Alaska Peninsula / Aleutian Island / Chignik Finfish (2/22/2026)

I don't know. News is, uh, Good morning, everybody. Today is Sunday, February 22nd. The time is 9:08 AM. We are back on the record and we are going to wrap up with the second calls for public testimony this morning.

And then we're going to move into Committee of the Whole Group 1. So second calls from yesterday are— I'll just read them all out and then we'll take them in that order. Jimmy Kupchayek, Bruce Hendrickson, Janet Woods, Christian Porter, Shai Vent, Kimberly Nichols, Delula Erickson, Eva Burke, Carl Frank and Eva Burke, Charles Wright Sr., Tom Hoblet, Jared Davidson, Edward Kraus, Libby Mussolino, and Tom Hoseth. Is Mr. Kupchayak with us this morning?

Second call. Okay. Bruce Hendrickson?

No Bruce this morning.

How about Janet Woods?

Okay. Christian Porter?

Second call for Christian Porter.

Second call for Shai Albert.

Is that you?

Nope. Okay. Hard to tell sometimes.

Kimberly Nicholas. Second call for Kimberly Nicholas.

Okay.

Welcome, Kimberly. You made it. Whenever you're ready, you can put yourself on the record and begin. Good morning. Good morning, Madam Chair and board members.

My name is Kimberly Nicholas. My Dena'aka name is Me'en Nezun. It means "I look on the bright side" or "I'm optimistic." And I am from Kaltag. It's on the Yukon River. Its Dena'aka name is Gaahtdaw, and then "gaaht" is our word for king salmon, and 'Is the place of,' so we're very lucky at that spot with our fishing, or we used to be.

So I grew up out there on the river. Our fish camp was 8 miles below Caltech, and our fall cabin we have in Cayuse Slough. But growing up out there, fishing was a huge part of my life. It was our whole life. And I wasn't sure what to say that you guys already haven't heard.

You heard all the science, you heard about our lifestyle, and I called my mom last night, she's an elder, and my aunt, and I was like, "I don't know what to say to these people anymore." But just my perspective on the river. I have 3 children. We have not been able to fish since 2019. My son was 6 at the time, and I have pictures at that time. He was already throwing out the lead line for the seining net with his dad at 6 years old, and I just want to It's just a part of our whole lifestyle.

We live our life by the seasons and our mental health by the seasons. And fishing during the summer is our best season, and it was something for us to look forward to.

And, um, you know, my kids still go home every summer. Even though they know they can't fish, with my mom and they just spend time with her and they go to the smokehouse, you know, and they make lunch out there. But it's just, I just would like at least some hope, you know, give us something to look forward to. [SPEAKING HER LANGUAGE] I think that's the direction I would like to see this go.

And fish oil and fishing is our medicine. Like, you know, there's the flu going around and stuff like that, and we used to take it for granted, but we used to just um, have fish oil to soothe our throats and stuff like that and line our gut. That's what we need. Thank you, Kimberly. Thank you.

Are there any questions? Miss Irwin. Thank you. Thank you, Kimberly, for your testimony. Um, in your village of Kal'tag where you live, um, are you able to harvest other foods for subsistence?

And if so, how are those other populations doing? Um, thank you for that question. Um, Yes, we do still harvest other food, like in our different seasons we have our moose hunting, and there's geese, and there's fishing throughout the winter, ice fishing, whitefish and stuff like that, pike, sheefish. But we have a creek above Cow Lake, and it used to be full of chum and spawning and stuff like that. It's important for it to come up too because they're part of the food system in our creeks for other animals to eat, not just big animals, the little animals, the grayling, all of that stuff is— they're finding other food sources, they're going somewhere else and we notice it.

And there's also a creek below Caltague, it's called Old Village and You know, we've noticed some fish going up there too, but yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for your testimony today. I appreciate you being here.

Okay, thank you. Thanks. This is Delula, my cousin. I'm going to sit by her. Okay.

Welcome, Delula.

Fairbanks, Lestow.

My name's Tallulah Ann. My family comes from Kaltag or Gathto out on the Yukon River, but I was raised mostly in Southeast in Hoonah, Alaska. It wasn't until I moved back up here in my adult life that I was able to reconnect with my family and our communities on the Yukon. And in my adult life, I was only able to fish with family members for 3 years out on the Yukon before we were shut down, and I was only able to do one of those years. In Kal'tag with my family.

And so the only way that I know how to be a good relative for our salmon is to come here and to fight for their right to survive and to get to our rivers. You know, I've heard the argument made here a couple times that our rivers are in stress and that the habitat isn't healthy for the fish. And I just want to emphasize the fact that when you're Operating a system, you have to account for vulnerabilities and you have to account for uncertainties. And I think that's what your decision here is meant to do. You have to manage this system for the vulnerabilities that are out there.

So it doesn't mean that you shouldn't make a decision. It means— it underscores and emphasizes the importance that you do. The Anadromous Waters Catalog for Alaska is widely known to be incomplete. So we don't even know the extent of our watershed and we can't understand fully what parts of it are healthy and unhealthy. There's 183 spawning streams on the Yukon watershed, and I would argue that most of them are ready and able to hold salmon.

And we're still discovering more, even in the last 5 years. So between 2024 and 2020, there were 13 new anadromous waters listing in your catalog. There were 8 new species and life phases identified, and there were 33 new miles of river mapped. And so I think that just underscores and emphasizes the fact that we don't fully understand the watershed, and you can't use that as an excuse to not make a decision here. When you have a vulnerability in your system, you have to account for that with, uh, greater protections.

And the best way to do that is to make sure that when you have a fishery that's taking fish that are passing through their area, not meant for their natal streams, that you let them through. And so I just want to state that I support Proposal 136, but I understand that that feels like an unreasonable ask to others, so I also support 131. Thank you. Thank you, Delula. Any questions?

Thank you for being here this morning. Appreciate your perspective.

Up next is Eva Burke.

Good morning, Eva. Good morning. Are you guys going to do your AC testimony first or your personal testimony? I will do the AC and then Carl will finish up, if that is okay. Okay.

Are you going to do personal? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. You are going to do that afterwards?

Yeah. Okay. Got it. Thanks. Our Minto Ninana AC met jointly with the Tenana Ram Park Manly AC.

We had 7 of our 11 members present. Please see ACs 12 and 17 for our comments. I will also reference the earlier comments made by Malena Jordan on behalf of the Tanana Rampart Manly AC. Our AC supports reductions in fishing time and gear modifications by reducing depth and seine lengths. We support supplemental June protections to strengthen passage time paired with fixed closures.

Proposals 130, 132, and 133. We oppose any proposals expanding fishing time. I want the record to be clear. There are errors in the 1987 Eggers tagging study earlier referenced. Chum that were originally thought to be destined for Asia or Bristol Bay were actually headed to the AYK region.

Additionally, the same blame on in-river issues and that the chum are of Asian origin were also used to deny action other than caps and years leading up to the first record low run seen on the Yukon and in the Bristol Bay/AYK region in 2000. Please see RC130. Additionally, the chum that are traveling to AYK largely bypass Bristol Bay. They're not going to add extra miles to their journey in a short migration period time home. They are traveling with the Alaska Coastal Current, Alaska Stream, going down and around the Fox and Andreanoff Islands and back up towards the Pribbs, where traditional knowledge and pollock fishery data show presence of Yukon fall chum and most likely Yukon Siwak chum known as summer chum.

The Yukon Chinook and summer chum run together, and the summer chum and fall chum run together. Chinook tricklers are already present in river in May under the ice. The salmon lead each other in the ocean following the sea ice melting and eventually freshwater influx in spring and are influenced by currents and winds. They are also teaching the younger fish, a lot of age 3, where to swim, what to feed on and when, and what is needed for each stage of life and for the massive migration home. They love age-zero pollock, which is hatching in Shelikof Strait and on the Bering Sea shelf edge near the Pribilofs each spring.

The herring are also spawning each spring, signaling life and feeding many other species. They are important to protect in a changing climate. Everything is important to protect in a changing climate. We are far behind the ecosystem-based management, climate-resilient fisheries, or gravel-to-gravel stewardship that is desperately needed to recover the last wild salmon runs of the world. Our waters were never meant to feed the world.

Everything has a limit. The Yukon River abundance largely drives the Western Alaska Chum Salmon Index, as I testified to earlier with RC-33. There is a huge uncertainty in whose Siwak chum are being taken and which major river streams are being impacted in an area half the size of Alaska. Which is lumped into one genetic group under Siwak. The department only has 6 years of genetic data for the Area M commercial fishery, which has been in existence since the late 1800s.

Although on average nearly 60% of chum were Siwak in 2007 to 2009, there were still several weeks in June that consistently had about 80% Siwak chum. There's no real knowledge of the interannual proportion of Siwak chum in the Area M fishery. This is throwing the public— and most problematically, the genetics have been collected during periods of less than average and extremely low whack chum abundance. This is throwing the public perception that seawack has been or is a small portion of the chum caught in Area M. Even in low abundance, seawack chum consistently make up about 24% of the Area M chum take and roughly 20% of the Bering Sea pollock take. The pollock industry has the tools to keep their overall take less than 200,000 and their WAC take less than 45,000.

This fishery is not even close to that, and it will take millions of dollars and years to get there. Our salmon need meaningful action now. These numbers might seem insignificant when you're taking millions of fish, but remember, the Yukon drives the chum, the WAC chum index. You need to make the safest decision for the system most at risk. Estimating half the Siwak to be Yukon would be conservative.

The Area M fishery has been averaging close to 100,000 Siwak chum from 2022 to 2024, and 50,000 could potentially be Yukon. If we're having chum runs of 500,000, Area M would be allocated a 10% exploitation rate while in-river subsistence users are managed to 0%. There are natural cycles of salmon, as I spoke about earlier, with lows every 20 years instead of roughly every 30 years. Everyone has historically done their part in times of extreme low abundance, and the fishery managers put in restrictive measures that were warranted and effective. Engineers designed for 50- and 100-year cycles.

There were salmon crashes in 1919 and heat waves during 1925. We're in the 100-year cycle and hoping to see recovery. For the past 2 years, the Bering Sea has been in a transitional state from warm and hopefully trends towards cooling, which I think we are seeing now. Back home, we had several long deep freezes this winter, and they're not predicted to end quite yet. This is normal for us, and that's why we need our own salmon.

It has the oils we need for our dark cold winters to keep us well. Imported sockeye doesn't quite do the trick, but I appreciate it and I'm grateful. In '94, the North Pacific implemented the Chum Salmon Savings Area, which was closed to all trawling— closed to all trawling during August, the entire month, and had a cap of 42,000 chum in effect through October 14th. The Board of Fish reluctantly eventually implemented the 2001 to 2003 Area M June Management Plan when chum runs on the Yukon hit the first record low. Fishing time was effectively reduced to 144 hours.

Interesting enough, the Yukon saw record recruits per spawner during the Area M strike in 2001. Please see slides 2 and 3 on my RC129. Here we are in a much more serious predicament. I don't see any other way to reduce chum than to reduce fishing time. It's been effective before, and we don't have guarantees of necessary data collection mapping capabilities and climate models, or years of historic genetic data and targeted species catch per unit effort collected for the whole stat area for every day to inform future fishing behavior.

Even the data collected in the Bering Sea only begins in 2011, far after a lot of the damage has been done on our stocks. The various levels of area M chum caps in effect from 1986 to 2000 did not help the salmon decline. The commercial fishery that existed on the Yukon also did not help the decline, but those decisions to allow commercial openers on the Yukon when subsistence needs were not being met were made right here at this table by this body, CRC 135. Our people have submitted many proposals over the years to reduce commercial fishing and restrict mesh net sizes and drifting practices, but those were denied in favor of commercial fishing. We need to follow the sustainable salmon and mixed stock fishery policies mentioned before me and prioritize subsistence.

Logically, if subsistence wins, everyone wins. There's more salmon for future generations. There's more seafood for future generations. Setting escapements for Yukon was not based on Indigenous knowledge. The escapements set have been used to manage us into extinction.

There are so many species of plants, trees, animals, birds, and bugs that rely on salmon. Other than humans. There is no such thing as over-escapement. There is no need to prosecute a fishery the minute something jumps above an arbitrary line, the lower end of the escapement goal. A 1920 Federal Bureau of Fisheries report said don't fish commercially on the Yukon.

Yet after statehood, we see huge increases in commercial takes of all species in all waters targeting our large iconic king salmon, king crab, and halibut. And by the 1980s, everything was showing signs of decline. Yet 50 years later, we're somehow just now figuring out abundance-based management. Fisheries historically collapse before science ever catches up. So reliance on science alone, which believe me has many great values but also shortcomings, especially in its ability to cross disciplines and knowledge systems, systems.

There are multiple studies being done. One was submitted as an RC by Megan Krupa at Board of Fish in 2023 that showed how local proposals are often denied in favor of department or commercial interest proposals. Additionally, a recent National Science Foundation study showed how local and advisory committee proposals had a positive impact on terminal fisheries in the Area M Northern District versus the negative impact of nearly every proposal submitted by Concerned Area M, which have a 45% success rate versus the 4% of the local ACs and the 10% of locals. Non-local and department proposals have success rates of 13% and 100% respectively, but have negative impacts on terminal fisheries half of the time. The study also calls out overcapitalization and increased horsepowers as contributing factors over the years.

In closing, when we protect CHUM, we protect Chinook, and when we protect communities that have had an unbroken intergenerational bond with salmon until just recently. Our people are not transient seasonal workers that manage two homes or have access to other subsistence resource or commercial fisheries to prosecute. Our whole ecosystem is in collapse with huge population declines of caribou and moose. It's partially climate and it's partially management that isn't with tribes, doesn't incorporate traditional knowledge or plan for precautionary management in a changing time. I hope this changes.

Where tribes lead, salmon are returning. Look at the Cusco, the only place meeting King Escapement goals. The cooperation from tribes, their management, and forgoing subsistence. Thank you. Sorry about that.

Thank you, Eva. Questions? Mr. Chamberlain. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you for that wonderful testimony, Ms. Burke. You do a lot of work with the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council and specifically in the pollock fisheries and work in the— and can you discuss a little bit about the ecosystem-based management and climate resilience practices in, in that aspect of your work?

Yes, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council actually put a lot of money toward a climate resilient fishery program, and they did some climate scenario workshops in various coastal communities. And they also do an ecosystem status report yearly, and that's reported to the council. But unfortunately, in the environmental impact statements that are presented on each action, a lot of that is hidden in other meetings and other documents, and so it's not super forthcoming in the action that you might have in front of you. And so, for example, the scientists, the Science and Statistical Committee, expressed concerns about snow crab in a changing climate, and the management action decided to increase the tack on snow crab And then there was a huge population decline after that, and it was all blamed on climate. But in fact, there was a decision to increase the TAC when they knew the stock was showing signs of decline.

So even in that fishery, with all the information and the data collected, they are still very, very much struggling to implement ecosystem-based management or climate-resilient fisheries planning. Thanks for the question. Thank you, Miss Irwin. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Eva, for your testimony.

My question is on page 7 and 8 of your RC129, and I'm looking at these different stratas that say Siwak highest. I'm wondering if there's any patterns that you're seeing, or is there anything you can tell me about the timing of when the highest take of Siwak is being harvested in these different fisheries?

Yes, thank you. Through the chair, thank you for the question. Libby from Tanana Chiefs Conference is also going to present I just included 2024. We were in a rush to get this in, so she will also have 2022, 2023, and 2024 available in the same format. In 2024, we saw that Siwak was the highest proportion of chum in the June 15th through 18th seine fishery in both the Southeast, South Central, and Unimak Southwestern districts, and had takes of 10,000 Siwak for 3 of the openers.

Siwak was by far the highest proportion in the June 6th through 28th gillnet fishery in the Southeast South Central District, even though overall harvest was low. Additionally, Siwak was also by far the highest proportion in the June 11th through 13th and June 15th through 18th gillnet openers in the Unimak Southwest District, with takes closer to 15,000 Siwak chum each opener. So that, that adds up, you know, to 100,000 Siwak in these areas. And like I said, There's a lot of uncertainty around what's going to the Yukon, and it might seem small, but in the North Pacific, they put a cap basically in the area where they're catching the most coastal western Alaska fish. They put a cap in that area of 225,000, but they can't effectively manage to that.

You have to assume that your chum are 20% Siwak. You don't get the genetics in time even in that fishery. You have to make the decision to stay off the areas where sea whack is in the highest proportion and at what time of year. And so that does mean standing down in the pollock fishery. And they put a cap of 45,000 Western Alaska chum.

And so if we are thinking about caps and numbers, I would be looking for a number like that. It's—. That's—. We can't be moving fish, not getting fish through the southern part of the Aleutians. We need to be moving them through the entire passageway, which was in effect in 2000 to 2001 to 2003, and we saw a lot of returns with some favorable environmental conditions.

Thank you, Mr. Carpenter. Yeah, thank you. Thanks for being here today. I just have a couple of questions on your RCs. So RC 130 has a couple, 3, I assume they're newspaper clips.

And I'm, I'm curious about the one in the middle where it says fewer of the chums caught in False Pass are now believed to be of Bristol Bay or Asian origin, and instead are thought to be headed for UK. What is the context of this article, and do you— who wrote it? Was it an op-ed? Do you have any idea about that? Yeah, I would invite you to look at the newspaper articles that we put together in our tribal room, and they're not op-eds, they're by journalists, and they're documenting that the Board of Fish made an error or didn't have the right information when they made a decision to put caps and not restrictive fishing measures.

And so there was pressure to hold additional Board of Fish meetings to present that new information, and they were off by like magnitude of order 30,000 to 50,000. And so it— there was additional Board of Fish meetings after that, and it took several cycles, but eventually time was limited and that study was found to have a lot of errors. So it's real problematic to continue to reference, and we should really be collaborating on future tagging studies through tribal co-management research projects. Okay, I'm just trying to get some context there because, you know, a journalist writing something that hasn't been reviewed scientifically is a little bit different to me than something that has. And then to your other RC where it shows kind of the flow of migration, I guess where did you get this?

