I am a retired Kenai River fishing guide who operated my guide service for over 40 years. I have watched the “salmon wars” go on for many decades concerning Cook Inlet salmon fisheries. My conclusion: Human greed knows no bounds. Americans overharvested passenger pigeons and they became extinct. Millions of buffalo once roamed our western prairies. Excessive harvests coupled with barbed wire fences nearly made them extinct.
The greed factor has plagued our fisheries in Alaska. You can access salmon catch harvests for Cook Inlet and see how the salmon fishery collapsed in the early 1960s due to overharvest by commercial fisheries. Limited entry was put into place in the early 1970s and allowed two days per week of commercial salmon fishing. Those restrictions allowed our salmon to rebound in 1976.
However, our fishery managers would allow emergency fishing periods when they thought excess salmon were available to commercial fisheries. Needless to say, many years of “emergency fishing periods” overharvested certain salmon fisheries bound for Cook Inlet’s salmon rivers.
A few decades ago, the pollock trawlers started harvesting tremendous numbers of pollock that were worth billions of dollars from Alaska waters. This fishery drags a trawl net along the ocean bottom and can have a high bycatch of other fish species. Tons and tons of king salmon and halibut were caught in past decades and could not be legally sold. This bycatch is dead and is thrown back by this wasteful fishery.
So now we have restrictions put on halibut sport fishing charter boats. Cook Inlet king salmon streams find sport fishing closures this year. The IFQ commercial halibut fishermen have had their harvest quotas greatly reduced. We find that the Southeast king salmon trollers may not fish this season due to low numbers of king salmon. The Yukon River received tiny returns of king salmon last year. Could the pollock trawlers have anything to do with these fishery problems?
— James K. Johnson
Soldotna
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