The Alaska Board of Fisheries voted 4-2 against requiring in-season management to more effectively hold the sport fishery chinook catch within its harvest limit.
The board voted on Friday, Dec. 1, at its meeting in Homer, which was primarily devoted to Southcentral fisheries issues.
The controversial proposal would have tightened in-season management of the Southeast chinook catch to better guard against resident and nonresident sport fishermen exceeding their share of the overall sport and commercial harvest. The proposal’s intent was to better protect the share allocated to commercial trollers.
The Wrangell Fish and Game Advisory Committee supported the proposal when it met last month.
Trollers and sport fishermen for months have sparred over the intent of the chinook salmon management agreement the parties forged during a Board of Fisheries meeting in 2022. However, when the state adopted regulations for that agreement, it dropped two words that would have required in-season management to keep the resident/nonresident sport fishery catch within its share of the chinook harvest.
The troll fishermen who submitted the proposal for last week’s meeting said the state created a “language error” in statute that goes against the terms of the 2022 agreement. David Richey and Monique Wilkinson wrote in their proposal that the state’s error “incorrectly liberalizes the sport fishery king salmon harvest.” That change, they said, “caused the sport fishery to significantly exceed its (chinook) allocation in 2023, with the potential to continue to do so in the future.”
Under state statute, commercial net fisheries are allocated approximately 7% of the chinook quota that the Pacific Salmon Commission approves each year. The remaining quota is split 80/20 between the troll and sport fisheries, respectively.
Under the state’s implementation of the 2022 sport/troll agreement, fisheries managers have not administered the sport fishery in-season to keep to its 20% allocation ceiling. Rather, any catch underage or overage from the Southeast sport fishery is added to or subtracted from the commercial troll allocation of chinook so as to keep the total catch within the overall ceiling.
As the Board of Fisheries began its deliberations last week, Chair John Wood of Willow advocated in favor of the proposal for stricter adherence to the 20% limit for the sport catch.
Wood stood by the text of the agreement that representatives for the Alaska Trollers Association, Southeast Alaska Guides Organization and Territorial Sportsmen signed during the board meeting in 2022. “I’m old-school,” he said. “When you give me a deal, I make a deal, a deal is a deal. I’m not going to deviate from it. The deal that was reached had that (in-season sport fishery management) verbiage in it.”
Board member Tom Carpenter of Cordova voted against the proposal and expressed frustration that the board’s action in 2022 allowed the dispute between trollers and sport fishers to take root. “This situation quite frankly stinks to high heaven.”
Carpenter was not on the board in 2022. He said the board “made an error” by voting in 2022 to approve the agreement without “much conversation from the board … specific to the intent.”
“I really feel when I look at the language and I look at those three signatures on the top of (the sport/troll agreement), I really think that all three people, or all three groups that signed that, believed something completely different,” Carpenter said. “That’s why we’re sitting here right now.”
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