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Deep Inlet Notice
To Deep Inlet THA Fishery User Groups:
A reminder about boat traffic and anchoring near island homes in the Deep Inlet area.
Please review our plan:
Berry Island Resident Impact and Noise Reduction Plan
August 21 Weekly Update
Cost Recovery fishing this week at Crawfish has gone very well. We are currently at 80% complete of our pre-season goal. Based upon the current harvest rate we will complete Cost Recovery on Sunday August 23. We will open the entire Crawfish Inlet net SHA to common property seine harvest on Tuesday August 25. After Tuesday we will put CI in the same time/rotation as Deep Inlet seine. I anticipate there will be large volume accumulated in the SHA by Tuesday. Since Tuesday afternoon the vast majority of Cost Recovery has come out of Shamrock Bay in West Crawfish. Fish have started to move through Cedar Pass and there was a large body of fish south of the pass mid-week that haven’t turned the corner into the SHA as of yesterday. After Tuesday we will pull the net line back to the line approximately mid-SHA for the Thur/Fri seine openings. This will give 4 days of build in the outer SHA for Troll opportunity. Future SHA seine opening lines will partly depend on troll success in the outer SHA and fish quality and volume. So far fish quality this year has been excellent.
We have begun moving fish from Deep Inlet to Medvejie/Bear Cove. The first two loads are on the way currently and there appears to be sufficient volume to keep working on the fish and make decent progress today. Based upon this initial success I anticipate that we will make our goal of moving 30k chum and issue an opening announcement for Deep Inlet on Monday Aug 24. The re-opening will start on Wednesday with a troll day and then roll back into the normal Deep Inlet rotation with Seine Thur/Fri and troll Saturday to finish out the stat week. The net fleets will have re-balanced their fishing time and the normal rotation should continue until the end of season. Only complication would be if we continue to see poor recruitment to Bear Cove then another closure could be necessary.
August 14 Weekly Update
This week at Deep Inlet there was initial excitement as there was a good push of fish into the THA after the weekend rain and wind. This push appears to have been short lived as the catch began dropping off on the Wednesday Gillnet day and continued to drop the last two days for the seine fleet. At this point it is nearly a certainty we will close the Deep Inlet THA after the Gillnet rotation on Wednesday until further notice. Most recent sex ratio is still 66% male but the 3 year old component has increased in the last week from 60% to 74%. This combined with the drop in numbers is very concerning and necessitates the closure to protect brood stock for the egg takes at Medvejie. The Deep Inlet THA will reopen to common property fisheries as soon as practicable once we secure enough brood stock at Medvejie and from Deep Inlet. We will keep our website updated with the most recent information https://www.nsraa.org/?page_id=884.
There is little good news from the Hidden Falls egg take also. The recruitment has slowed to a trickle and no significant additional egg takes will likely occur. We are currently approximately 30 million eggs short of our 190 million goal. We plan to take an additional 10 million fall Medvejie stock chum and are ready to receive eggs from DIPAC if they happen to have a surplus which looks less likely each day.
The one bright spot is that Crawfish Cost Recovery has made good progress and we are 35% of the way toward our goal with about 30% of that progress since Monday. The cost recovery boats are fishing daily, even during commercial seine openings, and are doing a good job of keeping the head of the Inlet cleaned up. Additional rain this weekend will likely bring in another pulse of fish and I anticipate next week will be the peak week for cost recovery. There are good numbers of chum in West Crawfish still and there were approximately 15 trollers working in the area Friday morning. Fish continue to move into the Crawfish Inlet SHA through Walker Channel and Middle entrance and the quality has remained high with few darker fish. As with Deep Inlet there is a high percentage of 3 year old fish (61% on 8/11) with 5’s at 5%. Sex ratio from the 11th was still 84% male but we will see if that holds up in the next CR sample this weekend. Based upon all other chum returns this year I anticipate that there will be a sharp drop of in numbers once we hit the peak. Lets hope I am wrong.
Aug 6 Weekly Update
We have made strong progress at Hidden Falls this past week and have taken 130 million chum eggs and gone through 150k fish. We have taken an additional 5 million chum eggs at Medvejie for the Hidden Falls stock component leaving an additional 55 million to go. Chum eggtakes are continuing at both Hidden Falls and Medvejie. It is still to early to determine if we will make the entire goal of 190 million. The numbers of chum entering Kasnyku Bay is slowly diminishing each day although it would be unusual for the run to entirely shut off this early. We continue to collect chum at SE Cove but there the run has turned into a trickle with only 3,000 fish collected since last week. We will attempt to fish again tomorrow at SE Cove for brood collection and that will likely be the last of the effort there. We do have to additional backup options for Hidden Falls chum, we can take up to 10 million Medvejie fall stock chum to replace a shortfall in the Hidden Falls stock. In addition if DIPAC or Port Armstrong has any surplus chum after making their goal (questionable), we can utilize those stocks to replace any shortfall at Hidden Falls.