This flowchart? You know, I know it's— I know it's the currents, but how did you come up with the determination of where the Kuskokwim fish are? And maybe the Yukon Siwak swim this way, and maybe they go with— I mean, where did— where did that derive from?

That's a series of traditional knowledge, and it's also from the data, the tagging studies that are available. And it's also physical oceanography. These are well-established currents that have been studied, and they're bringing in fresh warm water that creates life. The spawning herring are in there, the spawning pollock are in there. These currents I learned about as an engineer at Arctic Slope Regional Corporation when I used to prepare environmental impact statements for oil and gas companies.

Part of the work was climate, meteorology, and sea ice. And so these type of currents and graphs were made available by Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, NOAA, different scientific studies that we were undertaking at the time. We had a shore logistics support base in Unalaska, so we were interested in passage and sea ice and what was happening in the time when we were planning for sea ice-free oil development. Okay. Thank you for that.

And one last follow-up if I can. So in your presentation from the AC, you said that in the June fishery in Area M that it could be up to 50% of the chums caught there are sea whack fish. And I guess my question to you is, I'm not sure where you got that information, but the WASP study, the 1987 study, and also some of the genetic work that's been done lately have a very different number than that. So if you could maybe elaborate on how you came to that percentage.

Um, you mean, are you talking about the 2024, 2022 to 2024 data and the percentage of Siwak? I'm not exactly sure which you— what you were talking about, but you made a statement in your AC testimony that the June fishery, that it could be up to 50% of the fish caught in the June fishery were seawack fish. And I'm trying to understand where that percentage comes from because all the studies and reports don't have a number even close to that. And so I'm interested in where you got that and how you derive—. If, if you have a study or report that breaks up the Siwak chum by the Yukon, Cusco, Bristol Bay, I would love to see that because I don't believe that exists.

And so what I'm referencing is the historical driver of the Western Alaska chum index. And if you look at the numbers on the graph, when there's 5 million Yukon summer chum, there's 6 million Western Alaska summer chum. The Yukon River, by far one of the largest producers of summer chum. And so if we look at it in that lens, it's— it would be fair in my opinion to say at any point in time, 50% of what we're catching here could potentially be going to the Yukon if the Yukon was historically well over 50% of that population. So it, it is some back of the math But nobody else is looking at it in that lens.

And I don't see any data that could suggest otherwise or point us in a different direction. And as an engineer, I would take a factor of safety and make a conservative estimate on my uncertainty to my impact to the Yukon River. Well, thank you for that. I mean, and I appreciate your perspective for sure. I just— I guess I haven't seen anything that points to that.

And I think A lot of what maybe you just said, there's a lot of speculation in there and hypothesis. So if you, you know, we can talk about it after, after, during a break or something. I'm just, I'm just having a hard time connecting the dots right now.

Thank you. I agree with you. I think there's a lot of speculation and hypothesis in a lot of data that's presented on what proportion of seawack is being taken in each of these fisheries. And, and where are those sea whet going? There is a tremendous amount of uncertainty, and so my hypothesis is as good as anyone's here.

Mr. Wood. Yeah, thank you. I just want to clarify a couple things too. When you referred to the tagging studies, that some of it was traditional knowledge, but what other tagging studies that were showing the route back to the Yukon?

The tagging studies in 1987 were on recapture and they were estimating recapture rates, but I don't think they had— they had made some errors in their estimates there.

Can you remind me of the question again? Well, I guess what I'm— so the error is in their estimates not actually where they were going? Like, I'm trying to understand what you're finding fault with. And if it were the— if it was the Eggers study, that— because I've heard you say on one hand Eggers is erroneous, and then on the other hand you're using it to say that they're going to a certain place. So I'm just trying to clarify that.

Okay, I got you now. So, so Eggers is erroneous. They don't know what proportion of Siwak is going to what tributary. That, that was made clear. Now in the Pollock fishery, and with this current data, we know we're catching Siwak chum in Area M. We know there's a major current going around Unimak, and then we see a bunch of Siwak and upper Yukon chum caught in the pollock fishery.

And they have higher rates of western Alaska chum along the shelf edge, the Bering Sea shelf edge by the Pribilofs. And, you know, traditional knowledge is really special. And before colonization and all of these impacts to the way we used to gather as Native people and share information. Our people on the lower Yukon had met and talked to people from St. George in the Pribilofs. And the people from St. George know that the fall, the Yukon chum, both summer and fall, run along the east side of St. George, and they're on their way back to the Yukon.

And they told us that. They said, "Don't touch those fish. The water turns big and black with Yukon Chum and they're heading home. And that also kind of describes relatively the abundance that must have been seen during the time that traditional knowledge was shared. And that abundance is largely missing from any data set that has ever been collected.

The abundance estimates on the Yukon are after, again, 60 years of commercial fishing history. So we have no baseline of abundance for any stream in this state, if you really, really think about it. So thanks for the question, I appreciate it. Just a quick follow-up. So you did use two different percentages.

At one point you said 50% Siwak chum, and another point prior to that you used 20% Siwak chum. Were you referring to like the pollock fishery and in the Bering, or were you referring to Siwak in like South Penn? Yes, great question. I'm going to submit my comments. I, I was still working on them.

What I'm saying is In the genetic testing that's been conducted in 2022 to 2024, roughly 24% of the area M chum are Siwak, just overall. And so if I was to say half of that, I would say 10% are Yukon, right, in that instance. And then in the Bering Sea, it's a little bit different. Um, their data shows that on average 20% of their chum is, is Siwak. And so we'd again say maybe 10% is coming from the Yukon.

So that, that's how that math would break down to— for me. Thank you, Mr. Carpenter. Thank you. Just one follow-up to that.

Um, I believe— and correct me if I'm wrong because I don't pay attention to the council probably as much as you do— but I believe that the genetic information that was presented at the council meeting specific to the middle to lower— or upper Yukon shows that it's about 5%. I'm just curious, you know, once again, I'm trying to figure out where you're getting 10% or 20% because there's a lot of information out there that these percentages are very different. So if you can explain that to me, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm listening. So Yes, in the pollock fishery, the genetics range each year. So some years when they're taking an incredible amount of chum, they might have 8.9%.

But if you start to break down that catch by time and area, you will see consistently in July and August there is a presence of Siwak chum in certain statistical areas. And so on average in those statistical areas, yes, they're catching 20% Western Alaska chum, but overall that number is masked when you're catching hundreds of thousands of chum. Okay, thanks, Eva. Appreciate you. Um, would you like to give your public testimony now?

Carl's got some stuff to add. I can't do that because you used the 10 minutes for the AC report. So I'm not switching out people for public testimony. I've had that asked of me already and I have to be consistent. So you have 3 minutes for your personal testimony if you would like to.

Apologies, I should have— we were trying to time it, but it was really hard to get all of that stuff into a You really should be letting me give a report. This is Carl Frank next to me. He's from Minto, part of the T'xu Clan, Painted Face, one of four clans that make up the community of Minto. His dad is Lloyd Charlie, a good friend of my own father's. His mother is Joyce Frank.

He tries to follow his father's footsteps and has an impressive resume in Alaska: trapper, fisher, hunter, dog musher, Vietnam veteran, and is widely known throughout Alaska for his hardworking subsistence lifestyle. My father is the grandson of Chief— or his father is the grandson of Chief Charlie of Tolovana, one of the original Tanana chiefs that assembled to fight for Alaska Native rights. His mother is a descendant of numerous chiefs starting back with Chief Justin Frank and his sons, Arthur and Richard Frank, who were all involved in Fish and Game and their agendas. Uncle Carlos Frank Mom's brother helped Alaskans secure the right to practice our religious beliefs to hunt and take moose out of season for ceremony potlatch. It's not looking good for our moose either.

Like a family blessing, he carries a heavy love for Alaska and what provides, prepared to speak up and try to help defend the resources that we all love and share. Mintow people lived along the Tana River before moving to its current location due to annual flooding. Salmon is a huge part of our diets. Now our subsistence rights not being met, which is a direct result of escapement goals not being met, and we seek time and area closures to help fish get to headwaters. During these meetings, we've heard Alaska Natives testifying, saying that shutting down fishing in these areas is pinning Natives against Natives, and it may result in dying cultures.

From one Alaska Native to another, this is not our intention. We want tribes to thrive. This dying off in cultures and practices is at hand now. Dying tribes already happening on the Yukon and its tributaries due to no fishing. Fishing and the work that goes into it to build strengths in the community.

Culture dies without these fish camps and ability to build relationships with other fishermen and women. I don't believe other Alaska tribes were solely commercial fishing tribes before. The influence of outside fishing practices that came to Alaska Alaska history reading shows that trade with other Alaska Natives in the interior and other coastal camps, we shared resources, taking just enough to make trade or barter. These routes they used from coastal regions to interior tribes is how these highways we now travel were created. They were created by Alaska Natives for trade opportunities.

But this may relate to a few Alaskans out there that feel the same way. I believe that the aboriginal tribes of Alaska have been strategically placed by the Creator to steward the regions they live in. All the different tribes all over the world were placed in their specific areas to protect their traditional lands. Alaska particularly has tribes acclimated to the different environments and may hold knowledge that only they see or feel through generations of passed-down knowledge. When writing this piece, couldn't help but question, where is Jesus, the Nahato, in these meetings?

I believe we need to make a clear passageway for fish with planned shutdowns to coordinate with other areas to give fish adequate time. Thank you. I recognize that was awkward, and I'm sorry we didn't get to hear from you directly, Carl, but I hope that we do in committee. So appreciate your understanding. Thank you.

I could not have said it better. Thank you. It's all my fault. Okay. Any questions?

Appreciate you both being here. Thank you so much.

Up next is Robert Charles Wright, Sr.

Okay.

Tom Hoblet.

No Tom.

Jared Danielson.

Is Jared with us this morning?

Edward Krause.

Libby Mussolino.

Good morning. Welcome.

Thank you, Madam Chair and the board, for the opportunity to testify today. My name is Libby Mussolino, and I'm going to highlight some key data on Siwak chum harvest numbers in the South South Alaska Peninsula. I want to take a moment to build off the data Eva Burke mentioned in her testimony. In June 2022, '23, and '24, Siwak catch rates in seine and gillnet fisheries remained high throughout June. In this time frame, Siwak continued to follow known migration patterns around the South Alaska Peninsula.

I will be referencing graphs that are in RC-136, which you do not have right now, but you will after the testimony. Apologies for that. They're similar to the graphs that are shown in RC129 on pages 7 and 8 depicting reporting groups and median harvest estimates for each strata in June. In the June 2022 seine fisheries, Siwak numbers peak in the June 2 and 3 stratas in Unimak and Southwest, and peak Siwak harvest is just over doubled in Unimak and Southwest compared to Siwak in Southeast and Southcentral. In June 2022 gillnet fisheries, Siwak is significantly higher than almost all other harvest types in each strata for Unimak and Southwest, and these numbers in Unimak and Southwest are also double and triple the amounts we see in Southeast and Southcentral for Siwak.

In the 23 seine fishery for June, Siwak is the highest again in the June 1 strata in Southeast and Southcentral, and the highest in almost all strata in Unimak and Southwest. Again, these Unimak Southwest numbers are double and triple the amounts we see in Southeast and Southcentral. In the June '23 gillnet fishery, seawack harvest surpasses all other groups in all but the first strata, and they again double and triple numbers in Unimak and Southwest compared to Southeast and Southcentral. This analysis shows that there are consistently high seawack counts in the second and third stratas in June, especially in the Unimak and Southwest districts, and double to triple the amounts of seawack are caught in Unimak and Southwest districts compared to southeast and south central. In 2024, the South Alaska Peninsula commercial salmon ex-vessel value for chum salmon for all gear types was around $1 million.

For the same area and year, the chum harvest numbers were 575,500. It can be estimated that approximately 27% of these chum harvest numbers were Siwak chum. One could conclude that Area M purse seining and gillnetting made $271,500 on siwak chum commercially, while subsistence fishers on the terminal spawning grounds of these fish were either fully or severely restricted from subsistence access. Looking at the 2024 year-end permit holdings, 43% in this area— 43% were local, 25% non-local, and 31% non-resident. The majority of these permits, 56%, were held by non-local individuals.

Expanding on this, the 10-year average of annual gross earnings from sane permits in Area M yields a 16% difference between nonresident and residential earnings, favoring nonresidents. The same average annual gross— I'm almost done. Is it okay if I offer— finish your sentence, please. Yeah. Okay.

Thank you. Um, these same average annual gross earnings for drift permits yields a 19% difference also in favor of non-residents. Am I able to offer a concluding sentence? I think we will probably call it right there, but I would ask you to RC your testimony so we have a chance to reference it directly. I will.

Thank you, Chair. Any questions? Ms. Erwin. Yeah, thank you, Libby. So you mentioned a value attached to the potential CWAC take, and you said you got that number from taking the, the value of the fishery and then breaking that down into the proportion of Siwak chum that was taken, and that's how you got that number, is that right?

Yes, through the chair, Miss Irwin, that is correct. Thanks, Libby. Yeah, thank you for your testimony today. Oh, do you have a question, Mr. Carpenter? Thank you, Madam Chair.

Um, when you broke that down, what percentage did you use to calculate that? Through the chair, Mr. Carpenter, um, I'm sorry, I do not have all the data on hand right now, but I'm happy to break it down. It was from the one of— I'm— this is my first meeting, so I'm keeping track of all the reports, but I'm happy to come with you afterwards with numbers for where I got those percentages. Yeah, sure, that'd be great. Thank you.

Thank you. Did I hear you in your testimony use the 25% 20%? I used 27% can be assumed to be CWAC, Chairwoman. Thank you. I knew it was in that ballpark.

Thank you. Thank you for your testimony. Appreciate you being here today.

And the last person for second calls on my list is Tom Hosseth. Is he here today?

Tom? All right. That concludes public testimony. Well done, everybody. What I would like to do is take a little bit of a break, probably about a 15-20 minute break, and we will get set up for Committee of the Whole.

And then we will begin with Committee of the Whole Group 1 in about 20 minutes. Thanks.

Hi folks, I just wanted to let you know we're just waiting for an RC for this first committee and then we'll get going.

Alright, welcome back. Thanks for the patience. Time is 10:41. We're going to go ahead and get into Committee of the Whole work at this time. Let's talk a little bit about the committee process just to remind folks.

So for our Committee of the Whole work, we use parliamentary procedures of the New England town meeting style. Committee meetings are intended to provide opportunities for additional information gathering and at times for dispute resolution. Hopefully, ideally, committees are not a forum for debate, nor are they a platform for repeating information that has already been received through public testimony. And public testimony includes written public testimony as well, although you can highlight a couple of things here and there if you think you need to draw the board's attention to them. During board committee meetings, advisory committee representatives may express both the official positions of their committee as well as their personal views.

They must, however, identify which of those two positions they're stating. So we recognize that those AC representatives are knowledgeable fisheries leader— leaders and that they need to be able to function freely during the committee meetings. People wear a lot of hats. Just make sure you're identifying clearly which hat you're wearing. During the committee meeting, the public will come forward and use the microphone near the front of the table.

It's over here. If you intend to speak, please move towards the front of the room. You can form a line behind the speaker at the podium in order to minimize the waiting time between comments. So again, if you'd like to speak, please move yourself forward so that we don't have to wait for you to do the bridal walk up the aisle and all the things. When you speak, Please start by stating your name for the record, even if you've already done so earlier.

So every time you come to the microphone, please state your name. Please don't refer to anyone by name or in a derogatory manner. We're looking for new information only. Please don't repeat what you've already said in public testimony. If people start repeating the same points, the committee chair will move on to the next proposal.

And a substitute language is being developed, or if you feel it should be developed, please speak to what you think the substitute what the substitute language says or what you think it should say. Okay, with that, I will go ahead and hand the gavel over to Member Erwin to run Committee of the Whole Group 1, which is Chignik Area Salmon. There are 5 proposals in this group. Miss Erwin. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you for setting the stage. I'm not going to repeat anything, just ask folks that you pay attention to the time. There's no time timer specifically to this committee process, but if you see my mic turn red, that means that I'm going to ask you to start wrapping it up. Please be aware that there's lots of people who want to speak and get through this. And with that, we'll go ahead and get started.

I'll ask staff to present Proposal 108. Yeah, for the record, Carlton Burnside, Proposal 108, 5AAC 15.357, Chignik Area Salmon Management. Thank you. Is there anyone who wishes to speak to Proposal 108?

Okay, if not, we'll move on to Proposal 110. Oh, just before you do that, I just wanted to let you know I forgot to mention that for this group, we're also going to be considering the Stock of Concern Action Plan for, I think, sockeye, and we're going to take that up at the end of— right after Proposal 109 at the end of this group. So we'll We'll take that up then. Mr. Bowers. Thanks, Madam Chair.

For King and Sakai. King and Sakai. Thank you. Thanks. OK, Miss, Miss Irwin.

Proposal 110. Thank you, Madam Chair. Staff comment. Oh, staff present.

Proposal 110, 5AAC15.332, same specifications and operations. Thank you. Does anyone wish to speak to Proposal 110? Please come to the microphone and state your name for the record.

Axel Copen.

Yeah. On proposal, I didn't— I thought they usually went through and read stuff on the proposal, so I was going to comment on 108. But so on Proposal 110, the idea is to avoid Chinook as best as possible. And everybody who's saying knows that kings are deeper and you use a shallower net, you catch fewer of them. And so in Chignik, since we're a stock of concern, the idea is to shallow up the seines to hopefully put less pressure on Chinook.

Thank you, Axel. Does the board have any questions? Mr. Wood. Yeah, thank you, Axel. Will you explain the difference in depth between seining in the lagoon versus outside of the lagoon and how that net depth would matter?

Well, in the lagoon, you generally have shallower nets. The lagoon's shallow. On the outside, we're allowed up to 375 meshes in depth. So the seines are also longer on the outside. They're 225 fathoms long.

