News - Local News

POSTED: Monday, Aug. 17, 2009

Vital sockeye run looks bad again for Lummi fishers

The Fraser River sockeye salmon runs, the biggest local moneymaker for commercial fishing in good years, appear to have collapsed again in 2009.

Although some hope remains that the fish may still arrive late in large enough numbers to permit a commercial fishery, the chances of that appear to be fading, said Merle Jefferson, natural resources director for Lummi Nation.

"There's going to be no fishery unless there's a miracle, unless they're real, real late," Jefferson said.

While many local non-Indian fishers now make most or all of their money in Alaska, the Lummi fishing fleet of five purse seiners and about 150 gillnetters relies heavily on sockeye for both money and food. If no sockeye fishery materializes this year, it would be the third straight year of little or no sockeye catch in local waters.

"It's getting hard to justify being a fisherman," Jefferson said. "Sockeye is our bread and butter."

Earlier in 2009, biologists had estimated that sockeye would return by the millions to the Fraser and its tributaries this season. Four years ago, when the parents of the 2009 fish were spawning in the Fraser system, biologists reported a good spawning season, and two years ago they measured a healthy output of two-year-old smolts heading for the ocean, leading to predictions of a bumper 2009 fishery.

But now, based on test nettings of fish on the approaches to the fishing grounds, that estimate is down to a mere 600,000. That's nowhere near enough. The binational Pacific Salmon Commission, charged with setting fishing seasons at levels that ensure perpetuation of healthy runs, won't allow any fishing unless there is a dramatic upswing.

For Lummi Nation, the sockeye fishery means more than income.

"We have a dietary need for salmon," Jefferson said. "A lot of people get their fish and can them for wintertime. We can't even do that."

In a press release issued Friday, Aug. 14, the commission said something went wrong between 2007, when the juvenile fish moved into the salt water by the millions, and summer of this year, when a tiny fraction of those fish began their return migration as adults. But commission biologists aren't ready to hazard a guess on what that something was.

"The scientists are scratching their heads right now," Jefferson said.

The sockeye collapse also affects non-Indian fishers like Riley Starks of Lummi Island, who in a normal year would reefnet sockeye, market them via the Lummi Island Wild cooperative, and serve them at his restaurant at the Willows Inn.

Starks said he hasn't given up all hope for a massive, late surge of sockeye toward the Fraser River. He finds it hard to believe that millions of fish could disappear in the ocean, when all signs pointed to a bumper crop until recently.

"The projection right now is so low it's off the charts," Starks said. "It doesn't make sense. ... If this is a collapse, this is going to run shockwaves through the Fraser management system."

Starks and other local salmon fishers could still earn some income off Fraser River pink salmon, which return in odd-numbered years. The salmon commission press release said it's too early to assess the health of the 2009 pink run, since their spawning migration would not be expected to peak until later in August.

Starks hopes that the pink harvest will be big enough to tide fishers over for one more year.

"That could save us," he said.