State fisheries research biologists say Bristol Bay could see a return of 40.3 million sockeye salmon in 2008, with a potential harvest of 31.4 million reds, if processors can handle the volume.
The problem, in brief, is that the Bristol Bay harvest, the world's largest sockeye salmon fishery, is a finite one in terms of time.
“You either make it in two weeks or you don't,” said Juneau economist Chris McDowell, himself one of hundreds of Bristol Bay fishermen. “It's pretty high stakes poker.”
Bob Waldrop, executive director of the Bristol Bay Regional Seafood Development Association, said their members are also concerned about how the processing sector will handle the 2008 run.
“We are going to find some way to address this,” Waldrop said Nov. 27. “This is something that can be handled in a cooperative manner. The RSDA is going to be looking at and evaluating a lot of possibilities. Neither fishermen or processors are going to solve it by themselves.”
Last year the industry did process more than the predicted run, and for 2008, the projected harvest is similar to last year's actual harvest,” McDowell said.
The actual harvest in the bay can and does fluctuate, and the way the industry addresses that risk is to decide ahead of time how much processing capacity to have. When it looks as if the harvest will exceed processing capacity, the processors give the fleet warnings in advance of fish openings of whether or not they will accept more fish.
Last year it was frustrating to have those limits,” McDowell said. “On the other hand, the actual return exceeded the forecast (of 34 million reds) by 10 million fish. No wonder the processors couldn't keep up.”
If the 2008 forecast is a reality, it would be 53 percent higher than the previous 10-year mean harvest.
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game anticipates the actual harvest will be between 25 million and 29 million sockeye salmon, based on actual harvests from recent runs of similar size.
The forecasted run to each district and river system is as follows: 14.65 million to the Naknek-Kvichak district, 8.02 million to Egegik District; 6.48 million to Ugashik District; 10.41 million to Nushagak District, and 0.74 million to Togiak District. Within the Naknek-Kvichak, the breakdown is 3.56 million to Kvichak River, 3.32 million to Alagnak River, and 7.78 million to the Naknek River. In the Nushagak district, the predicted run includes 7.10 million sockeye to the Wood River, 1.93 million to Nushagak River, and 1.37 million to Igushik River.
Fisheries officials were cautionary, noting that there is always uncertainty in forecasting returns of sockeye salmon to Bristol Bay, and the 2008 forecast is not different than previous years.
Meanwhile, many months before the fishery, processors and fishermen alike are already trying to figure out how to handle such a huge harvest.
Waldrop said that processors thought they had the capacity to handle the 2007 run of reds going into the season, “but it turned out otherwise, because the run turned out otherwise.
“The harvest was 29.5 million; but they let a lot go,” Waldrop said. “They over escaped all the rivers and several of the processors either shut down and quit buying or put their fishermen on limits, for limited amounts of time. How much fish went by depends on whom you talk to. Every single fisherman thinks they lost thousands of dollars.
“They simply met their processing maximum,” he said. “In the average year 60 percent of the fish are caught in a one week period, and in Bristol Bay those are titanic numbers,” he said.
Margaret Bauman can be reached at margie.bauman@alaskajournal.com.