In Chignik Lagoon, they're limited to 125 fathoms in length. And but, but guys don't— guys use all different depths in the lagoon and on the outside as well. So, you know, trying to avoid Chinook on the outside, you need a shallower net.

So as a follow-up, in the lagoon, even though they're shallower nets, are they, are they still basically— are they shallow enough to avoid Chinook? Anook in the lagoon as well? You know, the idea being that if you're shallowing them up out on the peninsulas as well outside the lagoon, that they have room to dive, I take, or you just wouldn't be scooping them from the water column? Yeah, generally. Now, when they get to the lagoon, the way they travel— this is more of Proposal 112, which is why Proposal 112 is going to be before you guys too.

They travel up the lagoon in the middle of the channel in the deeper water in the channel. Channel. And the sockeye are on the edges in the shallower— on the sandbars and things like that in the shallower areas. So the Chinook kind of have a natural path up through the lagoon by going up the center of the channel in the deeper water down deep. And yeah, the sockeye are hard to catch in the middle of the channel because they'll go under your net.

Actually, when you're fishing on the sandbars, if you even get sucked off the sandbar from the tide, you can lose your fish, your sockeye that are in the seine, because when the bottom drops like that, those things will go underneath too. So you try to get pursed up before you get off those sandbars and things like that. And the kings are out in the middle. Okay. Thank you, Mr.

Carpenter. Yeah, thanks. Thanks, Axel. Just generally speaking, can you kind of describe the lagoon and how deep it is low water, high water, just in the deeper parts like you're talking about out in the middle? Yeah, I mean, it's fairly deep in the channel as far as, you know, you can run a big old deep draft tender up inside there.

Guys don't like to do it, but they do it. But on the edges and up inside the lagoon in the grass flats, it's— you better have a shallow draft boat. As far as the depth of the channel goes, I don't know the exact depth, fathoms-wise. I, I don't have to know that because I know the lagoon, right? So I'm not looking at my plotter, but the channel is a lot deeper than the edges of the lagoon and everything like that.

Okay. Significantly. And generally speaking, you know, I know that you could fish 375 fathoms currently, but what generally in depth, mesh depth are the seines that people fish in the lagoon? I mean, are they half of that generally, or— Again, it depends on what area of the lagoon they like to fish. You're talking 250.

Okay. Some guys have shallower than that. The guys that fish up inside the lagoon have very shallow seines. Some guys don't even use lead lines. They have Samson line that just gets full of water and sand, and that's it.

Some guys just have chunks of chain to hold down parts of it so it doesn't float up because there's a lot of snags, a lot of rock piles, and you don't want to be catching those. So you're— it's, it's, it's, it's kind of varied, but they're definitely, you know, nobody's up there with a 375-mesh deep seine in the lagoon. Yeah, I wouldn't think so. All right. Thank you.

Any other questions for Mr. Coppen? Thank you, Axel. Does anybody else wish to speak to Proposal 110? Okay. Proposal 111, please.

Proposal 111, 58AC15.357, Chugnack Area Assumption Management Plan. Thank you. And before I ask if anybody wishes to speak, I would like to reference there is RC144 has been submitted as substitute language if anyone wishes to speak to that. Does anybody wish to speak to Proposal 111?

Come on up, Axel.

Axel Copen. So Proposal 111 is the one that splits Metrophania into eastern and western sections for two purposes was the idea behind it. The east side is where you have a problem with Chinook, traveling Chinook in July. And while the department can react and close it, it's the same type of problem you have when in the June fishery in Area M, where by the time the effects are seen, it's too late. So in 2024, we had a problem.

We were all We knew we were a stock of concern for Chinook. Guys were supposed to avoid catching king salmon, and all of us but 2 of us did. And those 2 guys decided, "Oh man, fishing's too good here," and they caught 10,000 kings in 2 days. By the time the fish tickets finally got done right and processed right and sent to Fish and Game, it was too late.

So Fish and Game reacted after the fact and closed the area for a couple days to let the kings clear out of the area. But it was— the damage had been done. So a couple guys couldn't control themselves. That's something else. Two seiners can kill a lot of fish.

One seiner can kill a lot of fish. You'll hear guys talk like, oh, you can kill a lot of fish in a short period of time with a big ol' seine and a big ol' boat. Um, but so since the Scout's Honor thing isn't going to work, let's create two stat areas. The other one can be closed when there's kings in the area. The other area that's hard focusing on sockeye bound for Chignik, let the guys work.

That's the idea. And the other idea behind it is, is it gives you two stat areas. Right? All these genetic studies that are being done and all these other things. You can go around an island, the Shumagin Islands, you can go to different sides and different places.

Same thing with Metrophania. These— all these islands, Kodiak Island, you can go around these islands and you can be in the same stat area in some of these places and catch fish going two different directions. So if you've got stat areas drawn up where you have to say which stat area in when you go to deliver The department's going to get more information on the stocks that are being caught in each one of those stat areas. It's better, allows for more precise management, a lot better records, information on where these fish are being harvested. So that's the idea behind this proposal.

Board questions. Mr. Carpenter. Yeah, thanks, Axel. Thanks for your perspective on that. I mean, while you're up there, I'll just ask you about the substitute language.

And to your point that you're right, a couple of people can cause a problem for a whole bunch of people.

But if you take the— like you said, the east side can be a problem area sometimes. If that entire area is open for a commercial fishery, isn't it also after the fact irregardless of where the problem area is, because sometimes it might be not on the east side, you know, those fish are already dead. And so I guess I'm trying to figure out how do we keep that from happening? And that, that's kind of why I introduced this. But I'd like your perspective on this because, you know, this is just a talking point at this time.

So if you would. Sure. Well, I'd like to refer you to RC 81.

I mean, it would help if there was accurate fish tickets being, being done out there. I mean, last I looked, the statute requires you to separate fish and by species and by weight every fish you catch. So kind of hard for Fish and Game to keep up if fish tickets aren't being reported properly and guys aren't getting fish. I mean, You got fishermen out there that are getting phony fish tickets and don't get a legitimate fish ticket for 4 or 5 days at a time. I don't know how long it takes for Fish and Game to get them, but I mean, you need better— somebody's got to make the processors do a proper fish ticket on the grounds.

I mean, I thought that was the rules. So I mean, fishermen can do what they can do, but I mean, somebody else got to step up and enforce these rules too. I, you know, And if there is two stat areas, the department can be proactive. And again, Proposal 112 limits the metrophania area to 48 hours followed by 72-hour closures to naturally reduce those times in July anyway, to kind of preclude that problem happening. And the department can be proactive when they've got this area, shut this side down.

They, they have that, but they got to get the information in a timely manner too. It's not just quick follow-up. No, I appreciate that. And but I'm trying to figure out is if you catch the fish and then they get the information, isn't that too late? Well, yeah, if they don't get it.

I mean, if you get it that day, that night, the next morning, you can shut it down. But again, if you're limiting them to 48 hours, It should help. Less time instead of 7 days a week, maybe you'll miss the times when they're really there. Now if the department, if this board decides that you just want it closed, that's up to the board.

I don't think a lot of Kings should be getting caught anywhere. I mean, I feel the same way. I don't care where it is. If it's in Chignik, Metrophania Island's a problem, close it down. You don't want to catch kings, close it.

But I would expect that same feeling of not wanting Chinook to be harvested to be applied to other areas too, not just Chignik. You know, we're doing what we can to protect our Chinook stocks. You've got a whole suite of proposals here. These are all based on protecting our Chinook stocks. So I just like to see that same standard applied to everybody else.

No, I think that's a fair statement. I think that, you know, when you look at, you know, stock of concern in Chignik, stock of concern on the Kenai, stock of concern, you know, there's problem areas on Kodiak Island. There's— and so I'm looking at this in a big picture, and I think that's a lot about what this meeting is about. But specifically to the RC-81 that you referenced, and it's kind of like a basically a text message. Yeah.

Was where, where was that conversation? Was that about Chignik or the CMA, or was it some other area in the state? I'm trying to figure that out. It was in Chignik, to the best of my knowledge. Okay.

I mean, I know the guys, but, you know, the names are blacked out. I mean, they're, they're afraid of retribution from the processors. So. All right. Thank you.

Yeah. And if I could Just one last thing there with the Chinook.

The— I try to get this across to people I talk to. Sometimes we're going to have to give up fishing time in order to get fishing time, if you know what I mean. We're going to have to make sacrifices now to be able to fish later. If we don't do something about this, it's just going to get worse, right? We keep knocking down these kings.

Ignoring them, it's going to get worse. It's not going to get better. So take our medicine, do what we can. Hopefully things get better. Thank you.

Mr. Wood. Yeah, thank you, Axel. So knowing that there's a stock of concern on Kings in Chignik and the high end is 2,700, in 2005 there was 2,962 harvest harvested in 12th, and in 2024, 12,172 harvested. Is that just around that Mitrofina Island, or is that in the whole, uh, stat area? Do you know where the majority of these fish are being harvested?

Like, well, the majority used to be in the lagoon, um, you know, when we had a stronger king run. Most years, the majority would be the lagoon, but it depends on the year. It depends on the abundance of the local— those Chinook out of Metrophania Island aren't— they're not local. You know, some of them might be. It's a small percentage, just like the Chinook study done down in Area M. You see, most of them are going somewhere.

Well, they're all going somewhere else down there. They don't have a Chinook run, but very few of them are going to Chignik. They're going to, you know, I think the predominant one was outside of Alaska. But it varies from year to year based on fleet effort and strength of local runs and things like that. So it— but predominantly that place is a problem spot.

Yes. Thank you. Any other board questions? Okay. Thank you very much, Axel.

Come on up, Virgil.

Virgil Imphenauer. When our kings really got depressed and we couldn't fish for kings anymore, which was 2008 when it was the last time we fished for kings. We fished 12 hours in the Upper Yukon and I think 6 in the Lower Yukon. I don't know what— know exactly what there. But anyway, what we did is, and this is what really surprises me, 7 days to turn in a damn fish ticket.

I cannot believe that. We were required to make a phone call at the end of each opening and given 12 hours to get the fish tickets over to Fish and Game.

And so, and what we ended up having to do is fish with either a manned fish wheel, fish-friendly fish wheel with padded baskets and everything, and no wire in it, use seine mesh for the baskets, and then someone standing there so that if a king got in the basket, you had a kid's plastic sled, you slid it over, and the king salmon went back into the river.

And then if you accidentally killed a king, you were supposed to put that on the record on the fish ticket. And, and the fish ticket thing, just— I've been hauled into court over an employee that didn't— forgot to have a fisherman sign a fish ticket, and I had to physically go to court over that. I cannot understand that the processors down there don't have to follow the law. It is the law. But I think— but the reason why they're so strict in the Yukon, or used to be so strict, because we haven't fished in 6 years for anything, is that we have escapement goals that have to be met.

And if you have escapement goals that need to be met, then the manager needs to know exactly what's getting caught all the time. And so anyway, that's my two bits worth on this subject. I just cannot believe that they don't have to follow the law and make out the fish ticket by number of fish, by species, by weight at the time of sale, because that is what the lawyers. Thank you. Thank you, Virgil.

Board questions? I don't see any. Thank you, Virgil. Is there anyone else who wishes to speak to Proposal 111? Come on up and please state your name for the record.

Hey, Fritz, get your mic on. There you go. Fritz Johnson. Thank you, Madam Chairman. Um, as terminal stocks in this region, I think it's really important that the board adopt these proposals which are specifically to protect kings in the Chignik Management Area.

I've already said my words in the past about the benefits of terminal stocks. This is a perfect example. These fish in Chignik are depleted, and I think these proposals, 120— excuse me, 110, 111, and 112, all deserve your support. Thank you. Thank you, Fritz.

Any board questions? Thank you very much, sir. All right, last call for Proposal 111. Does anyone wish to speak to Proposal 111?

Okay, we'll move on. Proposal 112, please.

Proposal 112, 5AAC15.357, Chugnuk Area Assignment Management Plan.

Come on up, Axel.

Axel Copin, Chignik AC. The Chignik AC submitted this proposal.

There was a lot of conversation among the fleet, among the lagoon fishermen who have fished there for the majority of their lives. Some of these guys got 50 years up there, 60 years. They got together, decided with their knowledge of where these kings hang out, that what would be the best place to close off to protect those kings when they get into the lagoon. And this all stemmed from 2024 when the commissioner on the eve of our fishery said, okay, only 2 days a week in the lagoon, kind of caught everybody off guard. But It makes sense to put this in regulation.

We just think that it's better if it's already there, mechanisms that's there. If your kings are struggling, you can— you have it in regulation to start taking actions. Like we said, like I said yesterday in my testimony, this is a true form of adaptive management. It's controlled by the department, but there's adaptive measures in there to in real time to try to get more kings up through the fishery, and it leaves flexibility.

You need to— we had an excess surplus of sockeye going up through the weir the last 2 years because guys aren't able to fish in the lagoon where most of the reds get caught. And so this idea is to see— it may not work— to see if we can fish these surplus sockeye and still get these kings to get up there? Because we've already proven if we don't fish at all, they, they still might not make their escapement. 2018, 2020, 2021, We didn't make our escapement. We didn't fish in the lagoon or Central District.

Well, we didn't fish anywhere. So can we adapt the way we manage the lagoon and fish in the lagoon in order to harvest these excess, these surplus sockeye and still get our Chinook escapement. And this— the department will be there to make sure that things are, you know, have escapement goals for the kings throughout the, you know, July. And if they're not being met, do what you have to do. Take the next step, take the third step, whatever it is to, to protect those kings more.

And that's the whole idea behind it. It's been tough on our guys having to sit on the beach for, you know, not everybody has a big net and a big boat in Chignik. It's not, you know, we're dependent on just those fish. So thank you, Axel. Any board questions?

I don't see any. Thank you very much. Please come to the mic and state your name for the record.

Steve Reifenstahl. We are opposed to this proposal and the discussion of the last several proposals. We would prefer that there be non-retention of Kings. It was mentioned in some of the information on the last couple speakers that that these outside fisheries are harvesting Chinook that are going other locations, Southeast Alaska, Cook Inlet perhaps. And if you truly, truly want to save more kings, and there's been so many statements about the state of kings in Alaska, non-retention is going to save more kings than a 1,000-cap cap or a 5,000-cap on Chinook, even at 60 or 70% survival, you're saving a lot of kings through non-retention.

Thank you. Thank you, Steve. Ms. Carlson-Vandort. So there has been non-retention for the last few years in the CMA, particularly as you get closer and closer to the river.

But you— what do you think the mortality of an ocean-caught king and a seine is? Not near— not near the river where they've hardened up a little bit.

Well, my guidance is with studies such as Candy. There's a more recent study in 2025 that that introduced the concept of best management practices. So I would say there's 5 or so main studies on survival, non-retention, or release of kings. So my feeling is you have a hard data point that Pacific Salmon Treaty uses. So that would be one example that would Several people here will know exactly what that figure is.

My feeling is that from the studies it's ranged from 60% to 90, 95%. I don't believe it typically would be 95%. So you're asking my opinion. I would say it's between 60 and 70% survival of 28-inch and larger Chinook. Hmm, that's an interesting number.

I haven't heard those numbers that high before. So we went through this discussion in the Nushagak and I was of the opinion, I shared your opinion for a really long time. And I'm, you know, been thinking a lot about it over the last couple of years. And the problem with that is that if we go non-retention, you don't really have any idea what the impact is. You don't know what's being caught.

You don't know what's being, you know, released. Whether or not they actually are survivable or not. There's a lot of discretion in there, and I mean, at this point where we're really trying to get hard numbers on what the impacts of these fisheries are on kings, what's being caught and when and where, non-retention, I think it could— I'm struggling with it because you just lose all that information. I appreciate your thoughts on that. May I respond?

[Speaker:CHIEF_HARVEY] Well, first of all, you have 28-inch— less than 28-inch fish that will be retained. So there's not zero information. There's a fair amount of information there. So that would be part of it. I guess the other thing is we are sacrificing Chinook for information.

We're saying the information is more important than getting more fish back to the terminal area. I think that the most important thing is that we know what numbers of Chinook are getting back to the systems, and we do get information there. So I think that there could be a cause and effect, and whether we could tease that out in the data after you introduce, say, non-retention statewide. So I think that would be the hypothesis and try to test that. Follow-up?

Thanks, appreciate it. So I don't— I appreciate where you are coming from. When you came up here, you said you were opposed to the entire suite of proposals and there is not the entire suite of proposals dealing with non-retention. So what is the basis for that statement?

It was being discussed on 111, but I came up here now just because decide to speak at the 112th. So I'm talking about 112 and 111. Okay, thank you. Appreciate that. Mr. Chamberlain, then Mr. Wood.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Um, Steve, I, I want to thank you for, for this, uh, and, and for— and just for the public's awareness, you sent an email with several other attachments, uh, on, on studies, and I do want to thank you for being open and and direct on this. It's very refreshing. So one of the things I wanted to point out was the Candy article or study that showed it measured time ranges from 2 hours to 36 or 38 hours. I can't remember.

And especially if we're looking at other areas, you've got a significant migration time. Do you think 2 hours or 36 hours is an appropriate time time measure to look at survival rates of Chinook salmon in these migration corridors throughout Area M?

I don't think it's fully adequate, but I think it's an indication of how well the Chinook respond after that period of time, 36 hours. But we look at more of a very limited study that was done last year with only 3 Chinook. And you can see where those fish went and how long they survived. And all 3 of them, remarkably enough, left the seine net, went to the ocean, and traveled in some— in one case, you know, hundreds of miles. So that's anecdotal.

I— you know, it's not defensible with all the metrics. But it is an indication. We believe that we should conduct a much broader study in coming years because of the promise of what we learned so that we could really get better information. And I do think that even if we're saving 30%, I mean, I guess you're trying to draw a threshold that makes it worthwhile. In my opinion, if the threshold was down to 30%, that's what you're saving.

And you look at the 4,000 or 5,000 eggs per spawner, that's meaningful.

