Southeast trollers will be able to target about 23,000 more chinook salmon than last year in the upcoming summer troll opener, the Department of Fish and Game announced last week.
All told, 106,900 treaty kings are allotted to the initial summer troll opener, along with 3,300 hatchery chinooks for a total of 110,200 fish.
“For the July target, it’s just about 23,000 more than what we were targeting last year, so that’s a fair amount of fish. … That alone, translating into a summer catch rate of 10,000 fish a day, roughly would be four or five more days of fishing,” said state troll management biologist Grant Hagerman in Sitka.
The commercial chinook troll fishery opens Friday. The department expects it to last between 10 and 12 days.
The catch quota is higher this year because the index that measures fish abundance has risen, Hagerman said.
“The all-gear (chinook allocation) last year was just over 205,000, and the all-gear this year (commercial net and troll, plus sport fisheries) is basically 266,600. So, it’s a big jump between the tiers. It makes a big difference,” the biologist said.
For 2022, trollers are allowed to harvest 193,150 kings and have already taken 40,440 treaty fish this year between the winter and spring fisheries. The harvest of wild king salmon is regulated by the Pacific Salmon Treaty between the United States and Canada.
“The department estimates that 152,700 treaty Chinook salmon remain to be harvested in the summer troll fishery, and the initial summer troll retention period will be managed to harvest 70% of that remaining allocation,” Fish and Game said in a news release.
With the spring troll fishery wrapping up last week, prices are expected to fall moving into the summer, Hagerman said, but fish prices overall seem about in line with previous years.
“The spring fishery is ending at probably around $7 a pound and that will most likely not be what they’re going to get (in summer),” he said.
“It typically can drop a couple of dollars a pound between what we end on for spring and what the summer prices are paid out at. It’s kind of like an anticipation of flooding the market. But it’s hard to know. I, just spitballing, would say that we’re at least going to be above $5 a pound, which is pretty typical for the last few years.”
However, a Canadian decision to delay the king salmon fishery in northern British Columbia might drive summer prices a little higher, he added.
While the spring and winter troll fisheries are managed to avoid catching wild kings from a number of large transboundary river systems, the summer fishery isn’t subject to as many conservation restrictions.
“A lot of the restrictions that we’ve taken focus more on May and June in the saltwater when those fish are migrating through those areas in the summertime. It’s not necessarily the peak of when those fish are coming back. … There are some restrictions (for summer) but they’re more focused on the more terminal areas closer to the river mouths,” Hagerman said.
Specifically, restrictions this summer will center around Behm Canal, near Ketchikan, as well as near the Stikine and Taku rivers in order to protect fish from designated stocks of concern.
The recent rise in fuel costs might complicate the financial picture of the fishery, Hagerman said.
“A curveball is fuel prices,” he said. “So that could play into the fishery in that we may not see vessels from south transiting up.”
Also, he said, there may be more vessels offloading to tenders on the grounds to save the cost of fuel to return to town to offload.
“It’ll be interesting to see how that dynamic plays out,” he said.
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