Alex Gimarc: Trawler wars

By ALEX GIMARC

This year’s “Two Minutes Hate” ginned up for election season is aimed at the trawl fleet, summarily blamed for multiple salmon fishery failures statewide.  Solution?  A summary ban on trawling, immediately putting the 225 – 250 boat trawl fleet out of business.

Most of the angst has been spun up by Democrat PACs aimed at their least favorite Republican incumbent, though some Republicans have played along, most notably Republican gubernatorial candidate Dave Bronson.

In response to their threatened economic doom, the trawl fleet ran an ad campaign all summer intended to keep their lights on.  Like most defensive moves, this one wilted under the tidal wave of Outside campaign money aimed at them.  As of this writing, they are expecting a ballot initiative to ban trawling just in time for the 2028 ballot.

But it is always wise to be careful about a brand-new issue, particularly one that seems to benefit democrats politically.  Now that we are in a short period between campaigns, the biggest question is trawler bycatch a real problem?  The short answer is no, we don’t.  OTOH, we do have other commfish caused problems crashing salmon returns statewide, particularly in Southcentral.

The best reporter on this issue in the state is Craig Medred, who writes in his own blog, Craig Medred news.  Over the course of the last week, Medred took the issue and those fanning the flames of economic destruction on in three pieces.

The first, High Crimes took apart Democrat claims that Sen. Dan Sullivan investments in foreign fish farming was somehow a Bad Thing.  Among other things, he points out that the Permanent Fund itself is invested in foreign fish farms.  Crickets out of Democrats.

The second piece, The Big Lie, goes after the notion that trawler salmon bycatch is responsible for poor salmon returns.  Democrats blamed the poor Kenai River salmon second red run return (about a million fish) and subsequent poor dipnet season on trawler bycatch.  Like all democrat Big Lies, salmon bycatch is so small that it is no longer tracked.   In the last decade it was 1990 – 2001, there was an average of 49 reds (sockeye) caught yearly from the entire state from the Yukon toe the Frasier River in Canada.  That’s not tons.  That is individual reds statewide.  Some problem, that.

Final piece, Alaska’s Mafia, goes after non-trawl commercial fishermen and their political supporters (he describes Jonathon Kreiss-Tomkins, JKT, acting dumber than a post) for causing the crashing salmon return problems. The crashing returns can be most closely tied to commercial hatcheries in Prince William Sound (PWS) flooding the North Pacific with a couple billion pink fry every year.  These hungry little mouths out compete wild salmon for available food.  Note that the PWS commercial hatcheries exclusively support a commercial pink salmon fishery whose returns also crashed this summer.

This is a powerful deconstruction of a problem caused by commfish and now being exploited by democrats for political advantage, blaming someone else entiely.

Democrats and their new commfish political mascots are setting the precedent that it is perfectly acceptable to carve off and destroy one segment of commfish (the trawl fleet) under the rationale that they are destroying salmon returns statewide.

This is a powerful argument and polls well, which is why a number of putative Republicans are trying to get on the runaway train before it runs them over.  What is an appropriate response?

The best would be to reframe the argument.  How?

In targeting the trawl fleet, democrats are essentially telling us that the solution is to remove their nets from the water, and everything will be solved.  There is a small element of truth to that argument, as the global solution to the maximizing salmon returns to rivers and streams statewide is to get as many nets out of the water as humanly possible.  The trick is to do this without wantonly destroying thousands of small businesses statewide.  But as democrats are democrats, wanton destruction of businesses of all sizes are a fundamental part of their DNA, it is what they do.  They are good at it.  Look at what they have done to mining, logging, oil and natural gas development in this state for decades.

How do we solve this?  We embrace fish farming, onshore (Recirculating Aquaculture Systems, RAS) or offshore in pens.  Start trading limited entry commfish permits for fish farming permits.  Yes, this will require a constitutional amendment to repeal the statewide ban so foolishly passed in 1991.

Second would be to shut down the commercial hatchery operation, especially those dumping pink fry into Prince William Sound.  Move those operations into commercial fish farming operations so that the environmental destruction of the foodstock in the Northern Pacific can naturally rebuild itself and in turn rebuild salmon runs destroyed by tens of billions of excess pinks released into the salt over the last three decades.

As the destruction of wild runs of salmon in this state are being politically exploited by democrats (JKT and Peltola are two examples), and commfish is gleefully serving up the trawl fleet as the designated boogey man (trawl bycatch as the claimed reason for the low Kenai River red return this July), what options do we have in response?

Now that it is politically acceptable to forcibly remove commfish nets from the water to preserve the resource, perhaps it is time for some of the 530,000 (2023) sportfish license owners statewide to get politically involved and do the same thing to the remaining 9,800 commercial fisheries permit holders.  Harsh?  You bet, but it does force them to start playing the game by their new rules.

Remember that the commercial hatcheries were sold to Alaskans with the promise to yearly produce 8 million reds, 1.5 million silvers, and 300,000 kings along with some unspecified number of pinks.  Over the decades, red, silver and king returns available to the general public from these hatcheries are all but nonexistent, yet the commercial fishermen have managed to feast on tens of millions of pinks.  Sadly, the massive increase in commercial pinks has also done its part to destroy king returns statewide and are doing the same thing to salmon species in Cook Inlet and PWS.

If I were running a campaign against any democrat (or Republican, Dave) who is blaming poor salmon returns on trawl bycatch or the Kenai River Sportfishing Association (JKT), I would do the following:

–          Purchase the most recent list of sport fish license holders in Alaska from ADF&G

–          Remove all non-residents from the list

–          Import it into your favorite political party’s list of registered voters

–          Run a query matching sportfish license holders with registered voters of that party

–          Discretely target those voters telling them that Alaska’s commercial fishermen are shutting down their opportunity catch salmon whether by sport, dipnet or subsistence methods and let them make up their own minds

You guys want this issue?  Great.  We will use it as a way to ensure none of you will be elected for a decade.

Alex Gimarc lives in Anchorage since retiring from the military in 1997. His interests include science and technology, environment, energy, economics, military affairs, fishing and disabilities policies. His weekly column “Interesting Items” is a summary of news stories with substantive Alaska-themed topics. He was a small business owner and Information Technology professional.