Okay, and I— so I want to address several points on this. One of the documents you forwarded me was the Pacific Salmon Treaty. Some of the findings on there, and I'll refer to Section Section 4.1, and I'll RC this for the public's awareness. On that one, it says, and I'll give the page number, 32, the average immediate mortality was 49% for all sizes combined over 4 years in which data was available. And on top of that, that's— so when they hit the deck and they're out, 49% are dead.

And then for the release, they assumed that 50% would die within in a specified time period. And there's another study that I'd have to— I'll RC all of these documents that showed mortality increased. Mortality for Chinook salmon released from purse seines tended to increase at days— on days 3 to 5, which is kind of indicative and it kind of lends light to what we're seeing in the tag studies, tagging studies. They tend to get but the ones we've been looking at or that have been discussed have been the fish have been getting eaten by salmon sharks, which tends to mean, you know, they're not quite fit to make it to grounds. If you look at a lame animal on land, you know, the lions and the predators tend to go after the lame animals, and that seems to be what's happening in here.

There's another study, Hinch et al., 2021 where it said a recent meta-analysis revealed mortality was 2 to 8-fold greater for females than males when they encountered environmentally challenging conditions, which I think would be being put on a deck of a purse seine. So I really want to make sure that when we say that yes, these fish are surviving for 24 to 48 hours, I want to make sure that what we're not doing is we're not releasing a dead fish into the waters, and especially when we're looking and we're applying this, you know, Chignik Lagoon is a relatively short travel distance compared to what— oh, and so how are, how are we not running the risk that we're releasing fish that are not going to make it to the spawning grounds on this based on the data that's available on this? I want to make sure we're not doing this. And how can we assure based on on candy, which is over a relatively short amount of time, how are we not just releasing dead fish into the water?

I don't, I don't believe any of the studies say that it's zero, in other words, or that it's 100% mortality. So I know there's a range, and I addressed that at the beginning. That's why I sent 5 different studies to you. There is a range, but you're still saving— the point is you're saving zero if you kill them all. You bring them on the boat, put them in the hold, you're killing all of them.

And there is a way to study that further, which I wholeheartedly am supportive of doing this in Area M to find out and develop better— there's— I mentioned the best practices. You're talking about some of the worst-case scenarios. We can make a better case and we can learn from experimentation. And I think there is value in saving as many kings as we possibly can. And right now, use your numbers and it's 20% or something, but I believe it's better than that.

I believe that we can improve upon that. And I believe it's worth taking that step because it's saving more fish than killing them all.

Thank you, Mr. Wood. And then Miss Carlson-Vandort. Yeah, thank you. So I just— I was reading Survival of Spring Chinook Salmon Captured and Released in the Selective Commercial Fisheries Using Gillnets and Tangle Nets. It was a 2004 study.

By Van Hagen, Ashbrook, and Dixon, and it was down in the Columbia River. And they were quoting some pretty good survival rates down there with these netted and released kings. So with— is there a difference between netting and releasing a king that's hardened up, perhaps going into the river system, or versus out in the ocean as they're traveling through? Sure, the scales are set in They are more delicate out on the ocean. Most salmon are.

In the river, they become hardened. Their focus, of course, is spawning. You can have a seal bite them and they'll still struggle on to the spawning grounds. I think that it's hard to compare the tangle nets or gill nets to what happens times on the same boat where they can be scooped off the deck. They've got cushion of other fish because there's obviously many more sockeye and chum associated with them and only a king or two, and you can scoop them over the rail pretty easily.

Thank you, Ms. Carlson-Vandwerp. Thank you. So I didn't get the email with the— all the studies that you're referencing. So I think if we're talking about them in this public forum, that we should probably RC those if we're referencing them. My question to you, Steve, is practice on the fishing grounds.

And it's— I'm not familiar with the studies. I haven't read them, like I just said. So I don't know the methodology or, you know, how they were being conducted. But my question is about typically these seiners when they're fishing capes and they're fishing outside, and I'm less interested in sort of the lagoon scenario. But there's— they're either alone but often, more often in small groups.

And there's usually sort of a set site off of a pinnacle or a point or something like that where they know those fish are moving by. And there's a sort of a turn that happens, like you tow for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, and then you, you know, close up and the guy sets behind you. In a similar spot or very close to that spot and will tow. And then, you know, you kind of go through that pattern. So if, you know, you're releasing a king that's live, I think it's reasonable to assume that that king could easily float in, especially if it's exhausted, float into the net right behind it, and then it goes through that exercise again.

And what would be, in your opinion, if you have one, the cumulative impacts of a king being caught and released in a seine net, um, just for just the nature of how those guys work those, work those fishing spots. Well, that—. And I bring that up just because that came up in Kodiak, and, um, and, and so I just— you're sort of tackling my thought. Well, it's a hypothetical, so it's possible. I would say that it's possible the King could get caught again.

There's quite a bit of time between one set, the close-up, and then the next one where they're towing behind the boat that's closing up. So the Chinook would tend to go probably deeper water, perhaps below the net. I mean, speculating what would happen is difficult, as you know. And again, I think let's do it. Let's do a study.

Let's work on this. But I'm sorry to repeat the same thing, but it still saves fish. There are scenarios where the fish could get caught again, or it could be eaten by salmon shark. But there are also a lot of fish that will get back to the spawning grounds. And we saw that on this very small 3 Chinook study that was done last year just because we had some extra tags.

So I think that it, it shows some promise. It shows what could happen on the upside, not just what can happen on the downside. Okay, thank you. Appreciate it. Any other board questions?

Okay, thank you, Steve.

Thank you. Please come forward and state your name for the record. I'm Chair Ernie Weiss. Probably a small point, but in my reading of the proposal 112, it looks like these conservation measures come under Commissioner Murr's emergency order authority. And there's a similar proposal for the South Penn post-June proposal 141 that goes straight into regular regulation.

And I'm— my point is, for one, it should be— for both, it should be either emergency order or go straight into regulation. That's all I have. Thank you, Ernie. Any questions? Thank you very much for your time.

Axel Copen.

I want to talk about non-retention of kings as somebody who's out there actually fishing and catching them.

When you've got the time to baby them, you can get 3 of them and tag them and let them go real nicely and not handle them too much. Nobody's fishing behind you, and they probably do great. But when you're out fishing, you know, if you're not getting very many fish, you can probably take pretty— you can take pretty good care of them. My son, Testified yesterday, man, he's, he's on it. You see a Chinook, man, he's, he's there to get them overboard.

If the trick is to never pull them on board in the first place, you stop your gear, you roll them over the corks. That, that's the best way. Then they swim away. But when you're catching 8,000-pound sets of mixed fish, 5,000 pounds, 4,000, 3,000 pounds. What are you going to do with those fish?

How are you going to go through those fish and pick those kings out of there before they die? Kings die quick too. The big ones, they don't do well when they're out of the water for any amount of time. It is what it is. I mean, I've seen this my whole life.

And this idea that you can let them go and they're not going to get caught again. The next boat's right behind you. I've thrown more kings overboard in the last couple of years because of non-retention that just swam into the net the guy who's almost around me, it feels kind of stupid. That fish is going to get caught again. Well, what did, what did I accomplish by letting that fish go overboard?

There's actually a study that once they're caught, they stay near the surface and are more likely to be caught again.

So what does that tell you? You're just passing them on to the next guy. I struggle with this idea of I mean, non-retention is just sanctioned chinook chucking. Let's call it what it is. You know, don't ask, don't tell, right?

Oh, we didn't catch that many kings. Yeah, you did. I mean, they're being caught. So I think it's— I struggle with the non-retention over mandatory retention because as a fisherman, you're trained to keep what you catch, right? I mean, most areas you keep them.

You throw them overboard and they die anyway. What a waste. They're a waste. And you're not getting the true numbers of what's going on when you have non-retirement. You have no idea.

I mean, there's tenders running around with freezers full of king salmon. They got smokers on their stern. They're smoking kings while we're fishing. Those aren't reported.

So there's a, there's a big issue with underreporting of king salmon all over the state. I've seen it, and I think the only way you're going to get around that is mandatory retention.

My two cents on it. Thanks. Thanks, Axel. I think we have a question from Mr. Svenson.

Axel, what if you guys that are seining, what if you increase the distance between the next seine?

Well, that's impossible depending on where you're fishing. You might only have a little area where there's snags behind you and snags in front of you, and you've got enough room to set your net. And you move, you put toe forward just to the snag that's in front of you, and you close up, and the other guy sets right behind you. Yeah, but can't, can't you get the same area? I mean, channel.

So he starts back further, he goes— why can't he? Because there's snags back there. Well, I'm not saying there weren't snags the first guy that laid his— yes, you, we literally will set our nets in an area that We have enough room from where I'm standing to that wall. Okay. If I tow past that wall, my seine gets destroyed.

Okay, so— If I go back behind that, my seine gets destroyed. I have that much area. You tow up, you close, you get out of the way, you purse up quickly so you go over the snags. The next guy comes in behind you and does the same thing. But he could be further behind before he started his seine.

He can start his seine in the same I'm gonna argue. No, no, no, there's a snag there. He can't. No, but you didn't get that snag because I didn't set that far back. I'm not saying set far back.

I'm saying him set the same. Never mind. I don't understand. I don't follow you. Yeah, I guess you know if we have a question for Mr.

Copan. Okay, thank you. I have one question for you, Axel. When you went in the CMA, whenever you're fishing and you catch a king and during non-retention, are you required required to report it or, or indicate it in any way to the department? No.

Okay, thank you.

Next individual, please state your name for the record. Hi, I'm Daniel Schindler. I'm on the faculty at University of Washington. I've worked on fisheries in Alaska for about 30 years, and I just wanted to comment on this non-retention mortality issue. I think we'd all like to have a single number that we can all trust and believe and the 5 papers that were mentioned earlier.

There's been some nice work on Coho, on Chinook, and on Chum Salmon, and I can assure you there's no single number we should believe. There are some trends that are worth mentioning in the context of this discussion, the first of which is that much of the mortality associated with catching and then releasing these fish is delayed mortality. So the Candy paper that's been mentioned a few times looked at short-term mortality. I think it was up to about 32 hours. If you look at the studies that have looked at mortality after handling fish, it's often days later.

A lot of that mortality is associated with loss of scales.

In terms of best practices, there's a few issues that are worth mentioning. Most of these 5 papers have looked at relatively small catches. We're talking about a purse seine that is going to catch a couple hundred fish. They take a few fish out of that, tag them and release them, and then track them for their mortality rates. Of course, in a full-on commercial fishery, a seine catch is catching hundreds if not thousands of fish, crowding turns out to be an important issue that affects this delayed mortality.

There's more probability of loss of scales, loss of slime, fish become vulnerable to infections, etc. The other issue is the time on deck. Big catches are gonna take longer to sort through these fish to release them, and time on deck turns out to be a predictor of post-release mortality as well. In addition to direct physiological-related mortality, it's also been shown from tagging studies following release from purse seines is that the behavior of the fish changes. They become more vulnerable to predators like salmon sharks and marine mammals.

We heard this yesterday about the 3 tagged Chinook that were released. One of them died by a salmon shark. Not surprising. In fact, there's been a lot of work on the Alaska Peninsula that has put radio tags or satellite tags on fish. And a lot of them die from predators.

And that's because their behavior changes. They actually sit higher in the water column than they would otherwise. And that makes them more vulnerable to both predators and to being caught by another seine that follows up behind them as we just heard. So the point is, just to wrap it up, is that There's no single number. A lot of the mortality is delayed, and in some cases the mortality can be substantial.

Thank you, Mr. Schindler. Any questions? I have one question. Um, do we know why they swim closer to the top of the water column after they've been caught? I don't think there's a good explanation for it.

We do know from sampling of the blood that there's a whole bunch of stress responses shows up in their lactate and their cortisol, things like that. And that translates into changes in behaviors. I can't tell you why they behave the way they do. Okay, thank you. Mr. Chamberlain.

Thank you, Dr. Schindler. One other thing that came to me is when you confine thousands of fish within an area, as a person is closed, what happens to the oxygen levels in the water that they're contained in? You know, when the net's in the, in the water, I'd, I'd guess the oxygen probably doesn't change very much. But as those fish get crowded, there's, there's stress associated with that. That also has been shown by direct sampling of the blood and looking for stress indicators in the blood chemistry.

Thank you, Dr. Schindler. Thank you very much.

Miss Levy.

Madam Chair, members of the board, for the record, my name is Charlotte Levy. Um, I just wanted to take a quick moment to come up here and just kind of, um, maybe speak a little bit of some of the discussion that came before me regarding the most recent tagging study that we did in 2025. Um, and just to kind of clarify a few things, um, I'm not really here to sort of advocate for or against, I just wanted to put it out there since I can't seem to find the time to submit my RC, and I'm really reluctant to speak to a lot of this before I actually get to give you guys an RC, but I guess that's the first thing I'm doing after this. So there was mention of the 3 Chinook salmon that we tagged last summer. So I just wanted to clarify that we designed this study, and it was just a pilot, and we only got to do 3 opportunistically.

It was really focused on chum. But we designed this study to emulate a real fishing scenario. Okay, so when I talked to— I talked to my co-lead from the department on this, and I talked to the fishermen, I talked to the Andy Seitz lab at UAF, who is the one who does most of the salmon tagging studies here in Alaska, and we kind of came together and said, How can we design a study that really looks at what an actual fishing non-retention program would look like? I like to call it optimized retention. And so we, we designed the study across 3 fishing days where we asked the guys to fish exactly how they would.

We're gonna step off to the side and the plan is we're gonna have you guys set, purse, everything's gonna be normal. You're gonna ignore us, you're gonna sort your fish, and the only The only thing that we're gonna do differently is that we're going to be brought fish as they're being sorted and kind of looking at air exposure on an x-axis. So we take all these things into consideration. We mark when they start the set, when they start the purse, because we know that as the purse comes together and the fish are starting to become aggregated closer and closer because of oxygenation issues, we wanna know are there differences? Where are maybe some pinch points in terms of an optimized program that we can be focusing on?

Um, and then we also, of course, we have time on deck, we measure air exposure and release back into the water. Okay, um, the only thing that I asked the crew to do differently is I said you need to carry them like a football. And I would just note that there are sort of these optimized non-retention programs in other fisheries that are maybe non- salmon, where it is not unreasonable to ask a fisherman, hey, you don't need to do all this other crazy stuff, but don't pick them up by the gills, don't pick them up by the eyes or the tail. And that is something that fishermen are capable of doing. I also have a lot of photos that I've taken of the sets themselves so that you can see, hey, what is the length at which we can really identify these fish and pull them out, and how long does that take for the sort.

And let me tell you, I know this is probably a hard thing for you guys to fathom, for those of you who aren't commercial fishermen or haven't seen, but these— this is their job. These guys are pros and they sort fast. And let me tell you how fast. They sorted so fast that they were sorting fish faster than I could tag them, and I try to keep my tagging within 3 minutes. That is always my goal.

Does it always happen? No, which is why we have a nice x-axis of how long it took between getting the fish and releasing the fish, okay? So these guys are very fast and they know what they're looking at. They look at fish all day long. And I'll show you guys the picture.

Some of you might have seen it. But if you ask a fisherman to look, I bet you they can pick out the kings. So anyways, so we designed this study to really think about worst-case scenario because I've been in other programs where we've asked fishermen to volunteer doing additional measures. And, and the truth of it is, you can't ask fishermen to do something that they can't do, or else they'll fail, right? And failure doesn't look good for anybody, and it wastes everyone's time to try to come up with, with programs in cooperation with fishermen if they're just going to fail.

We—. Nobody wants that, okay? So I wanted worst-case scenario. So that is what we did. That's how we set up that study.

Of the 3 Chinook that we tagged, um, There was one that was immediately predated after 2 days, kind of close in the area. It didn't go far. The second one traveled, I want to say, about 250 miles, and that's both distance and displacement. So it's very close. They were kind of— they were getting to where they were, they were going.

There was not a lot of difference between how long it took them to get as far away from the release site as possible versus how many miles, kilometers did they actually travel? Because I look at both. I look at distance and I look at displacement. So if you picture a straight line, it's all great circle distance. That's your, that's your displacement from tagging release to where they pop up.

But then you've also got your distance, which is, well, of that, where are these fish going? How many how much distance are they actually putting in regardless of how far they get away from the release site. And so the second one was recaptured, and I'm just going to tell you guys right now, it was recaptured in South Unimak after 7 days, okay? And that fish actually spent a lot more time— because we, we also look at depth— and on average that fish spent a lot more time in deeper waters, but it was also over a shorter period of time. Okay, the third fish, and this poor fisherman, he said, "I got, I think I got one of your tags.

What do I do?" And at that point, it would have been nice to maybe put it back in and see what happens so we can maybe answer some of these questions. But the opportunity to physically recover a satellite tag is kind of gold because we get the full archive data set. So I said, "You need to keep it." And I asked him to keep it. The third Chinook was released and made it 27 days, and it reported 8 miles up the Kenai Talk. And this, this fish had, I think, roughly 600 kilometers in distance and about 1,000 kilometers in displacement.

I switched those two, displacement and distance. So this is this fish did a lot of— a whole lot of moving. It was moving and shaking, and it made it all the way up to the Connectock in Cusco Bay. Okay, yeah, Madam Chair. Miss Carlson-Vandort, how many boats were, were involved with that sorting exercise?

And you're describing how they were sorting and how fast they were. That's an excellent question. So we used the June test fishery as an opportunity to to do this study, and we did it across 3 different vessels. And this is very qualitative, but I did ask ahead of time, how do you feel? How does your crew feel about their sorting abilities?

How experienced are they? So we could kind of— it's, it's not really going to be very useful quantitatively, but just get an idea of crew's confidence in being able to sort and, you know, kind of do all the things. So 3 different vessels. And what was the— because that was my next question— what was the answer in terms of how competent and used to and experienced they were with sorting and with instantly identifying species? So we had one vessel who very right up front, they were kind of some young kids, and they told us, we're really nervous about this because we're newer.

