BETHEL -- Up and down the Kuskokwim River, salmon dried or frozen from last summer's shortened fishing season is running out after the lowest harvest of king salmon on record.
Now state and federal managers are turning to village residents to help plan what promises to be another summer of frustration, with restricted fishing in a region that depends on salmon as a main food source.
By next year, tribes are expected to be even more directly involved through a trial co-management program, something that Alaska Native leaders and fishermen say is sorely needed.
During three days of state-led meetings in Bethel that wrapped up Friday, a group that included biologists, fishermen, tribal representatives and managers explored strategies to allow residents to fill drying racks, smokehouses and freezers in the face of declining king salmon runs.
Village residents traveled to Bethel from the tundra, from the river mouth and from headwaters for the first meeting of its kind for the Kuskokwim, state managers said. The sessions cost the state about $35,000 including travel and other expenses. Bethel's tribe, Orutsaramiut Native Council, donated a meeting hall. The meetings are similar to preseason planning meetings held in Anchorage with Yukon River fishermen, said Dan Bergstrom, state fisheries management coordinator for the Arctic, Yukon and Kuskokwim region.
The state wanted to ensure that the people most affected learned about salmon science and why restrictions are needed, he said. State managers organized an afternoon of breakout sessions that put people from different parts of the river around the same table to hear one another's issues. Managers also wanted to hear from residents directly, he said.
"People are getting it," Bergstrom said.
Yet even as the state is reaching out to residents and tribes, concerns with state authority are driving a push to tribal co-management.
Among ideas being brainstormed to help fishermen:
• Dipnetting from a barge to save fuel. Fishing with the round nets often seen at the mouth of the Kenai River is a conservation technique used with success in recent years on the Yukon River by commercial fishermen targeting chum and releasing king salmon. But an experiment last summer on the Kuskokwim failed. Fishermen said salmon weren't hitting the nets and the cost of fuel for repeated passes in skiffs was too high. A proposal to dipnet off a barge came up a few years ago and it could possibly be implemented now near villages where sockeye or chum pass by in big slugs, said Dave Cannon of Aniak, a former fish biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
• Fish fences to funnel salmon toward dipnets. That idea has promise, but it wasn't immediately clear if it would be allowed under current rules, Bergstrom said.
• The use of beach seines, or nets fastened to shore at one end and circled around to draw in a school of fish.
• Community freezers operated by tribes to preserve big catches and ensure they are shared with those in need. That could be allocated through federal fishery disaster money granted to the Association of Village Council Presidents, Bev Hoffman of Bethel suggested.
• Newly designed drying racks and smokehouses to reduce spoilage and allow maximum processing.
The state typically manages subsistence fishing -- as well as commercial and sport fishing -- on the Kuskokwim but last year federal managers took over subsistence fishing for part of the summer and may do so again. The Federal Subsistence Board at an April 16 meeting in Anchorage will take up requests for a federal takeover of parts of both the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers. Long stretches of both rivers are within the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge. The state already has decided to close sport fishing for kings throughout the Kuskokwim River system and bay through July 25.
As it stands, state managers will oversee fishing and they said they will work closely with their federal counterparts, as they have in the past.
"We're going to be taking a conservative approach again this year," Aaron Poetter, Kuskokwim area management biologist for the state Department of Fish and Game, told local fishermen Thursday.
Counting fish from the sky
Fishing for the second year in a row likely will be shut down early in the season when kings, or chinook, start moving from the sea into the river, then open up with restrictions on gear when chum and red salmon come in, Poetter said.
Last year, an estimated 118,000 king salmon made it to spawning grounds in Kuskokwim tributaries, meeting the goal of 65,000 to 120,000 fish, according to Fish and Game. Managers are forecasting more chinook this year, but at this point not enough for subsistence fishermen to target them.
About 12,000 Kuskokwim chinook were caught in 2014, the lowest on record and far below the average harvest of 84,000 fish, according to Fish and Game. A state research project is examining the reasons for the crash of king salmon returns around the state.
The Kuskokwim spawning goal only was met last year because of the sacrifices of residents who normally would be catching kings for subsistence, Tim Andrew, natural resources director for the Association of Village Council Presidents, reminded state managers. Long strips and slabs of king salmon make more efficient use of drying racks. Smaller salmon and whitefish cover the racks, but with less meat hanging and less to store.
Andrew was among those at the fish meetings who questioned the state's methods of estimating salmon returns.
There's not a sonar counter on the Kuskokwim, though managers plan to test one this summer. Instead, the size of the run is estimated from aerial surveys and counts of salmon at weirs, where fish are funneled into live traps and tallied before being freed for spawning.
But on the Kuskokwim last year, two of three weirs that have goals set for the number of fish headed to spawning grounds failed to meet those escapement goals. On aerial surveys, all nine tributaries that have goals met them.
