Kodiak’s herring fishery has been extended and broken into new seasons, for sac roe and for food and bait. That’s after the Alaska Board of Fisheries approved changes to the fishery at its statewide shellfish meeting in Anchorage last week.
Herring may now be commercially fished in the Kodiak area nearly year-round. Previously, the fish could not be harvested during the sac roe season, which specifically targets the females’ eggs. But the Alaska Board of Fisheries approved a change that allows fishing during the sac roe season, which starts in April and now runs through Feb. 28.
The board also modified Kodiak’s food and bait fishery, splitting it into two seasons. The first begins Oct. 26 and goes through Nov. 30 while the second season goes from Jan. 11 through Feb. 28.
The new changes to the Kodiak herring fishery break down the sac roe season into three distinct periods, which will not overlap with the timing of the separate food and bait fishery.
“A” season will go from April 1 through the end of June [30], “B” season from July 1 through October 25 which ends before the food and bait fishery begins, and then the “C” season from December through Jan. 10. Up to 35% of the unharvested sac roe herring from the A season will be rolled into the B season, and all unharvested sac roe from those will be rolled into the C season. That’s in addition to 1,000 tons of the sac roe herring guideline harvest level or GHL being reserved for the “C” season.
Board Member Gerad Godfrey, who proposed the changes, said the aim is to help restore the market for Kodiak herring.
“It’s ultimately an outgrowth of the Herring Revitalization Committee that we worked on to explore if there were actually viable markets that could make this fishery come back to life,” Godfrey explained. “Because it’s not a fishery that became obsolete. It was a market that went away.”
The Herring Revitalization Committee was formed last March in response to statewide issues plaguing herring fishermen, such as a depressed market for sac roe.
It’s unclear if there will be a market for the fish. But longtime herring fisherman Bruce Schactler of Kodiak said he’s hearing of interest in Alaska herring products from other countries.
“The Legislature has put in, I don’t know, somewhere in the neighborhood of $500,000 into the development of new products, the development of new markets” he said.
Only a few vessels have participated in Kodiak’s herring fishery in recent years, even though, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, the population has been at near-record levels in that time period.
Sitka resident [Tlk’ Un Yeik] Paulette Moreno of the Tlingit Nation, who is an advocate in the Herring Protectors advocacy group, raised concerns about the timing of the process. She said that the board-generated proposal and decision was rushed. The Board of Fisheries created the proposal last month at the conclusion of its meeting in Ketchikan and put it on its agenda for its statewide meeting last week.
“A board-generated proposal does not necessarily give the public enough time and all parties involved to comment and to have their thoughts heard on something so important as a — what some people would call a resource, but our traditional customary food,” Moreno said.
But Schactler, of Kodiak, said the change was a product of the Herring Revitalization Committee’s public meetings and work from last year. He put the original proposal forward to the Board of Fisheries during its meeting last month, on behalf of the committee.
“This proposal simply tries to do what the task force and everybody has asked them to do, is try to figure out a way to move the industry forward, out of these doldrums, out of this disaster we’re in the middle of,” he said.
Both Schactler and Moreno agree that the altered herring fishery in Kodiak will affect other herring fisheries around the state. Still, it’s not clear if processors will buy the fish.
The changes will go into effect once the Department of Law approves the measure’s language. It could be implemented for the upcoming Kodiak herring season, which is set to begin on April 1.
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game will put out an announcement with more information in the coming weeks. The department was neutral on the final proposal adopted during the Board of Fisheries meeting last week.