And I said, that's fine, you do your best and you tell me what you think is going on. And, you know, don't sweat it. So two of the vessels had very experienced crew. They're super fast. We had one that wasn't.

I, and like I said, I have not, I have not done this analysis yet, and I'm very much looking forward to seeing if we saw differences in air exposure, meaning longer sort times, and also just the whole sort times themselves. But I think that's a question that we can answer. Yeah. Okay. No, I appreciate that because I mean, I love what you're doing.

I think it's super interesting and important work. And, you know, I'm just trying to reconcile in my mind, you know, a controlled situation that you had versus what's happening on the grounds in real time. And especially when you're dealing with, in particular, areas that have, you know, not— have struggled to get good crew for a long time, what that means. So, yeah, I mean, very interesting. Thank you.

And if I may, I think that regardless of kind of what happens at this meeting. This is something that we're all really interested in and would like to expand the study and to look a little bit more at Chinook, because I think there's— even though the sample sizes are a lot smaller, you just get such a valuable data set from these tags. And I know this is a very important question to everyone, but I also would just encourage everybody— Mr. Schindler, who came before me, made a very good point that there probably is no one number. If you come up with one number, that number is, is gonna have to be on sort of a sliding scale. And I think you guys as managers and as board members are gonna have to decide how much is a single Chinook worth, and, and, and what on that spectrum, where's the tipping point in terms of like how confident we are that X amount of fish could survive, and if that is the priority.

I personally think, and I've watched this happen in groundfish fisheries, that there are a lot of tools that you can use to tighten up programs. If you, if you give fishermen the right tools and the right guidance, there's ways that you can tighten up programs. And that is exactly what this is about, is learning how can we make an optimized program. Is there a minimum threshold size? Is there a size at which they stop being able to really speciate as good.

Is there a cutoff amount of time after a sort that those fish have to be back in the water? And I'll tell you, you'd be amazed at how many fish can survive, you know, being out of the water for several minutes. We've watched it with Peacod too, who have barotrauma issues. So it can be done, and there's always ways to tighten it up. So I will submit that RC with some more data so you guys can see it.

But that's really the intent of this, is to look at how do we make a program that actually works for everyone. So that is forthcoming, as I said yesterday or the day before. Mr. Chamberlain. Thank you, Ms. Levy. And I, I just want to put on the record, I'm very supportive, very supportive of this study.

But I just want to say, you know, very, uh, first question, uh, would you agree that peer review is the best way to review these things. Absolutely. And, and that's why— so I actually can't— if I may just directly respond to that, there is a lot of analysis that has to happen, but the one thing that has been done is the analysis of the tag data. So the tag data that I'm telling you right now is the only— that's the only reason I'm willing to talk about the raw tag data is because that has been processed, and that is why it's the only one I'm really willing to speak to. But yes, this paper is like almost in submission.

It was kind of bad timing, but it feels relevant to this meeting. So, and, and so I think, and I very much look forward to you are seeing it. It's hard for this board to make, make decisions on, especially on preliminary study data without, without a full set of the facts. Because as you heard through prior testimony, there are a lot of other factors that can influence this or other factors we should be taking into consideration before drawing conclusions. But so— and so would you be willing to RC that as quickly as possible just so we have a chance to read through that?

Just to make it a question. Yes, from your mouth to God's ears. It's like the next thing as I walk out of this this room. Thank you so much. Mr. Wood.

Yeah, thank you. Boy, after listening about 7 years of genetic studies, I was just curious, like, how was this paid for? Yes, thank you for that question. So I think, um, I think this maybe came up the other day. So what the borough paid for this study, it's a pilot study.

We have a pro— we have an approach of if we think something's really important, we find experts to work with to develop a project. We get the groundwork started by paying for it, and then we use our results to say, hey, there might be something here, and then we take it to other granting agencies to get additional funding to expand the work. And we've— we have a track record of doing that in the past, and that's the intention for this work as well. Thank you. Thank you very much, Charlotte.

Okay, next testifier please. State your name for the record.

Virgil Lempfenauer. When I served on the Board of Fish, a fellow board member with me was a retired biologist, worked mainly in Sport Fish Division. He was involved in numerous catch-and-release studies, and fish that are out in the saltwater, not close to their spawning grounds, are over 90% catch and release mortality. When we were at a work session in 1995 in Juneau, the state had sent the Wallastad, which was the largest enforcement vessel the state had, to area M to check on chum chucking. And so what his report was that he gave to us was they were doing catch and release with purse seines and drift gillnets.

And so I asked this board member, well, what do you think mortality is? And he says, well, there's no way of knowing what the mortality is for sure, but it's gotta be more than 90%. And so to me, this is a no-brainer. It's ridiculous. And so what we did after we found that information, we made a regulation for mandatory retention and all of area M, of all salmon, period.

Thank you. Thank you, Virgil. Any questions? Thank you very much.

Hi, Miss Woods.

Janet, click your mic on. Janet Woods, for the record. Traditional knowledge. States that a fish caught is a fish dead. So that has been known for, for forever.

A fish caught or a fish even studied is a fish dead. And as it was stated before, that when you catch, because I fished for many years, when you catch a king it doesn't live very long. It has very short time. Thank you. Thank you, Janet.

Any questions? Okay, thank you.

Come on up, Carrie.

For the record, Carrie Stevens, Upper Yukon.

You can imagine how hard for it is, uh, for us to listen to this conversation.

Questioning the value of one king salmon. So I just want to put it on record again that the department sanctioned that every king salmon matters. That's why we're on a moratorium in the Yukon. We cannot catch king salmon to eat for ourselves, for food. And one female king, especially the larger ones, can have up to 14,000 eggs.

So every king does matter. And again, the best way to address this problem is to not catch them in the first place. Thank you. Thank you, Carrie. Any questions?

Thank you, Mr. Thompson.

Good morning, Madam Chair Irwin. On 128 retention, as Kerry mentioned, Chinook on the Yukon is a matter of conservation and mentioned that every one, every salmon counts in this fishery. It would be interesting to find out how much Chinook we are talking about, and probably in the range of 10,000 to 15,000, that we don't know what river streams they are coming from, and yet we are allowing this fishery to harvest Chinook.

We really need to determine where these fish are coming from. Has there been any weight, sex, length analysis in where these fish are going? If that has not been done, then we need to do that to allow this fishery to continue.

So— We need to— and I don't know why we're talking about, you know, a fishery, a fishing area where there's a high Chinook catch. If that is so, then we need to look at maybe closing that area. Over the years, the fishery has grown so much that now we're trying to cut it back. Thank you. Thank you, Francis.

Any questions?

Thank you, Francis. And after Mr. Delaney, we'll go ahead and move on to the next proposal.

Madam Chair, Kevin Delaney.

The lady from Upper Yukon kind of stole what I was going to say. The best way to preserve these fish and get them home is to not catch them in the first place.

I want to speak much more about stock of concern action plan regulatory construction, not so much about the detail of that plan. Proposal 112 is an excellent vehicle. It is a stock of concern action plan. I believe there should be a little maybe more preamble language stating the objective, but what we're really interested in the stock of STACA concern action plans is to have recovery criteria in the plans and the plans in regulation. So I'm going to not stand in the way of lunch here any longer, but come back and talk more with you when we get into the STACA concern action plan discussions.

Thank you. Thanks for saving those comments, Kevin. Any board questions? Thank you very much. Okay, Proposal 109, please.

Proposal 109, 5AAC 15.200, Fishing District Sections and Subsections, and 5AAC 15.357, Chugach Area Salmon Management Plan. Thank you, staff. Does anyone wish to speak to Proposal 109? New information, please.

[Speaker:GEORGE_ANDERSON] Yes, thank you. George Anderson, President, Chignik Intertribal Coalition. We are the proposers of this and just want to give a little history on why. Back in '24, severe reductions in our local fleet, 120-hour closures in the Chignik Lagoon, tribal folks looking for options. So we developed this in the, in the wake of the '24 season, roll through '25 season, same reductions in place.

And this addresses giving our folks some opportunity so they're not sitting on the beach for 5 days. So I'll stop there. I just want to say one thing about new information. If it has not been said on the record, either on time testimony or in committee, I'm not going to be up here a lot. So I appreciate this opportunity.

It's an awesome process. But unless we really need to get up here, if a board has something pressing, we're here. So thank you. Thanks, George. Any questions?

Mr. Carpenter? Yeah, thanks, George. I'm just trying to figure this out a little bit. So right now it's divided into 3 basic pie shapes and that box is kind of on the inner side of that. Aren't those areas open already?

I'm trying to figure out, you know, exactly what you're trying to do here, I guess. Yeah, Mr. Carpenter, through the chair. Yes, you heard in testimony and from the department, there's always been a little confusion about this Jack's box. It's kind of infamous in our area. In fact, in '24, when I think the department thought it was closed.

I think it might not have been. And after a little work with the department, it— anyways, there is support, I think, for clarification from them as well, because this area has been— the lines were kind of not making sense at the beginning. But as we get new ABs every few years, I think this language will help new managers in our area manage our fisheries. Thank you. Any other questions?

Thank you, Mr. Anderson. Thank you.

Axel Copen.

George summed up most of it, but one other part of this was, is We talked about a little bit earlier, we have a lagoon fleet in Chignik. Now these, these guys are small boats, shallow draft. They fish, you know, in Chignik Lagoon, small seines, and they are not competitive or to be quite frankly even safe to be out on the capes. You know, you got a boat that was built to be dry, shallow draft, and now you have to tank them down and put our are, you know, for RSW to fish outside the lagoon, you need an RSW system.

And you're going to put a bigger net on and you're going to expect these guys to go out where they've basically never fished and go out there and try to fish and make a living because that's what, that's what they're facing with the 2 days a week in the lagoon. So part of the reason behind this idea was Jack's Point is close to Chignik Lagoon, Chignik Bay, just around the corner. And right now, the way it is, it's, it's confusing. But it's also a place where bigger seines are used. So this proposal would clear this area out for the smaller, less competitive boats where they don't have a 58-footer breathing down their neck when they're trying to fish there.

It's— it makes sense geographically. It makes better alignment sense. What George referenced in '24 was that when the department announced an opener, usually this area is open, but Central District was not open, but the lagoon and the Western District was. And this place is right in between. The boundary lines.

So a bunch of guys were out there fishing because in all our lives it's been opened with— it's never been closed. And so guys realized, hey, we're fishing in a closed area. So, you know, it was just extra confusion. And that's because you have staff that's, you know, we don't have staff there for 10 years anymore or 6 years or anything. It just, it doesn't happen.

And, and so there's some clarification that was needed there. And it's also The lagoon guys have bore most of the brunt of our king salmon conservation. They're the ones that are being displaced for 5 days a week. And so by creating a new stat area, the department will know what's being caught there because it's a different stat area. And they'll also— there's a place they could open that area and let these guys go out there and catch some of these surplus sockeye on their way into the lagoon.

And avoid the Chinook. So that's also part of the idea. It'll actually reduce fishing pressure in the area because they'll be limited to 125 fathom seines and they'll be shallower. So it's actually going to reduce fishing pressure from what it is now in that spot when somebody chooses to fish there with their bigger, deeper seines. So I just wanted to get that on the record and clarify that part of the proposal.

It's not a fish grab. It's not a you know, we're expanding this area to do this. It's, it's smaller boats, smaller seines. Thank you. Mr. Wood.

Yeah, thank you, Axel. So just to understand the fishery there a little bit more. So if this was put into regulation, this would allow just basically the lagoon boats to fish this area, and, and the, the bigger boats with the deeper nets could only fish on the outside edge of it. Is that what you're coming out with? Well, I mean, a bigger boat could go get a small seine and fish there.

You just— it has to have a smaller net, a shorter, shallower net than what is allowed there currently.

Oh, okay. So if a boat with a larger net wanted to fish just outside of that black box there, more welcome to if it was practical. Offshore, off of it. Yeah, well, that's true now, but yeah. Okay.

All right. Thanks.

Okay. Thank you very much, Axel. I think at this time we're going to go ahead and break. I'll hand the chair back over to Member Carlson-Vandort. Thank you, ma'am.

Thanks, Mr. Owen. Okay. It is noon. I think we're going to take our lunch break at this time for 1.5 hours, and we'll come back and we'll complete Group 1 with the stock Concern Plan discussion, and then we'll move on into Group 2. So we'll see you back here at 1:30.

Thank you.

All right, thanks everybody. 1:33, We're back on the record. We are still doing Committee of the Whole Group 1, Chignik Area Salmon. We've gone through the proposals and we are going to give folks a chance to talk about the stock of Stock of Concern action plans. There are two, one for Chinook salmon, one for sockeye, first-run sockeye, early-run sockeye.

Miss Irwin. Thank you, Madam Chair. Before we begin, I just want to remind folks that when you come to the mic, please state your name for the record. When we call the Stock of Concern plan, please start lining up if you choose to speak. Please don't refer to anybody by name and new information only.

Only. Staff, we're not going to go through the options, just present the plan. We'll do that in deliberation. So we'll start with the stock of concern action plan for Chinook.

Again, for the record, Carl Burnside and Chinook River King Salmon stock status and action plan 2026. Thank you, Kevin. Come on up.

Madam Chair, can I defer to the author of the proposal and come up right away after that?

Sure, there's no author, but go ahead, you go after George if you want. Oh, okay. Kevin Delaney, Kenai River Sport Fishing. Well, as I mentioned just before lunch, I want to talk a little bit about the regulatory construction of action plans and specifically to this one. So You've got Proposal 112, which we brought to the table just before lunch, but that is— that does contain elements of the Chignik Staka Concern Action Plan for Chinook, but it doesn't contain the whole thing.

In our opinion, there should be a preamble and a target. That one, the target is the escapement objective. Then in 112, there's a number of tools that members of the community from Chignik have done an extremely good job of describing. And the staff has a sandwich menu— that's kind of the joking way we've referred to it in the past— of potential options either to replace or augment what the folks from Chignik have got in 112. Now I want to speak to two pieces of that that are content.

112 Asks for— I'm going to talk about the trigger that would be 1,000 king salmon harvested that would trigger a closure of areas of concern. So in the Proposal 112, which is potentially on its way to being the Stock of Concern Management Plan, it has a date of July 1st, and we would like to see those measures in place from the very beginning of the fishing season through the very end. So we would suggest striking the July 1st, and then through conversations with the staff prior to the meeting, and here specifically with the folks from Chignik, we tried to determine how the department came up with the 1,000/5,000 number. Um, the 1,000 would be— if it was exceeded in a period, you would close the area for a while, and then if the 5,000 were exceeded, you'd close the appropriate area for the rest of the season. After these discussions, we feel that in the Chignik area, that those numbers are too high.

They should be approximately half of what was in the EO issued this year. So instead of 1,000, 5,000, we're thinking more of 500 and 2,500. So that— those are two concerns we've got with the language and 112, which potentially be— could become elements of the stock of concern plan. Then let's go back and talk about regulatory construction of the stock of concern plan. And as I mentioned just quickly before lunch, I think it's real important as we go around the state to have regulatory consistency.

Part of that, our recommendation is to put the recovery goal in the plan. And to put the plan in regulation.

I guess that's all I have. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Delaney. Are there any questions? Thank you very much.

Does anybody else wish to speak to the Stock of Concern Action Plan for Chignik Chinook?

Okay, we'll move on to the Stock of Concern Action Plan for the early-run sockeye.

Chignik River sockeye salmon stock status and action plan 2026.

Come on up, George.

Thank you. George Anderson, Chignik Intertribal Coalition. Um, yeah, as far as new information to us, it's all new. I think RC 13 dropped during staff comments. I think it was available after lunch, so we didn't see it in the agenda after the October work session.

And 25, we, we didn't know this coming up at this meeting. So anyways, luckily we asked the department for information on the 2024 genetic study. They gave it to us immediately. Luckily, we had somebody close by that could help us out. We dropped RC133, and that is our newest information.

And not really prepared to talk beyond that because we're still digesting it. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Anderson. Are there any board questions?

Not at this time. Thank you very much, Mr. Commissioner. Yeah, I just have a question. The first one, you said RC 13.

Yeah, I think that's before lunch, or is that what you said? No, no, no, no, no. Day 1 staff comments. I thought this— yeah, OK, is that clear through the chair? I understand.

Yes, it's clear. Mr. Anderson referred to RC 13 and then RC 133 as well. OK, thank you. Any questions? No.

OK, thank you, George. Thank you. Is there anyone else who wishes to speak to this action plan?

OK, thank you very much. If that does it, that ends Group 3 Committee of the Whole— or Group 1, excuse me, Madam Chair. I'll hand it back to you. Thanks, Mr. Owen. Well done.

Do we need to take a break for our seed distribution? We do have a distribution to come around. OK. We'll do a quick 10-minute break, hopefully to get an RC distribution for Committee of the Whole Group 2, and then we'll get started with Group 2. Thank you.

[FOREIGN LANGUAGE] All right, we're back on the record. Um, time is 1:56. We are about to get into committee of the whole. Group 2. Group 2 consists of South Alaska Peninsula, Southeast District, mainland salmon, commercial cut— sorry, commercial salmon gear, retention of commercial caught salmon, and herring.

There are 18 proposals in this group, and I will turn it over to Chair Wood. Mr. Wood. Thank you, Madam Chair. I'm over here in this corner.

There are 18 proposals. If you could, when we— well, the author can come up and speak first to the proposal, and then whoever wants to come up and comment on it, please come on up and stand in line or get really close so that we can get through this quick— as quickly as possible. Try to think of everything you want to say is in turn instead of coming up like 5 separate times, okay? And if it's possible, so And if it starts getting repetitive, which it shouldn't because this is all new information, like we have never heard this before, right? That's your criteria, like we have not heard this before, then don't talk.

So anyhow, we'll start with Proposal 119 and get prepared to start standing and come on up. We'll let the, uh, we'll let the department read it off first.

