Fish Board limits Cook Inlet commercial fleet in effort to boost Mat-Su salmon

The Alaska Board of Fisheries on Monday came out on the side of Mat-Su guides and fish experts with restrictions on Cook Inlet's commercial drift gillnet fleet to save flagging runs of sockeye and coho. The board unanimously voted Monday morning on a new plan that gives the drift fleet more room to fish in the first half of July but removes an Inlet-wide fishery in late July. The plan, which emphasizes conservation corridors, also would restrict the fleet to certain parts of the Inlet if they caught low numbers of sockeye after Aug. 1, when they usually start catching more coho. Before voting, several board members noted they felt a new urgency to prioritize Mat-Su salmon conservation. Valley residents are forced to drive to the Kenai Peninsula to fill their freezers due to low numbers of salmon in a place with once-plentiful runs, said board chair Karl Johnstone, an Anchorage resident and retired Alaska Superior Court judge. "In our efforts to provide opportunities to the central district drift fleet we seem to have forgotten perhaps an obligation to address the needs of nearly 400,000 people in Anchorage and the Mat-Su," Johnstone said. "The population of this area has tried to make their voices heard at this meeting. We had an enormous amount of public comment." The plan conserves the Valley stocks while giving the commercial fleet the chance to catch sockeye in the early part of the season, said board vice-chair Tom Kluberton, a Talkeetna bed and breakfast owner. During testimony to the board, numerous drift net fishermen blamed culverts, pike, shore erosion and other problems with habitat as the biggest threats to salmon in the Valley. But Kluberton rejected the contention that the board should "just give up on sending fish to the northern district" and said habitat problems aren't all that's wrong with Susitna River and other Mat-Su systems. "It makes no sense to give up on a piece of real estate that's the size of Scotland," he said. Several members did express concerns the new plan will let too many sockeye slip past drift nets into the Kenai and Kasilof systems, overloading spawning grounds and habitat in a fisheries concept known as "overescapement." "I'm kind of concerned about the sockeye portion of it, consistently overescaping a system and what kind of damage may happen," said John Jensen, a crab and halibut fisherman from Petersburg. Then again, Jensen continued, "the record shows we've been hitting the top end of the escapement goal every year for quite a bit of time" yet runs remain strong. Last week, the board approved new restrictions to protect Kenai River kings that, among other things, encourage the shore-based commercial set gillnet fleet to adopt shallower nets that may allow the deeper-swimming king salmon to pass while snagging sockeye. Upper Cook Inlet houses the most complicated mixed-stock fishery in the state - at-risk salmon like Susitna sockeye or Kenai kings mix with healthy runs - and supplies commercial harvest as well as dipnet or rod and reel fishing for the growing populations of Anchorage and the Mat-Su that make up Alaska's urban core. The board is deciding more than 230 separate proposals during the two-week meeting that started Jan. 31. Johnstone over the weekend hinted that the session may run a day or two over. The board was deliberating additional proposals that cover commercial fishing and Mat-Su stocks on Monday. Any board action can be reconsidered within 24 hours and isn't effective until written into regulations.