10 years ago – March 23, 2016

Alaska snowboarder Bell wins gold

The Haines competition of the 2016 Freeride World Tour ended Monday with a victory by an Alaskan athlete and the cancellation of its live webcast because of  an “extremely rare hardware issue” with a relaying satellite.

Haines Borough Tourism Director Leslie Ross said she is confident the event will return next year. “I’m pretty positive they’ll be back because we’re storing stuff for them,” including equipment used on the mountain, she said.

Ryland Bell, 30, a troll fisherman from Elfin Cove who grew up in Fairbanks and frequently visits Haines, won the men’s snowboard competition, taking one of four gold medals awarded.

22 years ago – March 25, 2004

NSRAA cuts $62,000 from Haines projects

The Northern Southeast Regional Aquaculture Association is slashing funding for salmon research and enhancement projects in Haines this year by $62,000.

This means the adult fish weir at Chilkat Lake will not be operated by NSRAA as in recent years, but by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. ADF&G received $180,000 from the Southeast Sustainable Fisheries Fund to operate the weir for two years, said Scott Kelley, regional management biologist for the department’s commercial fisheries division.

The NSRAA budget cut was decided this month at one of the organization’s two annual meetings in Sitka.

Local NSRAA involvement narrowly survived being cut altogether after Alan Anderson, a Sitka troller on the board, made a motion to eliminate all Haines programs with the exception of smolt studies on Chilkat Lake.

The motion nearly passed, but Haines gillnet representative Mike Saunders was able to postpone the action. “That’s an indication that maybe it would have passed had it not been postponed,” Saunders said.

It’ll likely be brought up again in the fall during the next meeting, he added.

NSRAA is a non-profit organization that conducts salmon enhancement projects throughout northern Southeast Alaska, from Petersburg to Haines. Its board of directors is made up of 11 non-fishing members and 15 gear-group representatives – five gillnetters, five trollers and five seiners.

The organization is funded, in part, by a mandatory tax on all commercial fishermen, assessed as a percentage of their catch.

NSRAA has been involved in Haines since the early 1980s. In addition to helping with operation of the Chilkat weir, the organization has “also constructed two spawning channels for chum salmon, and four chum salmon incubation sites,” NSRAA vice president Steve Reifenstuhl said.

With the help of a local staff biologist, they’ve put chum eggs in remote incubation boxes in the Klehini and Chilkat river systems. The fry immigrate from the box to the stream.

“Essentially we’re putting more fish into the river systems,” Reifenstuhl said.

NSRAA has also conducted studies on both Chilkat and Chilkoot lakes.
“We can’t afford to do it anymore,” Reifenstuhl said. “The board’s discussion of evaluating projects is a reflection of how stressed the industry is right now.”

“With the decline in salmon prices, it has affected the industry in several ways, from processors to fishermen to hatchery programs,” he continued. “The effect has been devastating to a number of fishermen, and some aren’t even fishing their permits anymore. We feel the same stress as a salmon-producing institution.”

NSRAA has an operating budget of $3.8 million. It shares oversight of two large hatcheries including nearby Boat Harbor with Douglas Island Pink and Chum, and conducts a handful of smaller projects around Southeast. It makes its money both by selling fish and collecting a 3 percent salmon enhancement fee taxed on the gross fish sales of Southeast fishermen. In the past, the 3 percent tax has generated about $1 million a year, but recently it’s down to $600,000, Reifenstuhl said. The organization generally harvests 10 to 12 percent of chum salmon from its hatcheries annually, but this year, due to budget stress, they’ll take 24 percent to compensate for lost revenue.

“The fish we sell generates funds to pay for programs,” he said. “Not only are we getting less money from the fish we sell, but we’re getting less tax money because fishermen are also getting less money for their fish. So, the board has begun looking at programs with a more critical eye.”

Saunders said it’s a continual fight to keep gillnet projects going.

At the meeting, Andersen’s motion followed a presentation by NSRAA board president Kevin McDougall, who is also a gillnet representative from Juneau.

He suggested taking $80,000 from Haines projects and splitting the funds between chum hatcheries at Boat Harbor and Limestone Inlet.

“I’m not going to the board asking them to cut the Haines project to save money for the organization,” McDougall said. “I want to cut Haines projects because I want that same amount spent for the entire group. Those fish at Boat Harbor and Limestone come back to our gear group. I know it doesn’t take away the emotional element that something in your backyard is being taken away.”

