Alaska’s Controls Help Preserve Salmon Bounty

The waters of Bristol Bay churn on a warm, overcast day as hundreds of boat crews scheme, speed and swerve to intercept millions of sockeye salmon.

For more than 40 years, Eddie Clark has set his nets here, about 330 miles southwest of Anchorage, for Alaska’s most valuable salmon.

“You’ve got to get your nets out there the first 20 minutes because that’s when the fish are all schooled up,” he said.

The ritual in Bristol Bay dates back millenniums. Sockeye come to these waters by the tens of millions, and fishermen--ancient or modern--have followed by the thousands.

In some parts of the world, such a siege of fishing ends up obliterating the fish. But not in Alaska, where a relatively clean environment and comprehensive management--tightened up after a decline in salmon stocks in the early 1970s--keep the salmon running year after year. The controls could stand as a model for troubled fisheries elsewhere.

“In Alaska, the fish come first--not the fishermen,” said Barbara Belknap of the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute.

Alaska produces more salmon than any nation. In 1996, fishermen caught 891 million pounds of salmon--chinook, chum, coho, pink and sockeye--worth $363 million. Of that, 310 million pounds and $263 million were sockeye.

Alaska salmon hatch in fresh water, migrate to the ocean to mature, and then, one to seven years later, return to their birthplace to spawn and die.

Bristol Bay is the epicenter of the sockeye run, producing half the world’s wild salmon. Its pristine waters reflect mountains, forests and snow-white clouds--not towns and factories. Its shores are accessible only by plane or boat, and all nearby roads are dead ends.

The state monitors salmon at every life stage: They are counted as they leave their freshwater home, again as the homing instinct kicks in, and finally as they enter their spawning grounds, all to make sure enough fish escape the bay to reproduce.

During the two-week annual run, the monitoring helps determine when, on an hour-by-hour basis, to open and close the bay fishing grounds.

“We will forgo commercial catch to ensure escapement,” state fishery biologist Jeff Regnart said.

This year, biologists expect 26 million sockeye to return, with nearly 16 million being caught.