Homer Jackpot Halibut Derby trades big fish for big prizes
The Homer Jackpot Halibut Derby is making major changes in 2012 as it moves away from being a “big fish” event. Stanley Ford of Kenai donated the Ford F-150 seen here and GCI is putting up a $50,000 cash prize if an angler lands the right tagged fish. From left are, Eric Stanley of Stanley Ford in Kenai, Homer Chamber of Commerce and Visitors Center Executive Director Monte Davis, and GCI Director of Sales and Marketing Keith Sopp.
Photo/Andrew Jensen/AJOC
The Homer Jackpot Halibut Derby is revamping for 2012 in a proactive response to concerns about the resource.
As commercial quotas take another cut in 2012, the 26-year-old derby is moving nearly entirely away from being a “big fish” event, with only one prize to be awarded this year for landing the largest halibut. Instead, monthly prizes will be awarded to those who release fish larger than 50 pounds and the big prizes will go to those who land a tagged fish.
Any angler who releases a fish 50 pounds or more will be entered in a drawing for a $1,000 monthly prize (The derby runs from May 15 to Sept. 15, a month shorter than previous years). There will also be two additional drawings with $250 monthly prizes for active duty military and veterans, and citizens 55 or older, who release a halibut larger than 50 pounds.
GCI is putting up the largest cash prize ever for a tagged fish — $50,000 — and Stanley Ford in Kenai is putting up a new Ford F-150 truck for the lucky angler who lands their tagged fish.
About 100 tagged fish are released for the derby each year, and the suspense will build as no tag will indicate whether it is worth one of the big prizes. On the final day of the derby, all tags for the season will be removed from a vault to find out the prizes.
In addition to the $50,000 prize and the truck, there also will be five tagged fish worth $10,000, five worth $5,000 and “a bunch” of $1,000 and $500 prizes, according to Monte Davis, executive director of Homer Chamber of Commerce and Visitors Center.
For the first time, prizes also will be awarded to anglers who land tagged fish from previous derbies. Every tagged fish from a prior season is worth $100 “Homer Bucks” that can be redeemed at any Chamber of Commerce member business or organization.
At the end of the season, a $5,000 cash prize will be drawn from all released fish entrants, as well as a yet-to-be-determined kids’ prize, a $5,000 prize drawn from all derby entrants and a prize of $10,000 will be awarded for the largest fish landed in 2012.
Davis said the Jackpot Derby committee spoke with scientists about how best to address conservation and were told that while 250-pound females lay the most eggs, they are not as fertile as females from the 50-pound to 200-pound range.
In prior years, the derby offered four monthly prizes for the four largest fish landed each month.
“By offering prizes monthly, we were encouraging people to keep anything over 75, 90 pounds, which we know are prime breeding stock,” Davis said. “That’s what we most wanted to get away from. On the 15th of every month, we’ll have a $1,000 drawing for everyone who has released a fish of 50 pounds or more.”
The past few months have been rough on Homer and other Alaska communities that rely on both the commercial and charter businesses. Declining amounts of halibut larger than 32 inches have led to severe cuts in commercial quota, and those cuts have coincided with the potential implementation of a catch sharing plan to split the harvest between the two user groups.
Since the times of high abundance with the catch sharing plan was passed in 2008 by the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, biologists have become increasingly concerned about slowing growth rates of halibut and retrospective errors in their estimates. Those errors in halibut estimates combined with a harvest strategy that didn’t call for sharper reductions as abundance declined have led to an overharvest of the resource since 2004.
As the International Pacific Halibut Commission tries to root out the errors in its estimates and craft a strategy that won’t overshoot its target harvest rate, a good old-fashioned Alaska fish war has broken out.
Davis said the Homer community is sticking together, though.
“That’s one reason we’re doing this,” he said. “We all depend on that fishery. We’re proud of our commercial fishermen, our commercial marine trades industry, and our visitor industry we have in Homer. Both of those are essential to our economy. Fish wars are what they are, but we’re a community and we stand together when necessary. That part has been good.”
Andrew Jensen can be reached at andrew.jensen@alaskajournal.com.
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