Gillnetters File Suit Over New Rules
By Wesley Loy, Anchorage Daily News, Alaska
Apr. 26–The famed Copper River salmon harvest begins in three weeks, an annual rite of spring that thrills gastronomes across the nation and sticks big dollars into the pockets of commercial fishermen.
But hundreds of fishermen rigging their boats in nets in Cordova aren’t feeling the usual euphoria over the upcoming season.
They’re hopping mad, so much so that last Friday they filed a lawsuit in state Superior Court in Anchorage against the Alaska Board of Fisheries and the Department of Fish and Game.
The gillnetters say the board in December changed the fishery rules in ways that will limit their salmon catches and cost them millions of dollars.
In particular, they’re upset about the board’s decision to cut fishing time for the fleet during the first couple weeks of the season, which is scheduled to open around May 15.
The Fish Board’s objective is to allow more prime king salmon swimming the shallow waters of the Copper River delta to avoid capture in commercial nets and swim up the silty river where they can be caught by subsistence, personal use and sport fishermen.
Commercial gillnetters contend in their suit that the board’s action was neither necessary nor adequately explained, and they’re asking the court to block the new fishing rules before the season begins.
“We can find no valid justification for the drastic changes called for in the new Copper River regulations,” said 30-year gillnetter James Mykland.
The lawsuit signifies a classic Alaska fish fight pitting different user groups all intensely interested in the fish.
Art Nelson, chairman of the Board of Fisheries, was in Seattle on Tuesday and had no immediate comment on the case.
The 21-page lawsuit was brought by the gillnet division of Cordova District Fishermen United, a commercial fishing trade group with 275 gillnet members.
The suit contends the board improperly voted to halve twice-
weekly fishing periods in the waters inside the barrier islands at the broad mouth of the Copper River.
It’s in these protected shallows that the lunkers lurk — prime king salmon that can bring $6 or more per pound at the docks early in the season, when consumer demand as far away as New York City and Washington, D.C., is strongest.
Watching the early kings swim by, with some red salmon mixed in, could cost commercial gillnetters $2.3 million, the fishermen contend.
The gillnetters also claim in their two-part suit that the board improperly rejiggered a Prince William Sound allocation plan designed to equalize fishery revenue among the gillnet fleet and a separate fleet that uses a different style of net called a purse seine. The gillnetters say the plan could deprive them of up to $5.9 million worth of fish this season.
The board, at its December meeting in Valdez, voted 5-1 to restrict early commercial catches of Copper River king salmon.
A former board member and advocate for the cutback, Virgil Umphenour of Fairbanks said the board made the right decision.
Commercial fishermen for years have overharvested king salmon that mill in the shallows behind the barrier islands, waiting for the right moment to begin their arduous migration up the swift Copper, he said. The idling kings are vulnerable to gillnets, and fishermen can make easy work of them.
“Of course, what those guys want to do is catch as many of them as they can,” Umphenour said.
The earliest kings to enter the Copper are also the ones that swim the farthest up the nearly 300-mile river to spawn, and the commercial catches are depriving subsistence users in the upper drainage of an adequate catch, said Umphenour, who sits on an advisory council to the Federal Subsistence Board.
As for cries of financial ruin by the commercial gillnetters, they ring hollow because the fishermen have a hatchery system subsidized with millions of state dollars to supplement their catches, he said.
“Those guys are collecting welfare with dignity,” Umphenour said.
But the commercial fishermen argue that plenty of king salmon make it upriver most years and that the board’s new restrictions will work an unnecessary hardship on the fleet.
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