How can the state say that enough kings reached spawning grounds if two of three places where actual counts are done came up short? Andrew asked.
"I really don't have that much confidence in aerial surveys," he said.
Poetter said he's been involved in hundreds of aerial surveys, often in slow-flying Super Cubs, and that they are more accurate than people might think.
"You can see dollies. You can see rainbow trout. You can see 'em," Poetter said. "When the salmon get up in the spawning grounds -- they start changing color, they pop even more. You can tell a spawning chinook when you see it."
But others pressed on, concerned about the critical number.
Zach Liller, the Kuskokwim area state research biologist, said that the Kuskokwim's overall escapement goal is drainage-wide. Individual tributaries just represent a portion of the overall number and may go up or down in a given year. But if fish fail to return in expected numbers to a particular tributary year after year, that may signify a real problem, he said.
Small nets, more kings?
The state Board of Fisheries at its meeting earlier this month approved new tools for conserving Kuskokwim chinook, Poetter told local fishermen. Fish wheels now can be used with chutes to allow the release of kings while capturing smaller salmon, he said.
State managers also now can limit catches through restrictions on nets. In one change, they can allow fishing with small-mesh nets anchored or set close to shore, Poetter said.
Last year, when a large stretch of the Kuskokwim was federalized, federal managers limited fishing to setnets with 4-inch openings, which king salmon tend to bounce off. But in state waters outside the federal refuge, fishermen could drift in their skiffs pulling those small-mesh gillnets, a new technique that turned out to be deadly to salmon. Some fishermen released dozens of live kings, but others kept them, legally.
Under the new rule, state managers can require the nets to be anchored down, which should prevent too many kings from being caught, Poetter said.
That strategy for saving kings has gotten mixed reviews from fishermen.
Residents of tundra villages said they cannot use setnets because they must be checked frequently and gas to travel back and forth is too expensive. Setnets also are hard to use near the river mouth, where big tides and fast currents disrupt them.
But Dan Esai, who lives in Nikolai at the headwaters, said the nets were effective. His village told him to thank the state and federal managers. Last summer, salmon made it back to the headwaters in numbers not seen in recent years, he said. There were signs that chinook caught upriver once fishing was allowed had earlier hit nets downriver.
"You could see the net mark on their nose where they backed out. It worked. It saved them," said Esai, a member of the Kuskokwim River Salmon Management Working Group.
A research project in which king salmon were tagged found that 23 percent made it past McGrath to the headwaters, state biologists said.
But others said they feared chinook are dying from their wounds before getting a chance to spawn.
Jacob Black of Napakiak said he saw a flock of excited seagulls last summer when he was heading to Bethel on the Kuskokwim, just below Oscarville in an area that became congested with setnets. When he investigated, he found "floating king salmon."
Tribal rule
Tribal interests want to manage salmon themselves, a theme expressed throughout the state-led meetings. They are establishing intertribal fish commissions -- one for the Kuskokwim and one for the Yukon. Under a Department of the Interior pilot project, by next year, the Kuskokwim tribal commission's salmon plan should be incorporated into a multi-step management process that includes the Federal Subsistence Board and technical advisers from state and federal agencies, said Sky Starkey, an attorney who consults for the Association of Village Council Presidents.
"I see a lot of potential in this endeavor," said Bob Aloysius of Kalskag, co-chairman of the new Kuskokwim Intertribal Fish Commission. "For the first time we as a people who know the river ... are going to be involved in the actual work that we have always let somebody else do and we are always ignored."
Myron Naneng, president of the Association of Village Council Presidents, which represents 56 villages including Bethel, has been pushing for tribal management for years. He called state managers "hibernators."
"They hibernate in Anchorage and come out here during the summertime to make determinations for us on when to fish and when not to fish," Naneng said. He also called them "grocery shoppers."
"Those may not necessarily be kind words but it's reality," he said.
State biologists used to be stationed in Bethel year-round. But that's expensive because of a cost-of-living boost and it can be hard to fill rural posts, Bergstrom of Fish and Game said. Now they spend the summer in Bethel. Before the crashed king runs, there wasn't a big push to work on salmon issues over the winter, he said. Federal biologists are stationed in Bethel year-round, however.
Others see state managers changing and becoming more responsive, as evidenced by the meetings.
"Everybody -- whether they were a fisher on the river, from lower, upper or middle, or whether they were with a federal agency or whether they were with the state -- people were listening more to each other," said Bev Hoffman, co-chairwoman of the Kuskokwim River Salmon Management Working Group, an advisory panel to the Department of Fish and Game.
"I teased the department," she said Friday of Fish and Game as the meetings wrapped up. "It was almost like they took a sensitivity group session. They seemed more open and there was more willingness in that idea of all of us working on the decision-making process."