The Wrangell advisory committee doesn’t want to see Southeast residents lose any more of their limited share of king salmon catches to nonresident charter fishing customers, but it isn’t ready to support proposals that would substantially rewrite the commercial/sport allocations set by the Alaska Board of Fisheries.
“It’s complicated,” said Chris Guggenbickler, chair of the local advisory committee which met three times in November and December to consider close to 160 proposals that will go before the state board at its meeting Jan. 28 through Feb. 9 in Ketchikan.
“We support the allocation as it is now,” Guggenbickler said of the harvest-sharing plan between commercial and sport fisheries. But the growing catch by nonresident charter clients is a problem, he said.
“As the fleet grows, they want to take more and more of the resource.”
The Wrangell committee — the same as others around the state and members of the general public — have submitted comments in advance of the start of the Board of Fisheries.
Much of the Wrangell commercial fleet is comprised of trollers, which depend on the high-value king salmon. The advisory committee also wants to see local sportfishermen get a fair share of the salmon returns.
“They (nonresident sport charters) are catching way more than their share,” Guggenbickler said. “We don’t feel the residents should lose their share,” explaining that current regulations direct the state to cut the fishing time for commercial trollers to make up for any overharvest by the sport fleet.
The advisory committee’s meeting minutes report that the members’ “overall preference statement is providing opportunity for resident over nonresident.”
The committee supports continuation of the current allocation of king salmon — 80% for commercial and 20% for sport. “The department needs to manage the sport fishery in season not to exceed its allocation. If the sport fishery was managed in season within its allocation,” many of the regulation changes proposed to the board would not be needed, according to the committee’s meeting minutes.
“We’ll see what the board does,” Guggenbickler said.
Concerns about nonresident charter clients taking kings also came up in the committee’s consideration of a proposal to apply annual limits on king salmon catches to nonresidents fishing in the Blind Sough hatchery return harvest area.
“The advisory committee supports the proposal because it corrects the situation where the annual nonresident bag limit for kings was not applied to hatchery kings. Where Alaska residents are not able to harvest enough kings to feed their families, the harvest of kings by nonresidents should be limited.”
Committee members also unanimously endorsed a proposal to reduce the nonresident annual limit for king salmon to two fish before July 1 and one fish after July 1.
The members supported the proposal “because it reduces the nonresident bag limit which will help (solve) part of the problem,” according to the meeting minutes.
The Board of Fisheries will consider 31 proposals for king salmon regulations and could use any of the proposals as a “vehicle” for regulatory changes or could combine language or draft substitute language to “float new ideas” as they “hash it out by amendment” before voting on regulatory changes, said Alaska Board of Fisheries Executive Director Art Nelson.
Board members, none of whom are from Southeast, will be “drinking from the fire hose with everything that’s coming at them,” Nelson said during a Sitka advisory committee meeting on Jan. 8.
All of the participants in king salmon fisheries are polarized over recent changes to the sport/commercial allocation that resulted in cuts to the Southeast troll harvest in 2023 and 2024.
Most fishermen agree, though, that current abundance estimates that determine catch limits for kings have been “biased low, compared to what is seen on the ground,” which has resulted in low catch limits as well as disputes between user groups.
Larry Edfelt, a retired state biologist who serves on the Transboundary Panel to the Pacific Salmon Commission, told the Ketchikan Daily News last month that Southeast Alaskans are seeing “high (king) abundance but low quotas, which means that the quotas will be taken sooner.”
“When the nonresidents have caught enough fish to close both the resident and nonresident fishery, everybody loses,” Edfelt said, referencing how the Southeast management framework in late August 2024 triggered one of the first in-season sport fishery closures in history.
The Southeast sport fishery, which includes charters, exceeded its king salmon allocation for the summer by 14,000 fish, prompting the state to close the region to sportfishing for kings in August to stop the overharvest.
The sport fleet exceeded its allocation in 2023 by more than 15,000 kings. The state in 2023 implemented new restrictions on the troll harvest in years when the sport catch exceeds its share, and any overharvest by the sport fishery is subtracted from the commercial troll allocation to keep the total harvest within its limit.
Given recent losses, many Southeast trollers and resident sport fishermen are backing proposals that implore the board to reinstate in-season management that would keep sport harvest within its allocation to prevent late-season restrictions on resident sport anglers and trollers.
For their part, nonresident sport and charter fishery representatives want to maintain stable, predictable harvest opportunities for the visitor industry. That means in-season allocation transfers from troll fisheries to the sport fleet, with some limits.
Anna Laffrey of the Ketchikan Daily News contributed to this report.
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