Fishermen’s News Online

Alaska’s 2021 salmon harvest made up ground this past week on the year-to-date 2020 harvest (2019 for pinks) and is now up 13% compared to the 2019/2020 benchmark, says fisheries consultant Dan Lesh. Pink salmon are up 11% year-to-date compared to the same period in 2019, said Lesh, who produces in-season weekly commercial harvest reports for McKinley Research Group in Anchorage on behalf of the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute. The latest in-season commercial harvest estimates from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game put the overall harvest at over 190 million fish, including nearly 127 million pinks, 53.5 million sockeyes, 8.3 million chums, 1.4 million cohos and 197,000 Chinooks. As of last week, the 2019 and 2021 year-to-date pink harvest were about the same. While this s...

Members of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council are scheduled to take final action in October in Anchorage on the issue of Bering Sea/Aleutian Island Pacific cod trawl catcher vessel limited access privilege programs (LAPP). During its online meeting in June, the council conducted a second review of the analysis of the proposed LAPP and recommended, after making several revisions, that the analysis be released for final action in October. Council staff note that the proposed program considers allocations of quota shares to groundfish LLP licenses based on the harvest of targeted Bering Sea/Aleutian Islands Pacific cod during qualifying years. Also under consideration is allocating harvest shares to processors based on processing history of BSAI Pacific cod during qualifyin...

The Marine Stewardship Council has recertified the North Pacific fixed gear sablefish fishery as sustainable and for the first time, also extended the rigorous certification to the Northern Southeast Inside’s sablefish fishery. “This recertification rightly acknowledges the hard work of Alaska fixed gear fishermen and fishery managers to maintain healthy fisheries in balance with marine ecosystems,” said Bob Alverson, director of the Fishing Vessel Owners Association. “MSC certification requires continued improvement in best fishing and management practices and our sablefish fisheries met all identified criteria.” The client for MSC halibut and sablefish is “Eat on the Wild Side” a nonprofit of the FVOC ad Deep Sea Fishermen’s Union. MSC first certified the North Pacific fixed gear s...

Peter Pan Seafoods, which operates processing facilities in Dillingham, Alaska, from April through August, has donated 10,000 pounds of sockeye salmon of its Bristol Bay catch to the regional school system in Dillingham. Vice President of Operations Jon Hickman said the company wanted to do its part to contribute to Alaskans who need the seafood most, so they arranged, organized and custom processed those 10,000 pounds of fish into about 13,333 meals, which were given to the school district for a variety of their programs, including Head Start. Peter Pan also provided 500 pounds of fish to the Bristol Bay Food Bank for free community canning classes and donated over 1,300 meal to Grandma’s House, an assisted living facility, and the senior center in Dillingham. “We feel very fortunat...

A U.S. House committee looking into significant delivery delays of Offshore Patrol and Polar Security Cutters to the U.S. Coast Guard has asked the Government Accountability Office to review the situation, as well as related budgetary issues. Given the significant budgetary commitment from Congress, the Department of Homeland Security and the Coast Guard have made for the Offshore Patrol Cutters program to date, continued oversight is necessary to ensure that the program does not continue to experience cost growth or additional schedule delays, said the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. Committee chair Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-OR, and ranking member Rep. Sam Graves, R-MO, told Gene Dodaro, comptroller general of the GAO, that the Offshore Patrol Cutter fleet, the lar...

By Mark Nero, Managing Editor Did you know that for many years, Fishermen’s News has had two separate websites on which its content lives? First, there’s the “main” or “regular” Fishermen’s News website (fishermensnews.com), which hosts the content that appears in the print edition of the magazine. There’s Fishermen’s News Online (fnonlinenews.blogspot.com) where certain content has been posted, like articles that are generated for our weekly Fishermen’s News newsletter, and the editorial that you’re reading right now. The reason I point this out is that currently, our hard working staff is in the process of merging the two sites so that all content going forward will appear solely on the fishermensnews.com site. As you may have noticed, the transition is already underwa...

Help in the form of thousands of pounds of wild Alaska salmon is coming to Yukon River villagers, where freezers by now are normally filled with Chinook and keta salmon, but many more fish will be needed to fill a gap in a year when fishing was banned. About 12,500 pounds of chum salmon were delivered to the Yup’ik village of Emmonak on the Lower Yukon on Aug. 10 by Everts Air Cargo, courtesy of the state of Alaska. They came in the wake of some 13,000 pounds of Chinooks delivered less than two weeks earlier, that were the gift of six major Bristol Bay seafood processers. The Prince William Sound chums from Copper River Seafoods were purchased by the state. Once delivered to Emmonak, the fish were being repackaged and distributed by Kwik’Pak Fisheries, a subsidiary of the Yukon Delta...

A veteran commercial harvester from Kodiak, Alaska, will serve six months in federal prison and pay a $1 million fine for violating the Lacey Act by falsifying records about his halibut and sablefish catch from 2014 to 2017. James Aaron Stevens, 47, owner and captain of the f/v Alaskan Star and f/v Southern Seas, was also ordered to spend 126 days in a halfway house, perform 80 hours of community service and to make a public service announcement acknowledging his wrongdoing. The sentence was handed down in early August by U.S. District Judge Joshua M. Kindred in Anchorage. According to court documents, Stevens falsely numerous individual fishing quota (IFQ) documents, including Alaska Department of Fish and Game fish tickets and fishing logbooks, on where he harvested 903-208 pounds ...