After more than a year Haines and Skagway have a sport fishing area management biologist again.
John Whitinger, is a biologist and Alaskan who says he is most drawn to looking at the entire ecosystem when considering the health of individual fish stocks.
He was born in Kodiak but described a childhood commercial fishing throughout Southeast Alaska. The 32-year-old is Aleut and has family on Prince of Wales, in Ketchikan and Sitka. “Everywhere I go, I have family,” he said.
He described power trolling for salmon from a 100-year-old wooden tug with his grandfather.
“He’d always try to keep me into the school year because that’s when the kings are running,” Whitinger said.
He moved to Anchorage and after he graduated he said he mostly thought about sports, football specifically.
“I was defensive line, linebacker, full back,” he said. “I played one year in Tacoma, Washington at the University of Puget Sound. It was a great place for school but we had the longest losing streak in football history and we lost every single game.”
He walked on at Adams State in Colorado and said he played one more year, then got a concussion and two shoulder injuries and realized that he probably needed to focus on studying fish before he destroyed his body.
After graduating with a degree in organismal biology, Whitinger taught high school science for a year, cultivating a passion for education that he said he’d like to continue in the Chilkat Valley.
Then he became a masters student at Northern Michigan University and worked on a project in Little Bay de Noc, which is known as a world class walleye fishery at the upper end of Lake Michigan. He and his professor documented how the fishery had changed over 30 years due to changing conditions in the lake and agricultural run-off that caused fish that used to be in the northern end of the lake to follow food and nutrients to the south.
“Now, after 10 years of this being the world’s best walleye fishing hole, it has completely flip-flopped and now Wisconsin pulls all of the larger fish from that fishery,” he said.
It was a chance to do the kind of work Whitinger said he is most interested in, looking at the entire ecosystem and how a fish population fits into it.
He moved back to Alaska two years ago and said he’s been applying to work for the state ever since, weathering hiring freezes at the state and federal levels. Then, he said, he got exactly what he was looking for.
“The first time I got offered a position, it was not only in Southeast, where I want to be, but it’s in a part of Southeast that [I’m not] super familiar with. So I’m super excited about that,” he said.
At the top of his to-do list right now is getting boats and a Ski-doo that haven’t been used in more than a year back up and running.
While he is new to the community, Whitinger said he brings a lot of experience with different kinds of fisheries with him.
“I’ve worked in the Great Lakes, all freshwater systems with a lot of artificial habitat, a lot of disruption. I’ve also worked in the Gulf [of Mexico],” he said. “I think that seeing this really wide array of what fisheries can look like and how it works in other places is .. something that makes me unique in this position.”
Just a few days into the job and Whitinger said he’s hearing from a lot of locals, which is how he’d like to spend his first year.
“I’ve already met several people who said ‘hey, I want to show you the river.’ I’ve had people invite me out on their boats, which has been awesome. If anybody wants me to go out fishing with them and I can do it, I will,” he said.
That’s how he’ll figure out what people would most like to see addressed in the Upper Lynn Canal fisheries they are using. Also on his priority list is checking in with the Chilkoot Indian Association and Chilkat Indian Village about what they’ve been working on, their goals and local priorities.
So far the thing most people ask him about first has been king salmon, he said.
Haines’ king salmon sport fishery has been shut down for nearly a decade. As currently written, this year’s plan is to open it back up again beginning June 14 to both resident and non-resident anglers.
“Everyone is on edge about how things are going to go because it has been so long and it’s very tense,” Whitinger said.
Some fisherman have questioned the decision to reopen the fishery and worry that it will put too much pressure on a recovering population. He said everyone he has talked to seems to be the most concerned that the fishery be healthy and managed sustainably.
“I’ve been talking with regional managers in the last four days… I’ve been on so many calls about this specific subject,” he said. “We’re working incredibly hard to provide fair and equitable access to king salmon this year to all user groups.”
Looking ahead to managing this season, Whitinger said he was going to rely a lot on the knowledge and experience of other people in the local Fish and Game office.
“I’m leaning heavily on theirs because I don’t have the background,” he said. “The types of things that you can’t get from showing up here and reading the reg book.”