Southeast commercial purse seine fishermen are preparing for a summer season with no confidence they will earn a good price for the pink and chum they catch.
The Southeast seine fishery opened with a one-day pink salmon fishing opportunity on Sunday in areas near Sitka, with more widespread openings to come.
The Department of Fish and Game has forecast a “traditional” fishery harvest of 19.2 million pink salmon by commercial seiners this year, not counting the fish netted in terminal harvest areas near hatchery release sites. That would be an “average” harvest compared with the most recent 10 years.
In its draft management plan for this summer, Fish and Game recognized that there have been “dynamic changes to the salmon industry in Southeast Alaska during the 2023 season and leading into the 2024 season.”
A major change in the market midway through the 2023 season sunk profits for Southeast seiners and other salmon fishermen across Alaska when Trident Seafoods slashed the dock price that fishermen earned for their chum and pink to just 20 cents per pound. By comparison, the average price paid to fishermen in 2022 was 34 cents for pinks and $1.18 for chum, according to state data for that year.
Trident last August said “global markets have collapsed” for salmon, citing a massive Russian pink salmon harvest going to market “at very low prices in part to fund the war on Ukraine.”
Other processors across Alaska last August also dropped their prices for pink, chum and sockeye salmon to staggering lows.
Then, Trident in December 2023 announced that it would sell its processing plants in Ketchikan and Petersburg, as well as plants and facilities in Kodiak, False Pass, Naknek and Chignik, as part of a “strategic restructuring” of the largest seafood corporation in the country.
Given big changes last year to fish prices and processing capacity in Southeast and across Alaska, Fish and Game held a preseason meeting with seiners and processors on May 8.
Ketchikan Area Management Biologist Bo Meredith said during the meeting that the “assumption a few months ago” was that the seine fishery would “have a reduced fleet, potentially.”
However, managers and fishermen were reassured by Trident’s mid-March announcement that E.C. Phillips and Son had acquired Trident’s plant in Petersburg, and that Silver Bay Seafoods had purchased its plant in Ketchikan.
Plant managers at the meeting said Southeast processors likely will operate at full capacity this summer and will be able to accommodate seiners’ hauls. Which leaves managers wondering how much effort seine fishermen will put into the fishery this summer, given potential market constraints such as low prices.
Troy Thynes, the Petersburg-based regional finfish management coordinator for Fish and Game, said during the May 8 meeting that “based on early indicators,” he is expecting about 205 to 210 seine boats will be working their nets across the region during the summer.
Thynes said that level of effort would be on par with recent years.
Phil Doherty, executive director of the Southeast Alaska Seiners Association, told the Ketchikan Daily News on June 12: “I think there’s a guarded sense of optimism going into the season, and I use that term lightly.”
“I think the reasons are fairly obvious — you go back to the 2023 season with the flood of fish on the market, largely Russian pink salmon, pretty much destroyed not just Southeast, but Alaska as a whole, Prince William Sound, Kodiak, any fishery that targets pink salmon,” Doherty said.
Going into this summer, “the rumors on prices were very poor for pinks and for chum salmon, too,” Doherty said.
“Individual skippers are going to have to look at where they’re going to go fishing, how much running they’re going to do, how much fuel they’re going to burn, how long they can stay out on the grounds for, or how far they can go from the processing plant,” Doherty said. “There’s no doubt if you’re a permit holder looking at the price of fuel and everything else involved with the fishing operations, which could very well affect where you’re going to go fishing.”
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