Preliminary numbers suggest king salmon escapement to the Chilkat River will be the lowest since records have been kept in 1991. This year’s return also marks the third consecutive year the run has missed escapement goals.
The state estimates that between 1,200 and 1,500 mature kings will make it to Chilkat spawning grounds this year. That compares to the state’s goal of returning between 1,850 and 3,600 king salmon to the Chilkat River and its tributaries each year.
Escapements have averaged 2,657 for the past 10 years, but dropped to 1,744 in 2012 and 1,730 in 2013.
Department of Fish and Game biologist Ed Jones, coordinator for the Sport Fish Division, said the state Board of Fisheries won’t overlook the margin by which this year’s return fell short of the state’s goals, which he described as a “big miss.”
“Things are fixing to change. The board is going to be looking pretty hard at the Chilkat and they are going to be asking what we can do to maximize the number of (king) spawners in that river – and there are things we can do,” Jones said.
Measures are likely to include new restrictions on the local king salmon sport fishery and on the Lynn Canal commercial gillnet fishery, he said. “Everybody’s got to share the burden of conservation.”
Jones said king escapement during the past two years is close enough to the state’s goals to be explainable by the state’s degree of measurement error, but this year’s shortfall can’t be explained so easily.
“We’re not really too apprehensive about what we’ve seen up to this year. This year’s an alarm bell,” especially for the lack of younger fish in the return, he said. Also, Jones said, the state’s forecasts the past three years have predicted the Chilkat meeting escapement goals.
Rich Chapell, sport fish biologist for Fish and Game in Haines, said king abundance is an estimate determined by tagging kings at fish wheels near 9 Mile Haines Highway, then counting tags at spawning grounds including on the Kelsall and Tahini rivers, and 37 Mile, Little Boulder and Big Boulder creeks.
Chapell and Jones say the drop in returning kings appears to be from low survival after juvenile kings head into the ocean to rear. “We’re seeing a Southeast-wide drop in marine survival which is causing below-escapement-goal abundance” at other Panhandle rivers including the Taku, Chickamin and Unuk, Chapell said.
Fish and Game’s Jones said the state knows where in the ocean Chilkat kings generally rear, but what’s happening to the fish there isn’t so clear. Kings from different river stocks that rear in the same section of the ocean can show widely different survival rates. For example, upper Columbia River kings and ones from the Taku River rear in the Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea. But Columbia River fish survive at a rate four or five times above the Taku kings.
Jones said he thinks something’s happening in the first few months at sea. “The Columbia River fish are getting what they need to survive, but the Taku fish are hitting a wall.”
With recent Chilkat returns low, some sportfishermen this spring questioned the state’s decision to liberalize bag limits to three king salmon per day. Chapell said this week that the expanded bag limit had little effect on harvest because the run was so depressed.
Of 337 parties interviewed in state creel surveys around Haines, only 10 parties caught more than one king per angler, and 266 parties caught nothing.
“With a bag limit of one king, we would have saved maybe 20 fish. I feel the bag limit made very little difference in the amount of kings harvested,” Chapell said.
Mark Sogge, acting management biologist for Fish and Game’s commercial fisheries division in Haines, said commercial gillnet fishing here already is restricted under the state’s Chilkat King Salmon Management Plan. To protect kings, gillnet boats must stay below Seduction Point during the first two weeks of the fishery in late June.
“I don’t know if we’d be backed off any more than we already are. We’ve been conservative for king salmon,” Sogge said.