This is quite difficult, new information, and thinking of all the information. My name is Amy Foster. I'm talking about on Proposal 119, the Setnett Sedum fishery. It is on the brink to the point of collapse. It is not because salmon are no longer migrating into Sedum.

The salmon are there. What's disappearing is our opportunity to fish in Hold on one second. Can we let the department first read it into the record? That way, that way we'll know what exactly you're talking about. So, so you can stay, it's okay.

Oh, sorry, yes, 107. Sorry. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Jeff Salinger, for the record, proposal 107, 5AAC09.X.

.XXX and 5AAC15.XXX new section.

If anyone would like— the authors here or anyone like to comment on Proposal 107, please do now. Madam Chair, Mr. Chair, my name is Steve Reifenstahl. I support this proposal. And the primary reason is that there's been accusations that fish are disappearing, going to the home pack, not onto a fish ticket.

So we're suggesting that, number one, that's not true. But if there— once the department or the public, the board wants better accounting, we're willing to do additional accounting. So one suggestion was that there's a fin clip, so you mark a home pack by that. I would point out the department doesn't support this, but we again are trying to put our best foot forward to have full accounting transparency so there's a good understanding of what is happening out there in the fishery. Thank you.

Thank you. Any questions?

Virgil Umphenauer speaking for the Fairbanks AC. Fairbanks AC supports this proposal. We're used to it because most of the rest of the state personal use fisheries have to clip the tail fins. And in the commercial fishery, there's a place on the fish ticket says fish caught but not sold for personal use. They should be listed on the fish ticket as well.

Thank you. Any questions?

Okay. All right, we'll move on to 119 now. Department, please read 119. Proposal 119, 5AAC09.360, Southeastern District Management Plan.

Thank you. Sorry about that. Oh, I'm sorry. Thank you. I'm new to the process.

So my name is Amy Foster. I'm talking today on Proposal 119. It's in regards to the Setnett set'em fishery, which is on the brink to the point of collapse. It's not because salmon are no longer migrating into set'em. The salmon are there.

What's disappearing is our opportunity to fish in set'em. Proposal 119 asks ask for when Chicknick area fishes, fishes, we as Setnett fishermen would like to fish at the same time on Southeast District mainland. The reason for this is in both areas the fishing fleet has changed. In Setnam and Chicknick, we are working on an older management plan that is not adapted to the current changes. Both areas have seen a huge reduction in the fleet participating in the fishery.

In Set'em, over half our setnet fleet is over 60 years old. It's not outsiders fishing in Set'em, it's the local fleet around Sand Point, with many operating out of skiffs. Please refer to RC-108, RC-111, RC-112, RC-117, RC-118, RC 124, RC 125, and RC 127, and Appendix C while going through the set of proposals. When chicken— Chicknick is open to commercial salmon fishing, our area would like to also be opened at the same time under comparable conditions. Unless something changes, the current management rules may be remembered as the reason an iconic setnet fishery in Satom disappeared.

Thank you. Any questions? I have a question. So this setnet site, how far is it from town? Um, from Sand Point traveling to Satom on our vessel where we were locating up in the head of Stepevak is about a 5-an-hour boat ride.

We use our vessel to sleep on, eat, and everything like that. Then we use an open skiff that's usually around 18 or 21 feet to set our gear and pick our gear up and work.

Do you have lease sites? Yes, yes, we do have lease sites in the Set'em area. So these lease sites, you still pay for them every year? Like, all state lease sites? Yes, yes, we pay $300 every year.

Well, actually, it's $600 or something like that. Yeah, $300. It depends. Yeah. Okay, and you do have running gear that you also have to maintain?

Running gear and anchor, or in an anchor? If— I'm not really sure what you mean by running gear. Before we set our nets out, we head to the beach And we either tie a line to the beach or set an anchor and run a line out, put a shoreline buoy there, put another running line out, and then put a head buoy, and then a hook with another buoy. And the length usually is from the shoreline to the head buoy is— around 80 fathoms, and then our hook is around 20 fathoms, and we do fish near the shore. Awesome, thank you.

Go ahead, Tony.

Chairman, board, my name is Rick Eastlick. I'm a setnet fisherman. I too fish in this area. Just for the record, this past June I had just less than 750 pounds of fish for the month of June. And like she said, there in the East Depewack area, as far as I can remember this year, the most we had was 4 different vessels.

So, and this is where I'm at, it's about 5.5 hours from town. Now, I'd just like to, I don't know if it's off track a little bit, but I know there's lots of proposals that's targeting the sane fleet that we have. But I have to tell you, if there's no saners, You know, we're out of business. Our volume is so small that we can't have a tender sent out to us. You know, for instance, in August, I'm the only boat— I was the only boat in this eastern district.

And again, like I said, 5 hours, 5.5 hours. And if it wasn't for the sailors out there beyond the on the Capes, you know, I wouldn't have any service, number one. Number two, I have one crew member. I am the oldest active setnet fisherman in the fleet. And I got to tell you, there's a lot of bad water out there.

And, you know, there's been times when I've needed assistance, I've needed help. And without the Stainers, you know, one of the fat boys that come rescue me, I wouldn't be here right now. So on the other side of that coin too, the processors, you know, they, you know, to gear up all their workers, everything else, the revenues in the city, they're not going to make it on the SETNET fleet. And in my earlier testimony in June, And I think I said there was the most 12 votes in one day. All right.

Well, thanks for speaking to this proposal in particular. Appreciate it. Thank you.

Thanks, Mr. Chair. Tony Zock, BBDC. We submitted RC-23 with our positions on proposals, but we just wanted to put it on the record that we are opposed opposed to any proposals before the board at this meeting that are increasing fishing time, area, or gear. And just to save time and not waste your time, that statement can go for any proposal that's increasing fishing time, area, or gear, Mr.

Chair.

Thank you. Thank you. Any questions? Okay, thanks, Tony.

Proposal 119, if you want to speak to it, go ahead and stand up. Good morning. My name is John Foster. I've been a Southeast District mainland settler since 1971. I have sites in Fox Bay.

I don't know that I'm basically speaking to this one. There's a whole slew of proposals that come in from the settlers trying to trying to get some fishing time. We're not asking for more, we're asking for some. I mean, last year we had one day, one day, July 24th. That's one day all we had.

The problem that's going on right now is, is, uh, with the chicknick fee being so small now and having guaranteed 3 and 600 $300 on the first round, $600. The catching power is, is a lot slower. So we don't get the fish. We are allocated 7.6%. I'm not looking for more fishing time.

I'm looking for some, just some, just some help to get out there and fish. And I don't know that I support this proposal as much. I think the best proposal that I've seen here is that would help would be 123, and I'll speak to that again when I come back up. So great, thank you. Yeah.

Oh, and one other thing, I did not go set netting last summer. The previous 5 years before that was a break-even. I paid the bills, paid my crew, and took nothing home. So this last year, since it was an odd year and And I was gonna, you know, big pink salmon. I went sinning on deck of a seiner at 66.

Okay, thank you. Go ahead, next up.

Yeah, I'm, uh, Emil Movic. I'm also a settineter in Sandpoint. And, uh, it's— we're not asking for more fish fishing time, we're asking for a different regulation so we could actually go fish. I mean, the regulations are already there, and I've got a couple proposals in, you know, to this matter as well. And, uh, I just— we're not looking for, you know, more fishing time.

We're just looking to actually get the time to be able to fish. We're a lot further away, and when they're out there fishing, you know, because their escapement measures are being met and their harvest is then they're getting harvest, I think we're supposed to— we should be fishing as well if we're fishing supposedly on the same fish as they— as it's been stately claimed. So I just really think that, uh, out of the fairness of that, that, I mean, once they get to go fishing, we should be able to fish as well. And with the Northwest Step Back section They've already got that as its own section, so it'll be— it could be regulated itself in between July 1 and July 25 as normal, and the department has every right that they still do that. This would be the Northeast District mainland.

Great, thank you. Any questions? No questions.

Axel Koppen. I just— there seems to be a misperception about the fishing time for setnetters. They get 416 hours of fishing time in June in the entire South Peninsula outside of Setom. Around the Shoemagan Islands, all up and down the peninsula, they get 416 hours of fishing time. If they choose to not fish because they can't go in the Southeastern District mainland, I'm jealous the fact they have a choice to go somewhere else when the area they prefer to fish isn't open, because I don't have that opportunity in Chignik.

If we don't get our escapement, we don't fish, period. There's no guarantee of 416 hours in Chignik like they have. So they may be losing access to an area But they're not losing fishing time. 416 Hours, most in the fleet in the South Peninsula. They're free to move anywhere.

And this plan has been in place for 41 years. It's been challenged by Southeastern District mainland fishermen every 3 years probably since then, before my time. The Department of Fish and Game recognized the significance of Chignik stocks in the area and put an 80% stock designation or stock assignment on it 46 years ago. They acted before the board did. This plan's been in place for that entire time.

The $300,000 and $600,000 they're talking about is a harvest preference for Chignik because the board in 1977-1978 realized that Chignik stocks were so exposed interception on both sides at Cape Igvak and in the southeastern district mainland, that there needed to be some establishment of a minimum economic level for Chignik fishermen to survive. So these 300,000 and 600,000 sockeye, that's 1978 levels of what it takes to support a fleet. If you account for inflation, that lower number is 1.1 million sockeye. So I think it's pretty reasonable, 300,000 and 600,000. I don't make any money at 300,000 sockeye harvest in Chignik.

I'd go bankrupt if we had to live off of 300,000 sockeye. It's just not enough. So I don't have anywhere else to fish. Chignik guys don't have anywhere else to fish if our area is closed. They've got a lot of area.

This plan's been well developed. It was based on the Cape Igvak management plan, which has been in place even longer. The allocation percentage was based on historical numbers. This is a historical plan. I don't think it needs to be changed.

Thank you. Thank you.

No questions.

Go ahead.

Go ahead and turn your mic on. Edgar Smith. The $300,000 and $600,000 was enacted in 1988, not '75. When we went to the Board of Fish in '85, they put the plan we have on in place there, and then they kept adding regulations like '88 to the 3,600,000, and they put 80% on around the same time on the '63 tagging study. So once we passed '84, Chicknick had a million fish caught before June 10th.

With 101 boats. Today they have less than 30, and they're no way going to keep up. I mean, even produce the catch rate for us to even get to the mainland to fish our traditional 7.6%. I mean, he has it backwards is what it is. It should be the other way around.

Okay, thank you.

Axel Copeland. I just want to point out that they actually exceeded their 7.6 allocation percentage if you look at their 10-year average from 2014 to 2024. And that was including several disaster seasons for Chicknick. So I don't think anybody's missing out on their allocation. And if you read the AMR from the Department of Fish and Game, this year's annual management report, it states clearly in there that the stock assignment was created by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game in 1980, and the official management plan was established in 1985.

Thank you. Thank you. Okay, we'll move on to Proposal 121. Proposal 121, 5AAC09.360, Southeastern District Mainland Salmon Management Plan. Is the author here?

Anyone want to speak to this? Okay, seeing no takers, we'll move on to Proposal 122.

Proposal 122, 5AAC09.360, Southeastern District Mainland Salmon Management Plan. Proposer? Okay.

Yeah, this is Emil Mobeck again. I'm the one that put this proposal in, and by seeing that all these other proposals are about the same, I'm going to probably— I would like to rescind it and put my approval or stand behind proposal 125. Okay, would you submit an RC withdrawing your support for your proposal? Yes. Thank you.

Sorry about that. Member Erman has a question. Thank you. My question is just, is there anything specific about 125 that made you decide to refer to that proposal instead of your original? That is also my original proposal, is 125.

OK, sorry, thank you. I missed the author on that one.

OK, we can move on to one proposal, 123. Proposal 123, 5AAC09.360, Southeastern District Mainland Salmon Management Plan. Edgar Smith again. I was the proposal there in This was put a sliding scale on for the Chickasaw allocation to Sockeyes, but the fishing game opposed it because of Administrative Order 360. But I sent the amendment in on RC 007 to actually set it as 150.

That way you're in between. I mean, every 3 years, I don't think Chickasaw fleet's gonna sit there and slide 50 or 60 boats at a time, but they're down around 30 now. If to get— if midpoint is 50 or 60, then they're sharing and we're sharing. We get to go and enact the plan at 150. And then another thing, if you got 150, if you do 7.6% of that, that gives you enough to actually enact the Southeast District men and set netters to go fishing and not be at risk to go too far or too under, even with the small fleet that we have now.

And with Chicknick trying to produce— with these restrictive king proposals coming in that could even slow the catch rate in Chicknick down even more. I mean, they've been down to 2 days in the lagoon. And like I said before, they caught 1 million fish in the lagoon in 1984. I mean, their catch rate is way down, especially with the running of the tenders and stuff to False Pass to deliver their fish. That's like a 7-day return round trip on the deal.

But another person was referring to it. We're not saying the 7.6, it's all the other restrictive things that's added to it that actually slows the fishery down. We can't even prosecute the fishery anymore with the midpoint of the Chicknick runs and stuff. But thank you. Thank you.

Okay, we'll move on to Proposal 124. Proposal 124, 5AAC09.360, Southeastern District Mainland Salmon Management Plan. I'm not I'm not the proposer, but that's my brother. But state your name, please. Edgar Smith.

Thank you. I'm not the proposer. My brother is on this. And this is 80% of the returning or migrating fish gone through sedum. And we've always said it was less than 80%.

80% Is the 1963 tagging study where you had 10 fish and 8 returned to Chicknick. But man, we're on the third WASP study now and it's getting better and better all the time. Why don't we just go to that number? In Chicknack actually submitted RC to showing how much wasp fish is traveling through a sedum. They split the sedum in half and it should be around 58% of the fish.

So put it to a real number that actually everybody's using now, not an old one that's 70 years old. Thank you. Next. Yeah.

Yeah. All right. Yeah, I'm Jim Smith. I proposed and I put an RC in to— what is it? RC 47.

And I'm trying to think where I'm at here. I just got here and I showed where the catch Oh, way behind on this.

Give me a second.

Is there someone else like to comment on this? And you can comment after.

Yeah, I, um, I actually conducted that. Could you do your name first? John Foster. I'm sorry, John Foster, Southeast District, uh, mainland senator. I actually participated in the WASP study.

We fished for a day down in East Steppevac Island Bay, one boat in Island Bay, one boat in Fox Bay, and then I think a week or two later we fished down farther down towards Gillimont Island down that way. And the numbers that come up are significantly lower than 80%. The 80% is based on a 1963 study tagging study where 7 tags came back to Chicknick. Oh, and one other thing, the south— not the southeast, the Shungahanna section. Excuse me, I got a dry mouth.

Setnetting in the Shumagun Island section is hard. I mean, last year there were setnetters that were fishing there, they were getting upwards of 10 to 15 fish a day. Uh, it— that— Shimogonanas are not made for setnetting. The water is deeper, the fish some years are offshore or they're deep, and you only got a 60-mesh net and you're not catching them. So Southeast District mainland is not a setnetter's area.

Thank you. Thank you. Anyone else want to speak to Proposal 124?

Rick Eastlick, Setnett fisherman. I too participated in the WASEP study of collecting.

I was in the more western part of the southeastern district mainland when we were collecting those samples. But to the 63 tagging study that he referred to. They had tagged about— they collected about 30 fish and then like he said, they recovered 8 of those tags. But what he didn't tell you was where they tagged those fish at. This is a huge, huge area and they tagged those fish right in Fox Bay in the very eastern portion of the Southeastern District mainland.

So that would be like we have all of Anchorage and they tagged the fish over here on 6th Avenue. And that's why, yeah, they got 8 of their 30 tags back. But, you know, and then when they extrapolated that out to the rest of the mainland, you know, that's like you're going— like I said, you know, this is a big area. We're talking hundreds of miles of coastline when you're talking all the way from Beaver Bay all the way into Balboa Bay. We're talking a massive area.

And they only tag these fish, you know, the next block over. Thank you. Thank you.

Again, Jim Smith. Sorry for— I drew a blank there. But I entered this. So that we can switch from that old data to the WASP study, which clearly shows in the 3— they have it set in 3 stages— that the early stratum would show that it was a higher number going to Chignik, near 80. But in the mid, which is June 26th to July 8th, which is probably the earliest we've gotten— we might have gone over there once in 20 years earlier than July, which is more of a 60% catch rate, and late July 9th through the 25th, which is showing more of a 58.6%.

And that is according to the WASP study, which means we've been losing out on 20% of the catch in that area for the last 50 years since they did that old study. And I believe we should use the new material rather than that, that outdated test, which was probably not very scientific. That's all. All right. We got a question for you.

Sure. Yeah. Thanks. I'm just curious about one thing.

With this permit in area, can you fish anywhere in area? Yes. Okay. Except for some parts up on the North Peninsula shut down. Right, okay, thanks.

Okay.

Just— Axel Copan. Just a couple points. There is the WASP study. There was also an ADF&G genetic study that was funded by Lucian's Eastborough, I believe, back in the '90s. And they actually had up to 90% Chignik-Sakai in one time period in that study.

So taking an overall average or something like that, you're protecting against the high abundance end of fish in an area that are exposed to exploitation. And as far as the size of the area goes, the Dolgoy Island area, that's way farther west than Southeast District mainland, had similar in the same high, high 75% on some days Chignik sockeye stocks in the area. So the size of the area does not prohibit the interception of stocks bound for another area just because the area is larger. They travel through the area. Thank you.

Thank you. Okay, and it looks like we'll move on to Proposal 125. Proposal 125, 5AAC09.360, Southeastern District Mainland Salmon Management Plan. Author. [FOREIGN LANGUAGE] Here again, I am the one that authored this, and, uh, it's an RC32.

I got in there the third page, you'll see the breakdown that they, you know, the early escapements, late escapements, and their harvest. And apparently we're never going to get to see the mainland with with this, with these harvest rates. And just want to be able to— I mean, if we're, you know, fishing on these same fish, they're fishing out there just across Cooperiana Point, fishing, and we get to sit on the beach and watch. So that's all I need to say about that. All right.

