Tag Archives: Cook Inlet region
The end of an era for Alaska fishing may already be here
The historic Long Island fishing town of Amagansett is about 100 miles from New York City — roughly the distance from Ninilchik to Anchorage. Remarkably, a remnant commercial fishery continued on eastern Long Island into the 1980s, despite mounting pressure from urban growth, pollution and rival sport fishermen. This summer, Kenai Peninsula beaches from Ninilchik to Kenai will be empty of setnets and buoys. Family-run commerial fishing businesses, a major economic force in the Cook Inlet region since territorial days, have been shut down and may not be coming back. Exceptional sockeye runs of the 1980s, when setnetters on east-side beaches recorded a few million-dollar seasons, helped set the stage for Cook Inlet’s modern fish wars. Sportfishermen saw too many prize king salmon in fish totes headed to processors. As more permit-holders migrated to the east-side beaches, new efforts were launched to avoid Kenai River kings. >click to read< 15:40
Federal fishery disaster money eased Alaska salmon fishery failures, but only for some
The federal government’s help easing the impact of recent Alaska salmon fishery failures wasn’t enough to provide relief to all the players involved. Alaska initially received nearly $8 million in federal money after declaring a disaster in 2012 due to low king salmon runs on the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers and in the Cook Inlet region. That’s according to a new study from the National Marine Fisheries Service, “Many commercial fishery stakeholders may have gotten little benefit from the relief payments because they were made to permit holders and may not have made their way to other key fishery participants,” it said. Those others include the nonpermit holding crew, vessel owners, suppliers of fishing inputs and owners, employees and suppliers of fish processing companies. Read the rest here 18:21
