The question has been out there all season. Will there be enough king salmon arriving at their spawning grounds this summer? A state biologist says that he thinks so.
“By no means am I saying the run was great. It’s still a below average run, and the only reason we are seeing these escapements is because of the sacrifice and the patience that the subsistence fishermen had this year,” said Aaron Tiernan, Kuskokwim River Manager for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.
He presented the news to the Kuskokwim River Salmon Management Working Group on Wednesday. Tiernan says that king salmon escapement into Kuskokwim tributaries are meeting the mid to lower end of the range that the state estimates is needed to ensure sustainable returns and a robust subsistence fishery.
Reaching those goals required what some people are referring to as the most restrictive fishing the Kuskokwim has ever seen; something that Tiernan calls necessary.
“I think that the management actions that were in place were proper and adequate to ensure that we at least met our escapement goals at the tributary levels,” he said.
Until recently, meeting king salmon escapement seemed improbable to impossible. Data from sonar and test fisheries indicated that there weren’t enough kings in the water.
Tiernan says that the sonar project is in its first year and the kinks are still being worked out, but that the test fisheries ran smoothly. He doesn’t know why the numbers from earlier in the season appeared too low to meet the escapement that they’re now seeing.
“It’s one of the things we’re going to look at post-season and try to come up with an answer," said Tiernan, "but right now we don’t have a definitive answer to why that is.”
Now that enough Kuskokwim kings have entered tributaries to begin spawning, the state is lifting restrictions on the river’s main-stem beginning at noon on Thursday, July 27.