Okay, thank you. Looks like there's no questions. We'll move on to Proposal 126. Proposal 126, 5AAC09.200, Description of Districts and Sections, 5AAC09.360, Southeastern District Mainland Salmon Management Plan, and 5AAC09.365, South Unimak and Shumagin Islands June Salmon Management Plan. Okay, would anyone like to speak to Proposal 126?

Seeing no takers, it looks like we'll move on to Proposal 120.

Proposal 120, 5AAC09.330 gear and 5AAC09.360 Southeastern District Mainland Salmon Management Plan. Anyone want to speak to Proposal 120? Here We go. Axel Copeland. I put that proposal in, but after hearing the setnetters say that they need the SANers, and, uh, I withdraw my support for the proposal.

I'll put in an RC. Thank you, Axel.

All right, flying right along. Proposal 147. Proposal 147, 5AAC09.3. 331 Gilnett specifications and operations.

Would anyone like to comment on Proposal 147?

Mr. Chair? Yes. I'm the author, Charlie Lean. Thank you, Charlie.

Um, I turned in a PC97 and rewrote the justification for that proposal, but it's it didn't change the language for the regulation. So I think it's kind of self-explanatory. The idea is to shallow the nets up to steer the fishery away from chum and Chinook and concentrate on sockeye. Thank you. Thank you, Charlie.

Also remind people there's an RC-161 out there that you can comment on as well. Thank you, Charlie.

Virgil Lempfener, Fairbanks AC. We oppose this proposal as well. It's, uh, I've looked at lots of studies when I was on the board, and the Japanese didn't fish more, more than 20 feet deep in their high seas drift net for sockeye. And I know that in the Point Molar test fishery, the fishery they do into Bristol Bay, see how fish are coming in. There's been a number of studies done on the depth where fish are caught.

The sockeye are on top of the water, the highest up on the water column, and then come the chums and the kings. So if you want to avoid chums and kings, you need to fish with shallower nets. Thank you. Thank you, Virgil. Anyone else like to speak to either Proposal 147 or RC-161?

Okay, thank you. Hearing no takers, we'll move on to Proposal 149. Proposal 149, 5AAC09.331, gillnet specifications and operations.

Thank you. And anyone like to speak to this, Proposal 149? Oh, here we go.

Good afternoon. I'm Virgil Porter. I'm the author of the proposal 149.

I'm here to advocate being able to use the full length of our net that has been allocated. Everyone else can use one net. They give them 200 fathoms for the drifters, and I'm unsure on what the standard understand that. They don't have to cut them in two. Uh, we'd be able to work with half the anchors for safety, be efficient, and you know, it might be a novelty, but it's also a little bit easier instead of having to go and break down two sets of gear.

Since we are in— if you look, there's no major river systems out there. This is a mixed rock fishery, you are fishing off an interesting cape, an interesting point, um, you know, maybe the South Pacific buoy, and that's about it. Being able to set one net and set that down, see what goes into it, it's a little bit easier than having two full gear setups. The drifters have the same limitations that we do in, you know, being next to terminal areas. And it seems to do okay.

I did one more thing. I had some suggestions on offering a smaller version of that, of the 175, I think Kodiak is at, I'm not sure, or 150. I would rather have the full allocation that we already have, but it would be nice to try out one net. All right, thanks Virgil. Anyone else want to speak?

Good afternoon, members of the board, chairman. My name is Moses Kritz and I'm from Togiak. And as I testified early on, I opposed 149, lengthening the sitnets from 100 and increasing it to 200. I'm not sure where this is going to happen, but a lot of our fisheries terminal up in western Alaska are losing a lot of their fish. Therefore, that's my opposition on Proposal 149.

Thank you. Okay, seeing no questions— oh, here we go. Robin. Good afternoon. I oppose the proposal.

Who are you? Pardon? Your name, please. Robin Samuelson. I oppose proposal 149, 150, and 153.

Thank you. Thank you. Looks like we'll move on to proposal 150. Proposal 150, 5AAC09.331, gillnet specifications and operations. Edgar Smith.

I was to proposal on this, but Cook Inlet and Kodiak use monofilament. Then they tried it on the north side last board meeting, and I think Connor Murphy put comments in on it that he's kind of switched back a little bit to multifilament. But all this, all this, like, there are studies saying it's not the gear that catches fish, it's where you put the net to catch his fish. In the south side in June especially, and a little bit in July, the water is so dirty that your net only fishes for like 20 minutes while it's— and a set net sets when the anchor stays there and the tide runs through it. And then when you get to silty water, it just fills the net up.

And sometimes it takes me 2 hours to clean the net out with a trash pump, you know, a high-pressure trash pump. But all I want this is to put panels in to where it's easier to clean and the net might fish a little bit more, 50% more than— I wouldn't use this in one whole net. I'll still use monofilament, but I'll use panels as a mono, mono in it and see if I can get the gear fishing a little bit more efficiently. But thank you. We got a question for you.

Yeah, thanks. But wouldn't this proposal, the way it's written, allow somebody to make an entire gill net or set net monofilament? Yes, it does. I'll amend it to put pieces in, then, like 50% of it in that B monofilm, but don't come back with Administrative 360 saying it's going to be an overburden to manage it with— Well, I'm not suggesting you amend it or don't amend it. You can do that if you want.

I just wanted to make sure that you knew, based on the way the proposal was written, that what you're suggesting using panels wouldn't necessarily be the case the way it's written? No. Okay. But the whole net is how it's written, yes. Okay, thank you.

More comments on this one?

I'm sorry, I also am not in support of 150 because up in my area, Togiak, I certainly hope we start to use monofilament nets as indicated. So the monofilaments are going to increase efficiency of taking of salmon. Therefore, the terminal fisheries are going to be losing because Our nets are like 50 fathoms and 29, 29 meters deep. And that for sure the terminal fisheries are going to decline more with, if 150 was to be allowed. Thank you.

Would you also mind putting your name on the record for us? Moses Kritz, and I'm from Togiak. Thank you, Moses. Any more on Proposal 151 or 150? Okay, hearing nothing, we'll go to Proposal 153.

Proposal 153, 5AAC09.331, gillnet specifications and operations.

Would anyone like to speak to Proposal 153?

Patrick Brown, Sandpoint AC. This was an AC-generated proposal similar to the one we just previously discussed, and I think all our comments will be found in the AC minutes, AC 15, I believe. Thank you. Thank you. Looks like there's no questions.

Okay, we'll move on to Proposal 151. Proposal 151, 5AAC09.331, gillnet specifications and operations.

Here we go, Axel.

Axel Coburn, I just have one comment. If the board is going to maintain these 25-fathom seine leads on the set gillnets, that they be included for any fishery shutdowns when the immatures are gilled in the seine web in the test fishery, because right now they're exempt. So if they're using seine web, they should be held to the same standards for immature harvest as the seiners are. Thank you. Thank you.

Looks like there's no questions.

I'm Amo Mowback again, and to that, us setnetters with 25 fathoms lead, we're not out there where it's closed for amateurs, and I would really recommend that we still keep the 25 fathoms. We went up from 10 fathoms What was it, maybe 2, 3 board cycles ago. And it gets us, you know, off the beach a little bit so that we're not in the swells and in the breakers with our main nets. And it really helps with the way we set net.

All right. Thank you.

Edgar Smith again. I sent to RC on Proposal 151, it's RC0111, and it shows where the leads at or how we fish the lead in the setnet configuration. And I've never caught an immature in a lead ever. And most of the time you're going to catch immatures when you close, close up and you start pursing on it, then they get freaked out. The fish are running along the lead.

They're not gilling in it. I mean, the net gills the fish, not the lead.

Okay. Any more on Proposal 151?

Yeah. John Foster again. Yes, kind of a déjà vu thing. I remember doing this before.

Where I fish in Fox Bay, it the beach has got a slope on it like this, and it's boulders like this, or rocks like this. And what I'm trying to do with 25 fathom lead is getting as close to the beach as I possibly can. What the— what that lead does for me is keeps my gilnet out in the deeper water so I don't have to drag it up into the rocks. If I didn't have a lead, I'd be dragging that net up into the rocks and constantly repairing it.

Thank you. Any more on Proposal 151?

Ricky Slick. I'd just like to say primarily for me it's a safety issue because like you mentioned earlier, the swells rolling in and, you know, this is open ocean again and we have this groundswell But when there's any kind of a wind and it starts breaking, and to get up close to set your anchor gear where when, when it's time to pick up, I have it almost like a zipper with another, with a buoy and a little anchor right there. So I don't have to get up closer into the, close to the shore. So primarily for me, it's a safety issue. Thank you.

Thank you. OK, looks like we'll move on to Proposal 125. 148, And I'd refer you to RC-162 as well. Proposal 148, 5AAC09.332, same specifications and operations.

Commenters on 148 or RC-162?

Guys, get up closer if you could. Robin Samuelson. I oppose— I support proposal 148 and 152. This is a mixed stock fishery. We have concerns for our king salmon in the Nushigak, which the board has addressed, and also the problems in Yukon River.

Okay, Taylor.

Thank you, Taylor Lundgren. Um, this— the cost is the biggest thing for us. I mean, this cost exceeds the price of two sayings for our 2029— I mean, 2025 revenue. And we're already doing this with adaptive management. We're pulling the nets out of water.

So this is redundant in my opinion.

We got a question. Taylor, explain to me how the reduction of 50 meshes is the same as the cost equivalent of 2 saints. Is that what I heard you say? No, no. Um, what was it, RC99?

In RC99, the 2025 revenue Seattle for the June fishery average. Okay. The Two Saints, the cost, it's going to be about $20,000 per seine. To remove 50 meshes? Yeah.

To ship it to Seattle. Why can't you take a knife to it and just resew it? Yeah, maybe in a river that works, or in a lagoon. What happens when you have a whale go through through? Well, we koozie it up.

Okay, but that's not permanent. Yeah, and that's not how we prefer to fish. Sure. No, I understand. So I mean, guys are pretty particular about their gear.

Yeah, we take pride in it. So fair enough. Thank you.

Any other questions? None. Thanks, Taylor. Thank you.

Hi, my name is Jamie Wirtz. I'm also opposed to a reduction in the seine net length and depth. Mostly I don't see this as a help in conservation, as that it will change a percentage or ratio if you're— if that's what the goal of this is, is to catch less chum or, you know, or make one species more likely to be caught than the other. I kind of see it as death by a thousand paper cuts, almost like a punitive response.

You know, if our nets are shrunk, then when winds blow hard and the tide's ripping, then, you know, we have less net in the water to hold the boat stable. It's a real thing. Like when the tide's really ripping or the winds blowing hard, our nets are already fishing about half the depth that they can be when it's calm.

You know, we have weather patterns that come through all season. So this penalty comes to us in July. It comes in August when we're fishing our own stocks, you know, our own pinks, our own chum. And I don't see— I don't see it responsible that our nets are changed and that we have to suffer that for the whole season.

It doesn't look like there's any questions. Thank you. Thank you. Hello, Mr. Chair.

Carlin Hoblett, False Pass AC. Reference RC-142, which is the troll study that was conducted. First of all, it was a troll study. Second of all, we don't— I haven't had time to dig through the whole, the whole study, but there was— I don't know, we don't know what stock of fish that was on.

The time of year is completely different than the South June Salmon fishery. The geography of this study it was conducted 300+ miles away from the South Penjune fishery.

The ocean depth is probably twice as deep, I would say, as where we're normally fishing in the South Pen.

And, uh, there's nothing— none of the parameters in this study can compare to a South Pen sane fishery. And if this is the best data to work off of to make such a detrimental decision that will cripple some small boat fishermen, then how can we prove that this gear net reduction will work towards conservation.

Good. Member— oh, Member Erwin or VanDort. Which one was it? Member VanDort, please. This is just a kind of a question in general, and you can take a stab at it, Carlin, or I would be interested in other perspectives.

The RC language just deals with the depth, I think, correct? But the proposal talks about lead length as well. Is that— it speaks to depth and no lead, getting rid of the lead as well. Oh, it does? Yes.

Okay. I was just kind of curious. I wasn't sure where the lead piece of it came in there. Member Erwin, or do you want to follow up there? Member VanDort?

We can go to Member Irwin and catch up with you. Okay, over here, Carlin. Thank you. Um, Carlin, when you say that reducing the depth will cripple your seine operations, what do you mean by that? Do you mean you're going to catch less fish?

It's going to be less effective? What, what is crippling your seine fishery mean when you're looking at reduction of depth lengths? So as Taylor pointed out, I— and, and I got a separate quote, uh, it wasn't a— just yesterday over text message, and it was a, on average, $15,000 to $20,000 to rebuild a scene.

And I don't have the RC in front of me, but a letter like I mentioned yesterday from my former employer, the importance of of hanging a net correctly. Because if, say, somebody can't afford to ship their net out— that, and again, I say that $15,000 to $20,000 doesn't include shipping— somebody can't afford to do that, they're going to try to rehang their net themselves. And if they mess it up, it's not going to catch fish. There, there are meticulous, precise measurements that need to be made when hanging nets. Okay.

Thank you. Hold on here, Carlin. Member Vindal. Yeah, and again, I haven't had a chance to digest this substitute language, but I just want to ask about the leads just to get it out there. So right now, just so that I understand how the leads are used, you can have— is that 150 fathoms in length of lead?

I haven't I haven't entirely looked at the substitute language. How is your net hung right now? Do you have 150 fathoms on your lead or not? I personally don't use a lead, a separate lead, but I've seen other boats use the separate leads. I guess the question, since this is for this proposal, to whomever is out there, I would be interested in understanding why 150 fathoms is necessary instead of 100.

I mean, I tend to look for consistency. Consistency in regulation around the state. I'm just saying this. And so this seems to be exceptional to me. If there's other examples of that, I'd be really interested in learning about them.

But I'm curious why and where and when that 150 fathoms came from.

Early use, since you said you don't use the weed. So that's— I'm just putting it out there. Thank you. I hope I didn't come up for the wrong proposal. I was speaking to the depth reduction.

Oh, it's all— it's the proposal deals with lead length and depth reduction and all kinds of things. So you're on track. Sorry, Mr. Chairman. You're forgiven. Um, yeah, the length, the length is 250 fathoms currently.

The length and the depth currently is 375 meshes, and this proposal is reducing it to to 325 meshes, removing 50, and you will not be allowed to use leads in addition to the maximum length, which is 250 thousandths. Okay, I just stopped reading at the— I didn't read the last sentence. That's okay, but you can just send it, man, to let me know what you think.

Okay, doesn't look like we have any more questions, so we'll move on to the next one. Thank you, Carlin.

Yeah, Axel Copen. I'm in support of this proposal.

Man, I don't know a fisherman that doesn't know how to hang a seine, so you should be able to do this pretty simply yourself. 50 Meshes.

I mean, it's not a big ask. This whole thing of shipping your net to Seattle and back and all this stuff, I mean, I wish I could afford to ship my nets to Seattle. I can't. I do all the work myself. It takes a little extra time.

Your crew has to show up right before— a little before opening day, I guess. But it's not that big of a task. We're going to have to do it in Chignik too if our proposal passes. So— and I've fished multiple depth nets. I have a lagoon net, shallower.

I have an outside net, outside the lagoon, that's only 200 and— well, it's 265 meshes deep only. You catch reds just fine. I'm always told, you know, these guys say they're a red fishery that has a chum bycatch problem. Well, shallow up your nets. It helps, trust me.

I don't catch many chums with that shallow net.

So I see no reason to fight this if you're trying to avoid chums and kings. That's the goal behind these things. That's why we have it in Chignik. We don't have that many folks with the deeper nets. But they catch a significant more, a significant amount of chums, and they get kings more than we do with the shallower nets.

So I've seen it my whole life. I know the studies you show the kings will generally be deeper during the day and they come up at night to feed. So, and dogs are, they're spooky, right? You get out there and you get around a group of dogs. When you're fishing dogs, you make too much noise, you get a little too excited, they dive underneath your net.

Doesn't matter how deep your net is, they'll go underneath it when, when they get spooked. When they're in the bays, local chums, not on the move, but the shallower nets are going to protect against unwanted interception. I think that was the purpose behind this proposal and I support that like I supported in Chignik. Thank you. Thank you.

Next.

Virgil Infinor for Fairbanks ACE.

We support this proposal strongly because of what I've already said a while ago and Axel just said. Thank you. Thank you, Virgil.

Yes. No, thank you very much. It doesn't look like there are any questions. Okay, but thank you. I think everyone knows my position, or our AC's position, actually.

Thank you.

Hello, I'm Michael Galligan, and I am pretty much against eliminating the depth from, what is it, 375 to 350. I've fished, I've perséning for a long time, too long, 50+ years. And the depth we've had in Area M, we've had reductions where it used to be unlimited and then we went to 450. And then because of the politics, we went to 375. And I don't want to go any shallower because if you understand the mechanism of purse seining, it's so crucial to have— even at 375, we lose fish all the time.

Shape is, shape is what it's all about. And if you've seen pictures of purse seining, most of them in books are all perfect. Well, it's never perfect. It's not a perfect world. And when I fished in Chignik and in Aerie M, if you're a cape boat, and I don't go in the lagoon, my boat's too big, I fish capes.

And in capes you have tide and you have wind. And it is so hard to hold that. You know, if you just think of, you've seen purse seining, you gotta have a nice circle and you're bringing it up from the bottom. You bring that up, that's actually 50 meshes, it's probably 12 feet. And that's significant when the wind's blowing and you're trying, you're pursing and you're trying to hold the net and the wind's blowing and your net gets like this, that fish will just walk right out of it.

And I've seen it a number of times. I've seen it in places I fished with unlimited depths, 600 meshes for sockeyes. They'll flat disappear. You'll have fish jumping in the net, you're pursing, you're telling the crew we're in them and you get to into the net and where'd they go? They'll flat leave.