But McDougall said his proposal was a business decision. “What are we getting for our money? How does that translate to the economy and the fishermen? It’s not a good picture,” he said. “It doesn’t matter how many fish you produce in the Chilkat River. Say you produce 100,000 chums. You’re not going to catch all those fish, because of management by (Alaska Department of Fish and Game). If you don’t catch what you’re paying to produce, you only get half your value back… I’d like to see dollars shifted to existing good programs where the benefit-to-cost ratio is much higher than it is in the Haines area.”

He added that a large percent of the chums that return to Boat Harbor and Limestone Inlet are caught by gillnetters, mostly from Haines.

“That’s not only a better use of money than is being used on the Chilkat Valley now, but we don’t end up spending the money, it generates more enhancement tax.”

Cheyne Blough, a gillnetter from Haines and NSRAA board member, backed McDougall’s proposal.

“From a restoration standpoint, I believe in what they’re doing in the Chilkat Valley,” Blough said. “But we’re in business to create fish to come back and be caught by us. I was for the proposal for that reason. Haines is one of the failures, if not the biggest, of NSRAA, from a cost-benefit standpoint. If things get tough, Haines is gone. We ought to move the money further south until things turn around. Once NSRAA’s flush again and things look up, maybe then we should start something back up in Haines.”

After McDougall’s presentation, Sitka seiner Chuck Olsen suggested doing away with Haines entirely and putting all the Haines money, not just $80,000, into Boat Harbor and Limestone.

“We’re always getting negative reactions from seiners to do away with gillnet projects,” Saunders said. “If you look at the budget of NSRAA, the Hidden Falls seine fishery gets $1 million. The entire budget for Haines is only $123,000, now. We could have even lost funding from Boat Harbor and Limestone. But – no sooner was that discussion tabled than Alan Andersen made his motion.”

Haines projects could never compete head-to-head with hatchery-based fish enhancement projects, said local NSRAA biologist Todd Buxton.

“They’re different beasts,” he said. “In any case, the board decided what’s going on in Haines is worth funding through this year. What we’re going to be doing is monitoring our chum fry leaving incubation boxes and spawning channels. This spring we’ll run the Chilkat Lake smolt weir.”

The summer will be spent upgrading local facilities such as incubation boxes and spawning channels, Buxton added. NSRAA plans to propose that Fish and Game install a new incubation box at Horse Farm Creek near 18 Mile Haines Highway.

“Then we have our spawning channels at 24 Mile and Herman Creek,” he said. “We also have sockeye incubation boxes at Spring Pond near Chilkat Lake. We’ll be marking chum fry in December to allow us to track enhanced salmon from the time they leave the incubation box to when they’re captured as fry in near shore areas of Lynn Canal, or as adults in the commercial fishery.”

Kelley said the NSRAA budget cuts mean Fish and Game will do “what it’s always done-manage returns.”

“From the department’s perspective, NSRAA has done great work in northern Southeast in general, and Haines specifically. The bottom line for (NSRAA) is dollars and cents. How do they get the most fish for the most efficient use of a dwindling resource? We’ll just keep on managing what fish there are to catch.”

55 years ago – March 26, 1971

Old Presbyterian Church Building Takes Trip, Survives Speedy “Sled Ride” with no Ill Effects

Past retirement age, and saved from the torch at the last possible minute, the 67-year-old Haines Presbyterian Church building took a trip last Saturday morning.

To those watching from points along Main Street, it must have been rather startling to see a large church moving rather rapidly through the old Haines House field apparently unaided by human efforts (the snow berm at times obscured the tractor being used to pull the building.)

Once the building was raised off the old foundation and placed on skids, the move to the new site behind the old cemetery near the Standard Oil tanks took less than 20 minutes.

Hundreds of volunteered man-hours went into preparing for Saturday’s move. The building had to be lifted off the foundation, the old concrete and steel chimney had to be chopped out and the building braced for the move. Then the equipment had to be readied for the move. That day came last week, and the move was made to look deceptively simple by the frozen ground and just enough snow to provide the “grease.”

To the amazement of many, the old building not only withstood the move, but more surprisingly, not a single window was broken during the “sled ride” across the field.

It was suggested that Eunice Benson, who headed up the “save the church” drive, pose in front of the newly situated edifice and hold a sign saying, “I told you so!”

Now the real work of refinishing the building can begin.