The low rumble from downtown Anchorage on Saturday was the sound of the crowd gathered for the Alaska Board of Fisheries meeting at the Egan Civic and Convention Center, where more than 200 people were signed up to testify through the weekend.
The subject? Cook Inlet salmon, of course.
Often more than 10 million of the fish return to the Inlet in the summer, but it's never enough. The desires of commercial, personal use and sportfishers are insatiable. The fish board is tasked with spreading the salmon catch among the members of this loud and sometimes angry horde.
More civilized Alaskans have suggested the political appointees to the board should step away from their Solomonesque efforts to divide the catch, build a model that assesses the value of salmon catches on their net economic benefit to the state, and let the highest-value uses of fish dictate allocations.
But that is unlikely to happen. Nobody trusts economists.
Thus the board is left to listen to days of public testimony and then try to find a politically acceptable compromise for allocating the fish. Rendering an outcome with which everyone will be happy is impossible. No one is happy now.
The United Cook Inlet Drift Association, the gorilla in the game, is telling the board to lift closed-area restrictions on salmon fishing in the Inlet because those restrictions are letting a biologically harvestable surplus of valuable sockeye salmon get away for no good reason. The 570 commercial driftnetters are also suing the state in an effort to get the Board out of the allocation game and put the matter of salmon allocation in the hands of the federal North Pacific Fisheries Management Council, an organization dominated by commercial fishing interests.
Meanwhile, the Matanuska-Susitna Borough -- former Gov. Sarah Palin's homeland along then northern edge of the Inlet -- wants the commercial drift fleet sharply restricted. Borough public affairs director Patti Sullivan sums things nicely from the northern perspective:
• "We have 7 of 11 of Alaska's (salmon) stocks of concern;
• "Our angler (fishing) days are the lowest in 37 years; and
• "Our only personal-use dipnetting hole from a bygone era, Fish Creek, is rarely open so we drive the hours to Kenai, and likely choose a bad day because an emergency opening shuts down our opportunity on that lucky Thursday when we thought no one would be there."
Personal-use fishing is a uniquely Alaska phenomenon. The people's fishery allows everyday citizens to fill their freezer by getting a permit from the state -- Alaska residents only, by law -- and going down to the Kenai or Kasilof rivers with a huge dipnet to try to pull out 25 to 50 salmon or more. Catch limits are based on family size.
Dipnetters didn't do so well last year because of what many of them refer to as the "curtain of death," the monofilament nets hung in the Inlet by commercial drift and setnetters. Those nets snag salmon -- and sometimes other fish, birds and marine mammals -- by the gills. They caught about 3.1 million salmon last year.
Some 2.1 million of those fish were highly valuable sockeye. The total catch was worth $39.1 million, making 2013 the eighth most valuable catch in Inlet history, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. But the overall catch was down 23 percent from the 10-year average, which angers the small army of commercial fishermen in Anchorage to testify before the board.
They believe that if the Alaska Department of Fish and Game has been more liberal with its management scheme they could have caught a lot more fish and taken home millions more in profit.
The dipnetters see it differently. They netted only about 350,000 sockeye, approximately two-thirds of their 2012 and 2013 catches. They whined all summer about lousy fishing and empty freezers, and some still remain angry.
The Mat-Su Borough wants lower Inlet salmon fisheries squeezed down and upper Inlet salmon fisheries further restricted, which has the Homer Chamber of Commerce up in arms. Jim Lavrakas, the chamber director, said restrictions on lower Inlet fisheries would do further damage to a local economy already struggling because of the hammer dropped on charter halibut anglers by the NPFMC, the organization some commercial fishermen would like to see take over management of Inlet salmon.
Fish politics in Alaska do get complicated, admitted Lavrakas, one of the multitude in Anchorage to testify before the board this weekend. The Homer Chamber, which has generally backed halibut anglers in their battles to hang onto halibut catch, now finds itself battling backing commercial fishermen in their effort to hang onto salmon catch.
Longtime observers of this decades-old fish war generally agree commercial fishermen have the upper hand in the battle. While dipnetters and anglers whine loudly and often, commercial fishermen organize, participate and contribute to political campaigns.
The clearly irritated chairman of the Anchorage Fish and Game Advisory Committee, one of dozens of such committees that advise the Fish Board, sent an email to committee members and others early Saturday morning chastising them for their complacency.
"Well, as I did see some of you at the beginning of the meeting yesterday, I can tell you, the ratio in the crowd was 10 commercial fishermen to ever sport/personal use fisherperson," Bruce Morgan wrote. "Do you wonder why when in the middle of the summer you have no fish and bitch!
"There are less than 1,000 commercial fishermen in Cook Inlet, and 30,000 personal use dip netters. Let alone, three times that in sport fishing licenses sold.
Why the heck don't we get off the sofa and to this meeting to change things?"
The Anchorage advisory committee has generally backed the efforts of the Mat-Su Borough, the Kenai River Sportfishing Association, and other entities that want to put more salmon in Alaska rivers.
The only way to do that is to reduce the harvest of commercial fishermen in the Inlet. That cuts into profits, and the Inlet's commercial fishermen have demonstrated over the decades they will fight fiercely, and understandably, to protect profits.
If you're in need of weekend entertainment -- and the Super Bowl isn't an aggressive enough show -- you might consider a visit to the Fish Board downtown just to watch the fireworks. Or, if you don't want to "get off the sofa" yourself, you can always listen live online.
Contact Craig Medred at craig@alaskadispatch.com.