As far as the kings and the chums, 12 feet, you know, depths, I really, and I don't want to be argumentative or anything, but I really don't think it makes that big of a difference, the depth, because I've fished with 600 mesh nets as far as kings and chums go. It's not, it does make a difference. You'll lose, you won't get much with a We go to 350 and we're pretty much done. I think— I don't know if I could do it with the wind blowing in my boat. It catches a lot of wind.

It's really going to hurt. And I get it for other people, you know, it's other things people can't afford to nets, you know, and a lot of little boats like in Chignik, some of these guys, they can't pack a net that's that deep and big. And I get it, you know, I— but when you're fishing capes and strictly capes in the wind, And I don't want to keep going on this, but that's crucial. Like the one guy said, it really is. For me, it's going to hurt me.

I can't speak for everybody else, but you make me go 50 meters, the cost or whatever, I kind of agree with him. I could do it myself, but it's scary. That was the one proposal of everything that's out here that really, really freaked me out is losing that depth. That's a big, big deal.

Issue. That's all I got. Okay, no questions. Well, maybe the lead. I'll put in the lead.

I don't even use a lead. I've never used a lead. It's a pain. I watched it, and you're quicker if you can get your net back in the water again, and I've never used a lead, so that probably hurts a lot of people. They don't want to hear me say that, but we have another question for you now.

Are you using a power skiff? Excuse me? Are you using a power skiff when you're fishing? Yes. Okay.

Yes. Thank you. We'll go on to the next person.

Hi, this is Jamie Wirtz again. I just want to speak real quickly just to clarify the difference of districts and areas and fishing. I have seined all over the state of Alaska and seined in Washington, and I've used nets from 7.5 strips deep to 450 deep in Southeast, and, you know, I mean, I currently fish with a 350 deep net, but when Axel was talking a lot about his net depth and what he sees with fish diving and all the rest, I would say that when you're fishing a terminal harvest area, when you're fishing a bay or a lagoon close to that stream, fish act in a much different way. So You know, in August, especially late August, we're fishing, you know, pinks will be on the surface, right? And you can be in shallow and chums get spooky and they dive and they go down.

And sockeye, they are harder to catch. You got to purse faster, tow less time. In June, you're fishing traveling fish. So these fish are traveling. They're in tide streaks.

They're off Unimak. They are swimming. In a very similar water column. There is not— they are not acting like groups of diving chum. They're not acting like, you know, slippery sockeye.

They're not acting like a whole bunch of happy-go-lucky pinks. You're lucky to see a jump or two in your net in June. They are focused on moving. They're traveling quick. This net reduction is going to have the biggest effect on our own fishery, our own well-managed fishery that happens later in the month of the post-June fishery.

So thank you. That's all I have to say. Thank you, Jamie. Oh, we got a question for you, Jamie. Yes, sir.

Yeah, thanks, Jamie.

So if you were to lose these 50 meshes, I'm just kind of thinking this in a practical sense, because you're, you know, the way the net fishes and, you know, you probably won't be harvesting at the same rate. What do you think most fishermen would end up making more sets per day because of that?

I mean, theoretically, less gear in the water, you can haul back a little faster. In practice, the minute or so you might save per set, you know, maybe you're getting one extra set at the end of the day. Um, if you can haul back faster. Uh, I think one, one thing that I also did want to mention is, um, uh, our gears broke down, you know, in strips and the major body mesh size strip is 100 meshes deep. Um, part of the reason I have a 350 net, is a lot of us have 25 meshes of a heavier twine because that's what wears in your power block.

And anyone that's sained or know, you know, that's what your— gets worn the fastest. And then your body web comes ordered no matter who you get it from. It's gonna be 100 mesh strips. And then we run chafing gear, which is a floating web. At the bottom of your net that comes in 25 mesh strips as well.

Um, and that's to help float the web and stuff. So if your lead line ever does get close to the bottom, it doesn't catch and snag. Uh, 325 is a really awkward number to go to, uh, when people are explaining the cost. Uh, a lot of that is because you're going to have to take a bale of web and you're going to have to count up your 25 meshes and you're going to have to cut that with a knife, or you're going to have to order 3 bales or 3 bales of 25 and sew them all together. So that's where a lot of that, um, I think cost complaint is.

Yeah, I appreciate that. I'm just trying to look at the net benefit, um, you know, if you're losing depth and you're less efficient and that's going to force you to make more sets per day to make up for that inefficiency that you're used to, I'm trying to figure out if there's actually a net benefit there. So I appreciate it. Yeah, thank you. Okay, go ahead, Carlin.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Carlin Hoblet, for the record. Just to be brief, you know, it is absolutely imperative how a net is hung when it actually has to hang in the water column. So when you're in deeper water, I'm IRC'd a chart of Chignik Lagoon.

The deepest spot I could see on there is 8 fathoms. I can't imagine that a lot of nets used in that area are not dragging the bottom. So just trying to stress the importance of a correct net hanging when it's actually hanging. And it's a whole different— whole different parameters again. It's a different fishery.

Different results. Okay, thank you, Colin. Thank you. Yeah, Axel Copin here. I don't fish Chignik Lagoon.

My boat's too deep to be in there, so I fish out on the capes. Our early-run sockeye don't jump at all. Our late-run jump too much. You think you got a good set, you have about 5 fish, and every one of jumped. So this, this thing with, you know, the fish don't show and they're on their way on the Capes and stuff.

Yeah, they're moving.

I fish out on the Capes and I don't know if you guys know what chignik means, but it means big wind. It blows all the time. And I don't have a big steel seiner like the one guy that was up here talking about the wind going to blow him around. I know a couple of guys who do. They don't move much in the wind.

And it's screaming, it's blowing 45-50, and they're fine. They've got power skiffs, they got more power than most of the boats in Chignik. So this whole thing about the wind and the weather and stuff like that— a shallow net slows you down when you're hauling your gear, doesn't speed you up. You have to slow down or you'll purse over the fish. You have to be better at at keeping those fish in the seine and be better at pursing.

When you got a deep net, anybody can do it. You go in, you put the purse line on the winch. This isn't the old days where guys had to sit there and pull. It's a, it's a shiv like a crab block guys use. They put the purse line in there and they turn it wide open.

They got a gripper wheel on the power block and it's pulling like hell and you're pulling that seine in. And if you shallow that net up, it takes away your margin for error. I go out there and fish with that shallow net, I gotta be darn careful. It slows me down. I can make less sets in a day because I have to be careful or those fish will go underneath, even the ones I may be targeting.

So you have to slow down. So getting a shallower net, these guys will have to slow down a little bit and it'll actually reduce the number of sets they make in a day. It will not increase them unless they want to purse over the top of the fish. Thanks, Axel. Okay, we'll move on to the next one.

Next person.

Hello again, my name is Jim Smith. My son received his seine permit from his grandfather, and he gave us a smaller seine, which is one strip, which is what he's talking about here on that depth. And we went around for the last 2 years trying to catch as many fish as the guy next to us. We couldn't. It's about half as much.

And when we go to the liver and I pump, pump the tank out, it's mixed. It doesn't catch more reds. So all that's impossible.

Thank you. Okay, this is the last one and then we're going to go to the bathroom.

Tom Mannis. I fish big steel boats. I fish little plastic boats. I fish in wind. I fish in calm.

I fish 600-mesh deep nets in Puget Sound, 450-mesh deep nets in Southeast, 325-mesh nets in Prince William Sound.

I can hang a net. Like, I'm not— a lot of people don't hang a net. We don't have time to hang a net. The amount of time and energy it takes to have extra nets is a lot. You can make mistakes hanging nets.

This is going to cost you a lot of money. I—. It baffles me why we would even consider a proposal like this when the effort we take, and we have been able to take, to reduce our chum catch is striking. We've caught less than half in the last 3 years when we started this management, adaptive management. We've caught less than half of the chums.

If we want to catch less chums, we're figuring out how to do it. Gear reductions, especially imposed by people that don't know how to use the gear, all they're going to do is cost us money and make us inefficient.

Did you state your name? Tom, Tom Menos. Thanks, Tom. Any questions for Tom?

Thank you for coming up. Okay, we're going to take a real quickie here because we only have, uh, one more proposal to do, so Okay, all right, everybody, 3 more to go. And so the next proposal will be Proposal 152. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Jeff Smallinger, for the record. Proposal 152, 5AAC 09.332, same specifications and operations. Would anyone like to make comments on Proposal 152? Okay, seeing nobody getting up, we'll move on to Proposal 155. 154.

Proposal 154, 5AAC 27.610, Fishing Seasons and Periods for Alaska Peninsula Aleutian Islands Area. Would the author like to speak to this proposal 154? There we go. Taylor Lundgren again. I am— we've observed over the years a this biomass of herring.

So in 2023, I obtained a commissioner's permit through the Fish and Game, and we executed it and just had to wait for the opportunity to try to get a fishery. There was one other time where we submitted some samples during our test fishery, the amateur test fishery, So I'd like to see a fishery if we could.

Member Carpenter. Yeah, thanks, Taylor. So if I'm reading this right, is this broke up into 3 different areas? Is that— is that the way I'm reading it? Yeah, Mr. Carpenter, there's the King Cove District, the Pavlov District, and the Shoemaker Islands District.

Okay. And we were talking about what the department— like maybe 100 tons in each area just to get started, something conservative. And when you did the test— when you did the test fishery a couple years ago, was that something— well, I mean, what was the limit that you were allowed to try and harvest, and was it in each different area? No, no, we just, we just went out and At that time we were just trying local, you know, one area, the Shumagun Island District. But they've been observed in several other places in all the districts that I mentioned.

So I mean, in quite abundance really, but just hasn't been verified by the department. All right. Thank you. Yeah. Member Godfrey.

Yes. I appreciate you stating the tonnage because that's what I was looking for. So between the 3 areas, you're looking at about 300,000 tons as a conservative approach, and you have secured a buyer in the event this is adopted? 300 Tons, sir? I mean 300,000.

Thank you. Your number sounds better. I like it. You have to have a market, and yeah, we have a market. The other question I have is, was there historically any herring fishery there in the past?

Yeah, there was a sac roe fishery before and, and there was a bait fishery, but years ago. So like decades ago? Yeah. Thank you.

Yeah, go ahead, Mr. Member Swenson.

When you, when you fish for herring, Do you bycatch other stuff? No. I mean, they're pretty specific. In my experience, I mean, yeah. Okay.

Yeah, it's pretty clean fishing. Thank you. How many people got a commissioner's permit to go out and test this with you? It was just me. Before me, it was one other boat that had participated in the Dutch Harbor fishing fishery the year before, so they didn't, they didn't take out take the opportunity to fish the commissioner's permit.

So I kind of took it over just out of curiosity.

All right, thank you, Taylor. Seeing there's no more questions, appreciate it. Yeah. All right, now we can move on to, uh, you want to stop in for anything, Art? Proposal 188.

Oh, you want to subnote there? I just wanted to support— is it 188, the Dutch Harbor fishery as well? Yeah, would you state your name and we're moving on? Why don't you let them read it into the books first? Okay.

Oh, don't move. No, I'm sorry, the department needs to read it into the books and then you'll be the first to comment. Just hold your spot. Proposal 188, 5AAC 27.865, Bristol Bay Herring management plan. Okay, Taylor, it's your turn.

For the record, Taylor Lundgren. I'm in support of this proposal.

Thank you. Thank you.

Good afternoon, Mr. Chair. John Jensen. I'm the one that started this all out. A while back and it became a board-generated proposal.

Now it's Proposal 188, and now it's further refined, found in RC 169. It was a draft. The draft was RC 158 by BBDC, and now the current— it's in legal language, it's found in RC 169. And my group supports this and we're happy with how it came out. We talked to just about everybody that could be or may be involved in it, and we've come up with a pretty good consensus.

There may be somebody that doesn't know what's going on yet that might be against it, but everybody that I've been dealing with this whole time became in favor of this. Thank you. Thank you for your— thanks for listening.

Mr. Chair, Tony Zuck, BBEDC. So we originally were opposed to Proposal 188 as written. I suppose we still are. We did submit RC-156, which it looks like is now the language in 169.

There's a few things that went into this. We were looking at the 15% and thought that maybe, maybe was a little bit too much, landed on 10. It's my understanding, and I'm not an expert, that roughly 75% of the herring harvested in the Dutch Harbor food and bait fishery is Togiak stocks. So that leaves about 25% that aren't necessarily Togiak Herring. So we thought we might want to consider those as well.

And then reducing the— when the Togiak District reaches their— excuse me, I'm sorry, I lost my place. But when they achieved 80% of the GHL, we reduce that from 90 to 80. We thought this is probably the most important part because then that quota doesn't go away forever from the Togiak fishery. So if there is a fishery in Togiak, we still maintain the ability to harvest that as much as we, we can. Mr.

Chair, great, thank you. Any questions? Thanks, Tony. Thank you.

For the record, Frank Woods, um, speaking on behalf of Proposal 188 in reference to RC-169. The majority of the people I talked to, except for the Village of Togiak, the traditional council put in a proposal similar that would ratify this decision today. Then delineation of the percentages and harvest rates were outlined pretty straightforward. Right now they get 7.5%. It'll increase to 10% and then ratchet down when— as soon as we develop a fishery or start commercially fishing in Togiak, it'll go back to original 7.5%.

The problem I have with that is, is We haven't had a biomass estimate in 4 years, and it sounds like ADFNG is gonna do an aerial survey just to get a biomass estimate. The second thing is it's gonna take probably 3 years to get an accurate age class composition, kind of a more detailed biomass count. And then with that, in the next 3 years, there's going to be rates of, I would say, increase for the North Pacific is requesting an increase. This 10% also gives an increase. And right now we have like a 30% ratchet down of biomass estimates.

So in my eyes, as a, as a user participant, that's a 50% decrease in the total bycatch or biomass.

The answer is, as I sat on a, um, with the Commercial Fishers Entry Commission and this board, I would advise or help or present reinitiating the Herring Revitalization Group. Because right now, this, this proposal brought together 8 villages In the next round, we want to represent Togiak's traditional harvest area, including Kalukuk section, for— and, and that's, that's in the future. So this is, this is a proposal brought everything back to light for this board to recognize we need an exploitation rate of a minimum of 30% for the region. If it goes back to 7, that's 37%, and we could divide the rest up to everybody else. So interesting.

It brought, it brought our villages together. But this proposal and SRC, we forgot to include Togiak and traditional council at Togiak. We have members here. They're in agreement but disagreement that they weren't included. So thank you.

Thank you, Frank. Any questions? Nope. Move next.

Yeah, my name is Jimmy Hurley from Mekwakw. I want to say I oppose this allocation, $188 million. You know, people along the Nushtak River, we barter with Togiak we get whitefish and pike, and we barter with Herring Row on kelp and seal oil. That's pretty nutritional for people who live a subsistence life, so I can't see a fisheries that you trade good food for bait. You know, look in front of what you have.

I mean, it's a shame to to whoever's proposing this, but, you know, I just have one voice on this and it's I totally oppose this. I mean, you know, we've been doing this for years. I have relatives in Togiak. I trade. And, you know, and that's all I have to say.

Thank you. Thank you.

Again, my— for the record, my name is Moses Kritz, and I'm from Togiak. And I turned 26 at 76 a few months back. And for the record, I don't— I'm not educated enough to do any numbers, but I am an elder and educated to know what's happening in our areas in terms of salmon and in terms of herring.

I'm not sure whose shoulders I need to cry on anymore because of our resources. We're losing our resources. Over in Togiak, they've taken away our fishing areas where we fished in the past for salmon. A lot of our salmon are, our chum salmon and king salmon are missing now.

And currently we've seen a great decline on herring.

Like I said before, I'm 76 right now, and I know where— what I see in my area. And I've seen not just our human consumption of the herring, but also the animal that feeds on the herring. Are starting to— we're starting to see decline. And for instance, one seal, bearded seal, it's now missing from Togiak. And like I said, I'm not sure whose shoulders I need to cry on anymore.

We're going to be losing 15% again to Area M. Why?

And you know why.

And that is our, one of our main food sources that we anticipate before the arrival of herring. We are currently anticipating the arrival of the herring, the roe, and roe-on kelp. And we put it away and share it amongst our families or make trades to other communities. Thank you. Thank you.

We have a question for you, Moses. Member Erwin. Yeah, thank you, Moses, for coming up and sharing with us during Committee of the Whole. You said you've been noticing bearded seals missing from Togiak. How long have you been noticing that trend?

Approximately, approximately 4 years, 4+ years. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you.

Okay, Peter.

Yeah, my name is Pete Dangoson. This is a really delicate situation, I see, 188. I've been tossing in my brain on how to do it, and I was talking to some of my people I work with and they offered an amendment to 169. As long as we don't— I don't want to see the people lose what they have, but I like to see that if we could make it work, you know, 169, but the people don't lose their allocation. The people really depend on it.

That's all. Thank you. Thank you, Peter.

Hello, Carlin Howard for the record. I just like to state that I support the utilization of a resource. I was told that with the current allocation, with the current proposed allocation, it would be equal less than 1% of the proposed biomass. And I, I have participated in the Togiak fishery in the past, and it's a vast area with a large biomass, the last time I was there anyway. So I, in my opinion, I, I can't see how a biomass of its size could affect subsistence fishing.

Thank you, Carlin. Any questions? All right. Thank you. Well, thank you.

Looks like we'll just wrap this up. Got off to a little glitch, but just ended smoothly. So pass the gavel back to our chair. Well done, Mr. Wood. Thank you very much.

Appreciate you walking us through that group. It's just about 4 o'clock, and I'd like people to have the opportunity to work on substitute language, if any. If you are going to work on substitute substitute language, please get with staff and let them know. That will help us sort of decide who needs to be where. I would ask that staff don't run out the door too quickly and that we check in with each other and give us a chance to check in with any stakeholders in that space too.

So if you are working on substitute language, please do it sooner than later so that we can get right to work with deliberations tomorrow morning. On Committee of the Wholes Group 1 and 2. So, um, if all works as planned, we will come back at 8:30 and begin deliberations on Groups 1 and 2 tomorrow morning. All right, thank you much. See you tomorrow.