Crew members on the Star Shadow make repairs after the second day of herring fishing in 2015. From left: Brandon Ihde, Billy Nestle, and Devin Jones. (Rachel Waldholz/KCAW)
Though the Sitka sac roe herring fishery is months away, purse seiners know how much they’re allowed to catch.
The Alaska Department of Fish & Game announced the guideline harvest level, or GHL, yesterday (12-12-16) in a press release (161212_adfg_herring2016ghl). They set the GHL at 14,649 tons, or 20 percent of the mature biomass. In March, dozens of seiners will descend on Sitka to catch their share.
The herring converge along Sitka’s shorelines to spawn every spring. ADF&G forecasts the total biomass of mature herring will be over 73,245 tons and that the majority of fish will be five-year-olds. Last year, the majority of the fish were four-year-olds. Herring reach sexual maturity at age three.
The department determined the quota using commercial purse seine weights from last spring. Unlike in years past, ADF&G will not run a test fishery this winter and adjust the forecast accordingly. Eric Coonradt, the department’s area management biologist, said they didn’t need the additional data.
“What we found is that it doesn’t change things appreciably. It’s a very small difference,” Coonradt said. “So in trying to save some time and some money, we would decide we would only do this once and we would allow staff more time to work on other things.”
Last year’s seiners captured about two thirds of the quota (9,758 of 14.941 tons) before ADF&G closed the fishery due to early spawning activity. This is in part because the majority of the fish were four years old. Generally younger fish spawn earlier and as Coonradt explains, that limits the fishery’s profit potential. “Once herring started spawning, we had spawn outs in the mix and those are not as marketable. They’re not marketable. It’s not that the fish weren’t there, it’s just with all the caveats that we have to abide by, it made it more difficult,” he said.
The herring fishery also closed early in 2012 and 2013. Over the years, Sitka Tribe of Alaska has complained that the commercial fleet is depleting the herring population. With the 2012 and 2013 cohorts in the mix though, Coonradt is hopeful that the fishery will return to the trend of years past – where there’s one big age group. “Kind of in the more recent history we’ve had decent years of recruitment annually. So, it looks like we’re getting back to this one big cohort pattern,” he said.
Last spring, the department mapped 63.3 nautical miles of spawn in the Sitka Sound area. The recent 10-year average is 65 nautical miles. The sac roe herring fishery usually opens in March.
