs the Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fisheries Commission. He commends fishermen for helping to conserve kings by stocking up on other species of salmon.
"A lot of people along the river are actually waiting to do silver salmon verses targeting kings. People are really helping out trying to make sure that our resources come back."
Fish biologists and managers are keeping their fingers crossed in hopes that the kings do show up, but for now they want to wait to see the numbers go up before letting nets back into the water. The next regularly scheduled fish management meeting is next Wednesday, but all involved are poised to hold an emergency meeting if a pulse of kings comes through the fish weirs and sonar counting systems.