The Alaska Department of Fish and Game lacks data for its fall chum escapement numbers due to low water and fish wheel displacement from highway construction.
Fish and Game area sport fish biologist Rich Chapell said while one fish wheel remained in place, the other had to be moved mid-season. “There was no current,” Chapell said. “It wasn’t turning and there was a bunch of rock being deposited right next to it.”
Fish and Game’s region pink and chum salmon project leader Andy Piston said it’s possible the run failed to meet escapement goals because the other fish wheel reported low numbers. “We know from the fishery that (the run) probably wasn’t very good,” Piston said. “The fish counts we did have weren’t very good.”
Commercial gillnetters caught 21,000 fall chums, one of the lowest harvests on record, Piston said. Harvests have declined significantly since the late 1980s when average harvests in Lynn Canal were 230,000 chums compared to the most recent 10-year average of 56,000. The record catch, in 1985, was 610,000.
Piston said the declining chum returns beginning in the late 1980s through the mid-1990s throughout northern Southeast is “one of the biggest mysteries of salmon in Southeast.”
Despite the decrease, if Chilkat chums did fail to meet escapement goals, it would be the first time since 1997. The escapement goal range for Chilkat chums is 75,000 to 250,000.
Managers are unsure what they’ll do if they can’t find a substitute for measuring escapement using fish wheels. “That would take some thought,” Piston said. “Depending on what goes on with the fish wheels, we’d have to decide what we needed to do in that regard. It’s a big complex river system. It’s pretty difficult and expensive to measure escapement of anything up there.”
Haines’ former commercial fisheries biologist Wyatt Rhea-Fournier took a different job in Homer earlier this fall. The summer of 2018 was Rhea-Fournier’s first time managing the Lynn Canal gillnet fishery. He took over after Mark Sogge retired in late 2017. The department will be hiring a new area biologist this winter and an assistant area biologist in the spring.
Fisherman Will Prisciandaro said between poor weather and low returns, his catch was dismal. “I didn’t catch hardly any of them. The week I did the best it was blowing 40. I think a lot of guys didn’t sh the last week of the season because they didn’t want to get stuck in the weather.”