NSSP is the only one buyer for pinks this year

After two years of trying and one year of buying, Icicle Seafoods will not return to Norton Sound for the pink salmon harvest this year, said someone familiar with the decision. The Seattle-based company brought a processor to Norton Sound in 2021 to buy pinks, saying then in a letter to local fishermen that they did not intend to compete with Norton Sound Seafood Products.

According to the 2021 Norton Sound Salmon Season Summary from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, “the pink salmon run was well below the record runs of the last 5 years, but the harvest was a record harvest for an odd-numbered year.” The reason for the record harvest was that there were two buyers for pinks for the first time in 20 years:

Icicle and Norton Sound Seafood Products.

ADF&G’s 2022 Norton Sound Salmon Management Outlook says that “the pink salmon harvest could be 250,000 to 1 million fish if there is buyer capacity.”

This year, however, there will only be one buyer, NSSP.

Tyler Rhodes, Chief Operating Officer for Norton Sound Economic Development Corporation, which owns NSSP, wrote in an email to the Nugget that “NSEDC will be purchasing pink salmon this year and will again be placing a focus on the pink fishery as the outlook for chum salmon continues to be poor. Like last season, we will again have a floating processor in region to help ensure we can handle the high-volume fishery and provide as much opportunity as possible for the regional fishing fleet.”

The Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game’s Salmon Management Outlook report forecasts the chum salmon harvest “to be 5,000 to 10,000 fish with almost all the harvest expected to be an incidental catch in the pink and coho salmon fishery.” In addition to the 250,000 to 1 million pinks harvest, the coho harvest is expected to be 50,000 to 100,000, well below the 10-year average. That means that the chum bycatch percentage of the combined pink and coho harvest ranges from 0.45 percent to 3.33 percent.

Kevin Clark, Assistant Area Manager for ADF&G in Nome, explained that for salmon management here, they look at escapement data in the rivers and compare it with the bycatch rate. “If those two numbers don’t seem to be matching at all, if the bycatch rate is higher that we anticipate given the weir counts, then we can make decisions to either slow down the pink fishery, but it all depends what the in-season numbers look like,” he said. Five to ten thousand incidental catch might be very small or it might be a reason for concern, it all depends on the actual run, he said.

By comparison, however, it appears to be a much higher number than the bycatch in the experimental purse seine fishery that took place last year. Though only 28,769, or roughly 10 percent of the 289,912 pink salmon caught commercially in Norton Sound last year were through purse seine gear, there was only a bycatch of 16 chum salmon, all of which were caught in Norton Bay, and donated to a village. That’s a percentage of about 0.05. “The purse seine fishery was actually very successful in avoiding non-pink salmon,” said Forrest Bowers, Operations Manager for the Division of Commercial Fishers at ADF&G.

Nevertheless, Rhodes said in the same email to the Nugget that “NSEDC’s opposition to a seine fishery in the region remains steadfast. We continue to invest our time, energy and resources in support of the resident gillnet fleet, which vastly out-fished the failed seining experiment last year. We hope that with expanded processing capacity and increasing interest from the fleet that we will see an even more robust pink harvest this year from local fishers.”

Bowers agreed that the experimental fishery wasn’t as successful as they’d hoped in Norton Sound, despite other parts of the state using the same purse seine gear. Near-shore areas in Norton Sound appear to have lacked the same high levels of aggregation. “I think there’s still a question about the viability of purse seine gear as a tool for harvesting pink salmon in Norton Sound,” he said. If they’d caught half a million, the question would have been resolved, but “I don’t think we have a decisive answer.”

But ADF&G has yet to be approached by anyone interested in continuing to answer that question. Last year, three permits were given out for the experimental purse seine harvest. “There are certainly some highly productive pink salmon streams in Norton Sound. There’s a lot of viable resource there,” Bowers

said.