Catches were down but prices were up in the first week of the Lynn Canal commercial gillnet fishery.
A dry spring may be keeping hatchery chums from finding their imprint streams, said fisherman Norman Hughes.
“It’s just a slow start. I think there are fish out there but the fresh water’s not here to bring them in. They’re somewhere else,” Hughes said.
Sixty-five boats fished District 15, with only a few north of Point Sherman. A restriction instituted last year to conserve sockeye limits fishermen to six-inch, chum nets. The eastern shore of Lynn Canal was closed to Point Bridget to conserve early-run Chilkoot sockeye.
Participation was down from a 10-year average of 73 boats.
Harvest of 17,000 first-week chums was down from a 10-year average of 55,000, but the higher number was skewed by harvests of more than 100,000 in 2006 and 2007, said area commercial fish biologist Randy Bachman. “Those were monster years.”
The week’s harvest of 1,300 sockeye was down from a 10-year average of 3,900 and reflects area closures to protect what’s expected to be a second year of depressed returns to Chilkoot Lake.
Scale samples show harvested fish evenly split three ways between those bound for Chilkoot and Chilkat rivers and other areas, including the Chilkat mainstem, Berners Bay and Taku.
That spread is positive for reflecting fish on their way to all the valley’s main spawning grounds, Bachman said.
On Tuesday, 1,644 sockeye had passed Chilkoot weir, a low number that’s still an improvement over last year, and 657 were into Chilkat Lake. At Chilkat Lake, that compares to a first-week escapement of 65 fish in 2008 and 16,500 fish in 2009.
Five packers in Lynn Canal were offering increased prices from last year, including 70 cents per pound for chum salmon (up from 50 cents last year) and between $1.50 and $2 per pound for sockeye, that fetched $1.25 last year.
“That’s 20 percent plus. That’s quite a big price jump,” Hughes said. Disease in farmed fish and a curtailment of commercial fishing in the Gulf of Mexico due to the recent oil spill may be making Alaska’s wild fish more valuable, Hughes said, noting halibut prices also are about $1.50 per pound higher this year.
“We’ll see if it holds. We’ve been branding fish from wild, pristine waters for decades now. Maybe that’s paying off.”