The lead-up to Fourth of July proved a bounty for gillnetters in Lynn Canal, with 240 boats each averaging more than 1,600 chum or 7.4 tons of hatchery dog salmon during the season’s third opening.
“The harvest was crazy. It was a huge week,” said Randy Bachman, commercial fisheries biologist for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game in Haines. Lynn Canal catches accounted for nearly 70 percent of all drift-gillnet caught salmon in Southeast during the second and third weeks of the fishery.
Bachman said better-than-expected returns of sockeye to Chilkat and Chilkoot lakes led him to open fishing for four days last week, and to open Chilkat Inlet to Glacier Point. Some 15,000 reds are already into Chilkat Lake, which indicates the run is tracking toward the upper end of its 70,000-150,000 escapement goal range, he said.
Sockeye escapement at Chilkoot weir was 13,600, on pace for an escapement of about 70,000 fish. The Chilkoot’s target escapement range is 38,000-86,000. “The Chilkoot is looking strong,” Bachman said.
Commercial boats from around Southeast converged on the lower Lynn Canal during the season’s second week. Biologists reported 240 boats participated in the local fishery, up from 120 during the season opener. The number represents more than half of all drift gillnet permits allotted to Southeast.
“It was a mob last week and it seems like it would increase this week,” boat captain Steve Fossman said June 28. “I heard there’s all kinds of boats anchored up together out there. It’s getting to be a trend, everybody coming to the hatchery release area. I wish it wasn’t so.”
A relatively wide dispersal of fish there is one of the attractions, with boats setting nets the breadth of Lynn Canal. “They aren’t all on the beach. You can find just about any area and throw your net out and do okay,” Fossman said.
When all the fish are concentrated into a single area, that also works well for fish-buying tenders, Fossman said.
Gillnet skipper Norman Hughes noted that more than 400 permits districtwide were fished in the season’s second week. He said that was a high level of participation this early in the season. “People are hungry.”
Fishermen said relatively low catches in other areas may have contributed to the early crowding in Lynn Canal. One area that didn’t fit that description was Sitka’s Deep Inlet, where 30 boats harvested nearly 30,000 chums in the fishery’s second week. High numbers of hatchery chum were caught at Deep Inlet and in Taku Inlet last week, with boats averaging 1,440 and 1,273 chum, respectively.
Although final numbers aren’t in, Bachman said at midweek it appeared the number of gillnetters in Lynn Canal dropped this week, with some boats drawn away to Taku. Packers’ prices this week averaged 60 cents per pound for chum and $1.70 per pound for sockeye.