Strong global and U.S. demand for sockeye salmon has 2021 pushed prices to near record highs and boosted fishermen’s paychecks.
Both Silver Bay and Peter Pan Seafoods a few weeks ago increased their base prices to fishermen to $1.45 per pound, a 20-cent increase from the summer. Other Alaska companies are likely to follow suit. That compares to a final price in 2020 of just $1.06
“Obviously, the base price is announced earlier in the season. Now that we can see where sales are going and really have a confident look, we’re excited to celebrate that with our fleet,” Abby Frederick, a spokesperson for Silver Bay, told KDLG radio in Dillingham.
Alaska’s total 2021 sockeye catch was 57 million fish, with a preliminary value topping $361 million —more than 56% of Alaska’s total dockside value.
More than 42 million of the reds came from Bristol Bay, worth more than $248 million to fishermen before final settlements are paid out next year.
Most of Alaska’s fish goes to market frozen, headed and gutted, and strong demand by global buyers pushed wholesale prices for Bristol Bay sockeyes this summer to $4.37 a pound, up $1.07 from last summer. Sockeye fillets were wholesaling at $6.61 a pound and averaging $12.94 at retail counters this fall, up nearly a dollar from a year ago.
The market is tight which underscores increased demand, said Andy Wink, director of the Bristol Bay Regional Seafood Development Association.
Bristol Bay’s sockeye run is projected to be even bigger in 2022 and could mean a catch of 60 million.
“It’s the largest we’ve ever forecasted,” said biologist Greg Buck at the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.
Bycatch debate continues
Bycatch will continue to dominate headlines as more Alaskans and lawmakers engage like never before. The increased awareness can be credited in great part to one man from Homer.
“If we don't step up and keep an eye out for it now, who will? It seemed like all the Alaska resources were infinite for so long, but now we're coming up to where fisheries are being shut down. It’s either step up or step out of the way,” said David Bayes, a longtime charter operator who said the waste and habitat damage by trawlers made him step up.
In 2020, the trawl sector in Alaska took 92 million pounds of various species as bycatch, according to NOAA Fisheries data.
Bayes has used social media to educate more Alaskans via a Facebook page called “STOP Alaskan Trawler Bycatch,” founded a year ago by Jody Mason, of Whittier, who calls Bayes “an encylopedia.”
“David Bayes has helped pivot the bycatch discussion from one of behind closed doors and buried information to mainstream Facebook posts and dinner table conversations,” said Maddie Lightsey, of Alaska Boats and Permits, in her weekly Fish Ticket report.
Bayes uses federal fishery managers’ numbers on bycatch and fishing overages to make his points.
“Every week they update and you can click and see what the new info is,” he said. “But I don’t think a lot of people have done that. Because once we started to post those numbers, we’d run into trawl captains and crews and people affiliated with the North Pacific Fishery Management Council that would say I was crazy. Those numbers are too huge. And then you show them and say, well, those are your numbers.”
Bayes also has exposed how catch overage numbers are juggled and often don’t add up.
“In the Bering Sea, for one example, a catcher processor trawl fleet was about five million pounds over its Pacific cod quota. You can see this progression through the year that these guys are past their cap but they adjust the quotas. And then a few weeks ago, NOAA reallocated and simply erased that overage on paper,” he explained.
It was Bayes who pointed out this fall that Bering Sea trawlers are allowed more crab as bycatch than the crab fleet can take, even in the red king crab fishery that is closed for the first time in 25 years.
“It’s gotten again and again to where the North Pacific Council system has said, ‘Okay, we're going to shut directed fisheries but the trawlers can’t help it because of the gear type and they must have this quota,’” he said.
“That does so much to prevent the stocks from ever bouncing back. They’ve shut off directed fisheries, but the trawl fleet keeps hammering it a little bit at a time and the small local boats just sit there and twiddle their thumbs and wait.”
The STOP platform has its critics.
Heather Mann, director of the Midwater Trawlers Cooperative of Oregon, said the site “happily hosted bomb threats to individual decision makers, fishermen using gear they didn’t like, and more misinformation about a very difficult topic than we’ve ever seen.” The platform “actively hosted and encouraged hate for fisheries, groups and individuals. It is the antithesis of civilized discourse.”
Dennis Moran is president of Fishermen’s Finest, the 19-boat, Seattle-based bottom trawl fleet that starting in 2023 will be required for the first time to reduce its yearly take of millions of pounds of halibut bycatch.
“The Facebook page has had multiple posts calling for violence against trawl vessels. If you speak up on the page to share the truth and provide sources to accurate information, you are blocked,” Moran said. “What Bayes posts is either purposely taken out of context or flat-out misinformation and rhetoric. They allow personal attacks on council members and others.”
Those critics are all wet, believes state Rep. Kevin McCabe, of Big Lake, who calls Bayes “an honest broker.”
“He takes pains to post links to his data and has often provided amplifying information,” McCabe said. Bayes said he knows the trawl sector is not “going away,” but he believes it’s time to “tap the breaks.’ Stakeholders need to come up with better fishing solutions as other states and countries have done, he said, before it’s too late.
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