Board of Fisheries passes new Kenai king salmon plan

New management rules for Kenai River king salmon mean sockeye bag limits in the river are up, and commercial setnet fishing will likely be closed for the foreseeable future.

The Kenai River late run king salmon is now officially designated as a stock of concern, which means many changes to the management plan. The Alaska Board of Fisheries finalized the designation at its meeting in Anchorage on March 1, and as part of it, revised the management plan for the fishery to help conserve more fish.

King salmon are generally in trouble throughout coastal Alaska. The Kenai River run of kings has been in decline for more than a decade, with increasing restrictions on sportfishing and commercial fishing in the area. Commercial setnet fishermen, who fish inshore on the eastern side of Cook Inlet, are closed entirely by 2023, while sportfishing for kings is completely closed due to low profits. The management plan, which the Alaska Department of Fish and Game uses to determine what regulations to set in the run, has provided some tools to conserve the run, but the number of returning fish continues to decline.

At its October 2023 meeting, the board reviewed the Stock of Concern designation for the final run, covering July and August on the Kenai River. At its meeting in March, the board decided how to revise the management plan to help rebuild the run over time.

The main issue in Cook Inlet is the complex web of different types of users and how they affect the kings coming up the river. The Kenai River is one of the most heavily fished systems in Alaska, with drift gillnetters fishing Cook Inlet, setnetters fishing the beaches up and down the Kenai Peninsula, personal use dipnetters fishing the Kenai estuary in July, and sportfishermen are next to almost everything. 87 miles of the Kenai River. Most of them target sockeye salmon, but kings will return at the same time, and will inevitably be caught as well.

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The new plan sets an escapement goal of 15,000-30,000 large king salmon — fish at least 75 centimeters from mid-eye to tail fork — to help the stock recover. It also sets meeting the lower end of the goal as a priority over exceeding the goal, or meeting either end of the sockeye salmon goal for the Kenai River.

For sportfishery, it allows the commissioner to prohibit the keeping of king salmon, expand the sockeye bag limit to six per day with twelve catches, and open an area of ​​the Kenai River to motorized private fishing that is normally closed . Fishing for kings will also be closed in the saltwater Cook Inlet north of Bluff Point, which is at Anchor Point. Personal gear fishermen are no longer allowed to keep king salmon of any size.

Commercial setnet changes are more restrictive. Because setnetters fish inshore and catch more king salmon than any other commercial fisherman, they have been heavily restricted by Fish and Game since the kings began to decline. In 2023, they are completely closed due to a low king salmon forecast; in 2022, they fished for about five days before shutting down for good.

The new plan allows setnetters to open if the in-season projection for king salmon is higher than 14,250 large kings, which is between the lower end of the sustainable escapement goal and the slightly higher recovery goal. However, the run hasn’t reached that number in at least the last four years, according to Fish and Game data. Even when they are open, they are limited to one net per person, with fishing seasons varying from mid-June to mid-August, when the fishery closes.

The drift gillnet fleet also cannot fish within 2 miles of shore.

The Upper Cook Inlet meetings are some of the longest and most contentious in the state, with competing interests and hundreds of proposals being debated during the two-week meeting. Gary Hollier, a Kenai setnetter who says he’s attended every board meeting since the 1980s, said he didn’t feel the setnetters got a fair process this time. For one, two of the board members who regularly support commercial fishermen – Gerad Godfrey and Tom Carpenter – were not there in person, and for another, the final proposal to make all the changes to management plan was formed by the board and pushed too quickly, he said.

“We didn’t get a really fair shake of representation as I would have liked to see it,” he said.

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The one net per person limit significantly reduces gear for setnetters — many setnet operations have stacked permits, meaning one person or family owns multiple permits. Hollier says that part of the plan effectively reduces his gear allowance to 10% of its full capacity. The board allowed setnetters to use handheld dipnets to fish commercially, but those couldn’t catch the volume of regular setnets, Hollier said.

“We’re hanging on by a thread, and we haven’t gotten a lot of support from this board,” he said.

Travis Every, who is also an east side setnetter, said he also felt the board’s approach to the final proposal was unfair because fishermen did not expect it to come out so quickly and they were ignoring it. Because king salmon runs have been low in recent years, the threshold for opening a setnet fishery is likely to be kept closed, and setnetters have little recourse to the Board of Fisheries, whose members are politically appointed. Fish and Game’s 2024 forecast for Kenai River late run king salmon predicts about 13,689 large fish will return, well below the threshold required to open setnets.

All told the Kenai Peninsula is not only losing the economic benefits of the commercial setnet fishery, which has been operating for nearly a century, but also its cultural aspect.

“It’s more than just a summer hobby,” he said. “It’s how a lot of people identify themselves.”

The board changed the threshold for setnet openings down from 15,000 big kings to 14,250. The Kenai River Sportfishing Association, a Soldotna nonprofit that advocates for sportfishing and fishery conservation, criticized that decision in a March 1 statement.

“The Board’s decision to lower the escapement goal prioritizes short-term commercial interests over the long-term health and sustainability of Kenai kings,” Shannon Martin, KRSA executive director, said in the statement. “This is a dark day for conservation in Alaska, essentially we signed off on the managed decline of a species that defined our region.”

The Board of Fisheries concluded its 2024 Upper Cook Inlet meeting on March 5.

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