Before Southcentral's first returning king salmon noses into fresh water, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game announced Tuesday it's closing two Kodiak Island rivers once celebrated for their fabulous king salmon runs.
The Karluk and Ayakulik rivers may be poster children for the collapse of king salmon runs across Alaska, from the mighty Yukon River to Southcentral's Kenai River. Few waterways have seen sharper declines.
The 25-mile-long Karluk, which saw returns of more than 13,000 fish in the 1990s, has seen its king runs collapse this decade to fewer than 800 of the big salmon in 2008 and just 1,182 last year.
Only twice since 2006 have state biologists reached their goal of 3,000 to 6,000 kings escaping upriver to spawn in the Karluk, helping lock the river into a pattern of weak returns, something they expect this year and next as 5- and 6-year-old kings return to spawn. The parental runs for both years were weak.
'Devastating'
The story on the Ayakulik is similar, with the steepness of the decline perhaps even starker. As recently as 2004, a huge run of nearly 25,000 kings returned to the Ayakulik. Two years later, it was down to 3,000 fish and by last summer fewer than 800 fish came back.
"It's been devastating for the local economy, and I don't think that's too strong a word," said Donn Tracy, Kodiak area management biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. "The fisheries created a lot of commerce in the past, and all that commerce is pretty much gone.
"It's dissipated over time. It's a long enough period now where we've had such poor escapement that the angler interest has pretty much evaporated."
Such businesses as lodges, air-taxi operators, guides and sport fishing retailers feel the effects, and many of them have switched to fishing for red salmon instead of kings. Sockeye runs have remained strong. Last year, both rivers saw hundreds of thousands of sockeye return, as well as smaller runs of silver salmon and prized steelhead.
Biologists such as Tracy hope the low king returns are cyclical, pointing to a similar stretch of dismal returns for the Ayakulik and Karluk in the 1970s that eventually turned into a rebound.
'Not unprecedented'
"We've been here before, though maybe for not the same reasons," said Tracy, who first started fishing the Karluk 14 years ago when the runs were bountiful. "This downturn is not unprecedented for the Ayakulik, but it is starting to get to be prolonged."
And the memory of days when "you could easily hook into 20, 25, 30 kings a day" on the Karluk are starting to fade, according to visiting California angler Les Robbins. "Back then (in the 1990s), the river was in a class by itself."
A shallow river that's largely a series of shallow ripples slicing through lush hillsides, the clear Karluk has a rocky bottom and is less than 50 feet across at its narrowest. Before the sharp decline in kings, both the Karluk and Ayakulik were considered among Alaska's premier king salmon fisheries.
For this season, from June 1 to July 25, kings may not kept and if one is accidentally hooking while fishing for another species, it cannot be removed from the water as it's released.
"I think they will rebuild," Tracey said of the Kodiak runs. "But you don't look at it as an anomaly anymore. It's just the way it is."
Contact Mike Campbell at mcampbell(at)alaskadispatch.com