This past Monday through Wednesday we harvested 100k lbs of chum from Crawfish Inlet for cost recovery. This is an increase from a catch of 15k lbs the week before. Overall not large numbers but the chum are big, bright, 80% males and over 8lb average. All cost recovery has occurred in the SHA which is slightly early for fish to be pushing into the Inlet at this point in time. This next week the troll effort in West Crawfish and the Crawfish Inlet SHA during the coho troll closure will be a good indicator on how the run is building. Plan is to return to the rear half of Crawfish Inlet on Monday for cost recovery to clean up what has built up since Wednesday. Volume and fish quality will determine how cost recovery proceeds next week. If the current trend in numbers continues next week should see a significant increase in volume. Deep Inlet has slowly picked up the last few days and is appearing to be following the Crawfish Inlet trend.
Coho have started to show up in better numbers for the troll fleet and the Deep Inlet and Bear Cove releases combined catch to date is just over 10k. Deer Lake has a catch of over 3,000 with Hidden Falls trailing at around 1,200. There are reports of better than usual coho catches in the sound which could be an indicator of good survival of our local releases. Still a little early to know how strong the run will end up but is an encouraging sign after the slow start to coho fishing.
July 30 Weekly Update
This past week we have seen continued improvement in brood stock numbers at Hidden Falls. To date we have gone through 75,000 chum brood and taken 70 million chum eggs. We have secured the 56 million portion for release at Hidden Falls and by Friday we should have the 20 million for release from Bear Cove secured and will be working on the 20 million brood stock release for Gunnuk Creek Hatchery over the weekend. The next priority of projects in order is 24 million Deep Inlet, 45 million SE Cove and 25 million Thomas Bay. While we still have a long ways to go there has been a steady but slow recruitment into Kasnyku Bay with an estimated 10-20k adults outside the barrier net. We continue to have reports of jumps outside of Kasnyku and are hopeful we will continue to get recruitment for the next week or so. Approximately 20k chum adults have been transferred from SE Cove to behind the barrier net at Kasnyku Bay. These transfers will continue until there is no longer a need at Hidden Falls or the fish are not available at SE Cove. As at Hidden Falls the recruitment to SE Cove is slow but consistent.
On Thursday we had the first Hidden Falls stock chum eggtake at Medvjie which resulted in approximately 2 million eggs collected. These will offset any shortages from Hidden Falls and as these eggs are from 3 year olds only will be released from one of our remote release sites. It looks like there may be another 5-10k Hidden Falls stock chum in Bear Cove and we will continue to collect eggs from those as they ascend the fish ladder.
Cost recovery continued this week at Crawfish Inlet and 15,000lbs of chum and 300 chinook were collected. Although still quite small poundage the chum are big, bright males and the catch volume went up 5x from the previous week. Harvest has been hindered due to the large numbers of jellyfish and low numbers of fish. I anticipate this harvest increase to continue and next week should see the first significant cost recovery in the inlet. Cost recovery will continue to occur in the east half of the inlet unless large numbers of fall chum congregate in West Crawfish and ADFG requests we harvest those seen in specific areas. In addition if no trollers are observed actively fishing in the Crawfish SHA then the full SHA may be utilized for cost recovery.
July 23 Weekly Update
Returns across the board continue to under perform forecasts and this past week it has become clear Hidden Falls will not make brood stock goals. At Hidden Falls we are seeing less than 20k chum at the weir and barrier net with little activity in Kasnyku Bay. There continue to be reports of chum between Round Island and Takatz but their behavior is indicative of early fish staying offshore and not congregating into larger schools. A total of 16m eggs have been taken to date. In order to preserve the best opportunity for additional chum brood stock for Hidden Falls the Thursday seine opener at SE Cove was canceled. SE Cove will continue to remain closed until we have secured sufficient brood stock for Hidden Falls. Unfortunately this may utilize the remainder of the chum return to SE Cove. The Sunday seine catch at SE Cove was less than 10k chum and the build up since then has been weak. This morning we loaded approximately 4k live chum onto the tender Lady Rosemary for transport to Hidden Falls. They arrived at Hidden Falls around 1pm with less than 1% mortality. These chum have been placed into a holding pen for acclimatization and eventual release behind the barrier net to ascend the fish ladder. We continue to fish at SE Cove collecting additional brood stock. Due to the slow build up at SE Cove we will likely cease fishing at end of day Thursday and restart Monday.
Lady Rosemary offloading adult chum from SE Cove at Hidden Falls Thursday July 23rd.
As all of you are aware chum returns across the region are meager. Deep Inlet chum catch took a sharp drop this past week and continues to be very poor. It is clear there is a break between the early Hidden Falls summer run and the fall Medvejie stock return. Chip Blair, our Data Analyst, put together a chart looking back at 35 years of chum catch statistics through stat week 29 for Alaska. Not only is this years chum return poor for SE Alaska, it is the worst since 1989, statewide is also tracking similar (link to data https://www.nsraa.org/?page_id=4630).
This past Tuesday we collected the first chum cost recovery from Crawfish Inlet. This initial effort was to clean out the last of the returning Chinook to the project and to begin evaluating the numbers of chum in the Inlet. A total of 3,000lbs of chum were caught with a 10.2lb average and an 89% male sex ratio. Next week we anticipate sufficient numbers to begin cost recovery on a routine basis. Cost recovery will be limited to the east half of the SHA in Crawfish Inlet and will occur until the full goal of $4m dollars is harvested.
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