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Published: July 9, 2006
Last Modified: July 9, 2006 at 07:54 AM
RUSSIAN RIVER -- The red salmon came again this June in a gray-backed wave of life that at times nearly obscured the rocky, rubble bottom of this stream.
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No one could have imagined such a bounty nearly 40 years ago when the groundwork was being laid for the revitalization of the popular Kenai Peninsula fishery. The river then supported a healthy salmon fishery, but it was nothing compared to what it is today.
Red salmon used to return each summer by the thousands or tens of thousands. Now, between the early run just finishing and the late run just beginning, they come by the hundreds of thousands.
There are so many, in fact, that fishery managers sometimes question the ability of anglers to catch enough. Already this year, the early run of fish has exceeded what biologists peg as the maximum spawning goal by some 20,000 fish. This has become the norm.
"They have had this supposed over-escapement (of spawners) on the Russian for the last 10 years,'' said Jan Konigsberg, a fisheries biologist in Anchorage. "Theoretically, something should be dipping but it's not."
Surplus salmon on the spawning beds might have reduced the ratio of returning fish per spawner to something less than ideal in recent years, said Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologist Tom Vania, but there is no indication that returns two or three times larger than biologists desire have done any harm.
And there have been big returns.
Only once in the past five years have fishery managers stayed within the desired range of 14,000 to 37,000 spawning reds for the early run.
That was in 2003, when 23,650 fish got past anglers, up the river and through the fish-counting weir.
Anglers largely thought it a weak run. No wonder.
Anglers had seen more than 85,000 fish go past the previous year and 78,000 in 2001. Those were years of incredible bounty. Fisheries biologists thought the bounty might have ended with the closer-to-normal showing in 2003.
They were wrong. More than 56,000 fish went through the fishery in 2004, almost 53,000 in 2005. This year, despite the fish returning a week later than normal, the escapement -- that is the number of salmon escaping harvest to reach the spawning grounds -- is climbing past 60,000.
All of this on top of catches by anglers that now number in the tens of thousands. No one is exactly sure what's prompted the change, though there is evidence a warming climate has played a part.
"It has been an interesting thing,'' said R. Russell Redick, retired Southcentral sportfisheries supervisor for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.
Redick was around when salmon fisheries all over Alaska tanked in the 1970s. The early run return to the Russian at the start of that decade numbered 5,451 reds, total.
To appreciate how few fish that is, consider that on two occasions this year the daily count at the Russian River weir was higher.
Redick remembers the situation being scary 35 years ago. The entire early run numbered a mere 2,654 fish in 1971. Extremely cold winters froze eggs and young fish called alevin in the gravel and reduced the productivity of the river, which is vital to salmon smolt and fry migrating out to sea.
Fisheries managers were powerless to do anything about the weather. All they could do was try to get enough spawners into streams and rivers to keep runs plugging along. To do so, they drastically cut back fishing. Redick and others now believe that set the stage for what is happening on the Russian today.
A commercial fishery that had targeted early run Russian reds as they moved through Cook Inlet toward the stream was eliminated, and commercial seasons for king salmon were moved back later into the summer.
"What really made it grow,'' Redick said, "was they moved the king season later when the Susitna (River) kings were in trouble. Then the early (Russian) run could sneak in before the kings.''
Fisheries biologists thought the change would help rebuild the early run of Russian River reds, but they never expected to witness runs like those that have returned to the river the past five years.
"I don't think anyone even thought about it,'' Redick said.
The average annual escapement for the early run was historically under 15,000 fish. Over the past five years at the start of the 21st century, it has averaged about four times that.
James Anderson at the University of Washington School of Fisheries and others have theorized much of this has to do with global warming or what oceanographers have called a "regime shift" in the North Pacific Ocean.
"Two major climate regimes have been identified,'' Anderson has observed. "One associated with cool and wet climate in the Pacific Northwest and another associated with warm and dry Pacific Northwest weather. The warm/dry regime favors stronger ... stocks of many Alaskan fish.''
Warmer, drier weather for the Pacific Northwest, associated with warmer, wetter weather for Southcentral Alaska -- sort of a northward shift of the Seattle climate -- is what some global warming models forecast.
And few debate that Alaska's climate has warmed in the past two decades, though there is much debate as to what caused the warming and whether it is long term or short term. Whatever the case, Anderson and others have argued the change significantly altered the environment of the North Pacific in the late 1970s.
"The pattern,'' he wrote, "was particularly strong with Bristol Bay sockeye (salmon), which jumped from catches on the order of 1 million fish in the early '70s to a record catch of 44 million sockeye in 1995.''
Anderson expected all of this to end around the year 2000.
"The weather pattern switches between warm/dry and cool/wet regimes on about a 20-year-period extending back to the 1900s,'' he wrote in a paper published just before the start of the new century. "The cycle has had a distinctive double-peak pattern with a strong regime shift followed by two weaker regime shifts and then another strong regime shift. The last strong regime shift occurred in 1977.''
Were the North Pacific adhering to his model, the climate would have begun a shift back toward conditions less favorable to Alaska salmon and more favorable to Pacific Northwest salmon almost a decade ago.
But it hasn't happened.
Though there have been some ups and downs in Alaska salmon runs in the past 10 years, they have remained generally strong. The prediction for Bristol Bay this year is for a return of 33 million red salmon with a catch of 24 million. That is significantly less than the 1995 catch but is more than the catches from the early 1970s when Alaska salmon runs struggled.
Alaska fisheries managers familiar with this history are reluctant to claim much responsibility for the salmon bounty in Bristol Bay, the Russian River or anywhere else.
"It's just a matter of keeping it out of the ditch,'' Vania said. "People give us more credit than what we deserve a lot of the time.''
Managing salmon is part science and part art with the weather thrown in as the key wild card.
As the strong return of early run Russian reds winds down, fisheries managers are looking ahead to the far bigger return of Kenai River sockeyes and wondering what will happen with them.
Their models, based largely on the size and number of young fish leaving the river, forecast a total return of only about 1.8 million fish -- a 20-year low. Fisheries managers, who have an escapement goal that earmarks 650,000 to 850,000 of those fish for spawning needs, have already warned commercial fishermen to be prepared for a dismal season in Cook Inlet.
But they issued similar warnings last year, when a relatively low return of 3.3 million reds was forecast for the Kenai. About 5.5 million -- 67 percent more than expected -- returned.
A weak return of salmon to the Kenai this year would be a bad thing for both Kenai sport and commercial fishermen, but it might actually add to the bounty on the Russian. That's because the Russian fish arrive in Cook Inlet and head up the Kenai mixed in with Kenai spawners. Thus, anywhere that Kenai fish are caught, Russian fish get caught along with them.
Reductions in commercial, sport or personal-use fishing to protect the weak runs of Kenai reds could actually allow a stronger return to get through to the Russian in the weeks ahead, making this river once again appear the shining star of Alaska fisheries management.
For that, fisheries managers may warrant some credit.
While they can't do much about the survival of young salmon in either freshwater or the ocean, they can ensure enough adults reach the spawning grounds to reseed future runs, said area sportfish manager Barry Stratton.
On that count, he added, the Russian is a huge success story. Former Kenai sportfisheries biologist Sid Logan, who along with Redick helped usher the Russian to where it is today, is even more blunt.
"It's the best managed fishery in Alaska,'' he said.
The numbers make it hard to argue with that conclusion.
Daily News Outdoors editor Craig Medred can be reached at cmedred@adn.com.
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