Allowable fishing for chinook salmon in the waters of Canada and
Southeast Alaska will be cut back significantly this year as a
result of a revised 10-year Pacific Salmon Treaty between the
United States and Canada.
Chinook salmon // Photo:
NOAA Fisheries
The goal of the updated treaty is to increase the number of
adult chinook returning to Washington and Oregon waters, where they
will be available to feed a declining population of endangered
orcas while increasing the number of fish spawning in the streams,
according to Phil Anderson, a U.S. negotiator on the Pacific Salmon
Commission.
Most chinook hatched in Washington and Oregon travel north
through Canada and into Alaska, making them vulnerable to fishing
when they return. Changes to the treaty should reduce Canadian
harvests on those stocks by about 12.5 percent and Alaskan harvests
by about 7.5 percent, Phil told me. Those numbers are cutbacks from
actual harvests in recent years, he said, so they don’t tell the
complete story.
I was saddened to hear of the death of Larry Rutter, senior
policy assistant in the Sustainable Fisheries Division at the
National Marine Fisheries Service and a U.S. commissioner on the
Pacific Salmon Commission.
Larry
Rutter
Larry, 61, was one of the folks who taught me the basics of
salmon management more than 20 years ago. He kept me informed
through some difficult negotiations over salmon harvest allocations
between the U.S. and Canadian governments.
Technically, he was very sharp. Personally, he was patient and
kind.
I am pleased that Long Live the Kings has created a Larry Rutter
Legacy Fund to carry out his wish for remembrances connected to the
Salish Sea Marine Survival Project, an effort he helped coordinate
across the border between LLTK and the Pacific Salmon Foundation in
Canada.
“It was due in no small part to Larry’s influence that LLTK and
PSF were awarded a $5-million grant from the Pacific Salmon
Commission’s Southern Fund Committee in 2013 for the Salish Sea
Marine Survival Project,” said LLTK Executive Director Jacques
White in a
statement. “Without his vision and dedication, we simply would
not be where we are today.”
To donate to the Larry Rutter Legacy Fund, scroll to the bottom
of the Long
Live the Kings page on the topic.
Larry was a graduate of South Kitsap High School and the
University of Washington. He worked for the Point No Point Treaty
Council and Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission before taking the
job with NMFS (NOAA Fisheries). His obituary in
The Olympian says Larry died last Thursday of pancreatic
cancer.
This will be my last update on this year’s Fraser River sockeye
run, as the run has begun to tail off and increases in the
estimates have been slight the past two weeks.
Latest numbers
from the Fraser River Panel (PDF 28 kb): Early-summer-run
sockeye, 3.8 million; summer-run, 5.2 million; and late-run 25.4
million. The late-run is now more than three times higher than the
preseason prediction, and the total runsize estimate now stands at
34.5 million.
Please read the rest of this blog entry for how this situation
developed.
—–
The entire Fraser River run is now estimated at 34 million, the
highest run size since 1913, when experts estimated the run to
total about 39 million. The late-run Shuswap/Weaver sockeye, which
are in their dominant year, are now three times the preseason
estimate.
—– UPDATE; Friday, Aug. 27
The entire Fraser River run is now estimated at 30 million, the
highest run size since 1913, when experts estimated the run to
total about 39 million.
—–
The total run of Fraser River sockeye is now predicted to be 25
million fish, which compares to 1.9 million total for last year.
This year’s run is the largest since 1913, according to the news
release.
By the way, Seattle Times reporter Hal Bernton does a nice
job reporting on the personal and economic effects of the big
sockeye run.
—–
UPDATE: Friday, Aug. 20
The Fraser River Panel today released new runsize estimates for
sockeye. See news release (PDF 198 kb). The latest numbers
have increased from 2.6 million to 2.9 million for early-summer-run
sockeye; from 3.3 million to 4.0 million for summer-run; and from 8
million to 12.1 million for late-run. We are now seeing predictions
that far exceed preseason estimates.
—–
When it comes to Fraser River sockeye, a single year can make
all the difference in the world.
Lummi tribal fishermen use
a purse seine to catch Fraser River sockeye salmon in the San Juan
Islands.
Photo courtesy of Northwest Indian Fisheries
Commission
Last year at this time, I commented in
Water Ways about the mystery of the missing Fraser River
sockeye and the economic disaster wrought by the abysmally poor
runs. Preseason forecasts of 10 million sockeye washed out with a
return around 1.9 million.
This year, all kinds of fishermen seem overwhelmed with
excitement as large sockeye runs return to the Fraser, the longest
river in British Columbia.
Kelly Sinoski, a reporter for the
Vancouver Sun, described how fishermen were laughing with joy.
She quoted Julius Boudreau, a commercial fisherman in Port
McNeill:
“It’s out of the ordinary. The catches have been way more than
the quota. It’s crazy. We’re seeing thousands and thousands of
fish.”
I placed a call to Tim Tynan of the National Marine Fisheries
Service, who works with the Pacific Salmon Commission as the U.S.
representative on the Fraser Panel. He reminded me that we are
seeing the Adams-dominant cycle this year, a typically strong
return that comes around every four years and is associated with
Adams River and Lake Shuswap, which is located in the middle of the
Fraser River watershed near Kamloops. Continue reading →
If you haven’t heard, the famous Fraser River sockeye run in
southern British Columbia is turning out to be a disaster this
year.
The low run has implications for all kinds of fishermen on both
sides of the border.
I asked Tim Tynan of the National Marine Fisheries Service about
this. It truly is bad, said Tim, who works with the Pacific Salmon
Commission as the U.S. representative on the Fraser Panel. That
international panel manages the U.S. and Canadian fisheries for
sockeye and pink salmon.
Conditions were looking good early in the year, when the PSC
staff forecast 10.5 million sockeye for the entire Fraser River
run. Of that, about 8.7 million was expected to come from the
“summer run.”
Based on current conditions, the estimate last week was reduced
to only 600,000 for the summer run, which has put fisheries on
hold.
It is quite a mystery why this has happened. Numbers were
looking very good up until the young smolts took off into ocean
waters in the spring and summer of 2007. After that, something
happened, because the expected number of adults resulting from
those smolts has yet to show up. Check out the latest PSC press release.
According to Tim, there remains a slim hope that some of these
missing fish will still show up, since a large number of their
parents came into the river two to three weeks late during the
summer of 2005. But it takes a cockeyed optimist to believe that
returns yet to come will turn around the disastrous year we are
having.
From recent news reports:
“There’s going to be no fishery unless there’s a miracle,
unless they’re real, real late.” — Merle Jefferson, natural
resources director for Lummi Nation, in a story by John Stark of
the Bellingham
Herald.
“You know what, we’ve made Mother Nature sick and that
sickness is manifesting itself in these poor returns of salmon.
It’s a crisis.” — Grand Chief Doug Kelly, chair of the B.C.
First Nations Fisheries Council, in a story by Mark Hume of the
Toronto Globe and Mail.
Look for problems affecting juvenile sockeye in the Strait
of Georgia, where the young fish spend the early, critical part of
their lives. “The place to start looking is close to home.” —
Brian Riddell, executive director of the Pacific Salmon Foundation,
in a story by Scott Simpson of the
Vancouver Sun
“The elders have been telling me for a long time that
over-fishing while the sockeye are at sea and are mixed in with
other species being caught is gradually extracting the genetically
stronger fish among the sockeye from the returning runs, and this
has been happening for the past 100 years.” — Sto:lo fisheries
adviser Ernie Crey in a column by Brian Lewis in
The Province Continue reading →
