Just A Small Fishery

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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . But with the collapse of many of the world's high-seize herring fisheries and with the extension of American territorial waters out to the 200 mile mark in 1976, Alaska's bearing sea coast began to attract considerable attention. Prior to that, the several herring grounds along the bearing sea coast had experienced only a very modest commercial industry, coupled with

an even smaller personal consumption or subsistence herring fishery. In quick succession, however, between 1976 and 1979, commercial herring fisheries in Togiak, Good News Bay, Security Cove, and Norton Sound began producing large tonnages of herring row. Then, in 1980, through the efforts of fishermen from three small coastal villages, the fifth commercial herring fishery in western Alaska was begun in Coke Chick Bay near Cape Ramanza. This is a story of that unique fishery. It's still midwinter in Scamenvale, Alaska, close to where the Yukon River spills into the bearing sea. But to members of the local Stochnotic Fisherman's cooperative,

it's not too early to begin thinking about one of the area's great spring migrations, the rush of herring from their ocean home into the spawning grounds of Coke Chick Bay, just south of Cape Ramans off. Although the herring have been returning to Coke Chick Bay to spawn for thousands of years, local fishermen have only recently shown an interest in their activities. The spurred on by the obvious success enjoyed by neighboring herring fisheries, and with the help of two regional fishermen's advocacy groups, villagers from Hooper Bay, Chivak, and Scamenvale began in 1978 to seriously plan for the development of their own commercial fishery. As a first step, the villagers created the Coke Chick Fishing Corporation to act as the middle man between the fishermen and the state. Seed money for the fishery was provided by the Alaska Renewable Resources Corporation, an enterprise funding state agency that loan Coke Chick Corporation $300,000. Under terms of the loan agreement, the Stochnotic Fisherman's cooperative retained a majority, 51% share of the newly created

Coke Chick Corporation, while the state held the remaining 49%. With their yearly earnings from the herring fishery, the villagers are slowly repaying the loan and purchasing the state's interest in Coke Chick. Now, in January 1984, after four years of ever-increasing success, members of the fishing cooperative from Hooper Bay and Chivak have come to Scamenvale by snow machine to discuss the upcoming herring season, and to meet with Bob Bingham representing sea row fisheries, the herring processor with whom the fishermen have had a contract for the past two seasons. The price the processor will pay to the villagers during the 1984 season is of the utmost concern to the fishermen. But with the primary market for the finished row product located several thousand miles away in Japan, it's often difficult for village fishermen to keep on top of all the factors that help determine the price. As chairman of the board of Coke Chick Corporation and himself one of the more active herring fishermen, Joe Paniac of Chivak is well aware of the

unpredictability of the market. The price fluctuates like in our first year, the price was very low and in our second year it was a little better than in our third year it went down again and this last season it was better. It's kind of hard to tell this conversation because of the reports that we've been herring from other areas. Although the fishermen this year as every year are hoping for an increase in the price they will receive for their 1984 catch, Bingham explains the considerations the processor ways as he negotiates with the fishermen. Well for 1984 I would propose the same terms of contract that you have for 1983. We don't know what the market conditions are going to be at this time. You don't expect them

to be any better than 1983 and there's a possibility that there may be some weakening of the market but that is too early at this point to know with any certainty just what may develop from that. There is one aspect the fishermen in San Francisco are receiving somewhat less than we received last year at the beginning of the fishery but it is very very early this time it's too early to tell. These talks are strictly preliminary. The actual per ton price the processor will pay the fishermen for his catch will not be settled here in scamming bay but on the herring grounds immediately prior to the opening of the commercial season. As events later revealed the negotiated price hammered out between the two sides was at the upper range of prices received in 1984 by all fishermen along the western Alaskan coastline. Three months later with the start up of herring season only a few weeks away fishermen and chivec began to organize their own yearly

migration. They trekked to the coast. We have to prepare our boats every year, like to paint them in two and a power outboard motors and get ready to go. Many of these 23 foot wooden boats were built by the villagers themselves with money from the elastory renewable resources alone. Together the expertise needed to fashion these skiffs. Each of the three villages selected a single master carpenter who in 1979 was sent to court towns in Washington to the Admiralty boat works to learn the craft of boat building. The skiffs were designed in Washington and then sent in pieces back to Alaska where the three carpenters, Paniac, Sebastian Casale of scamming bay and Harvey Joe of Hooper Bay helped 30 interested villagers build their own boats during the first two years of the commercial herring fishery. Take some energy like if you're living here

in chivec you have to hardly approach down to the Hooper Bay which is about 15 miles by snow machine. This year there has been little snow during the winter. The trip to Hooper Bay therefore is slowed as the snow machine pulled boats have to traverse sketches of barren tundra. All fishing and camping gear food for several weeks as well as drums of gasoline must be hauled

down at this time. Once in Hooper Bay the fishermen have to wait until the sea ice breaks up before they can attempt to span the 25 mile open ocean passage separating them from Coptic bay. The typical part is when you have to go into the open water and go into your fishing ground because the weather is kind of hard to predict you know sometimes when the south wind hits you know and there you hate to be out here in the open water especially when you have a smaller skipper. Happily for the fishermen the spring of 1984 was an unusually mild one on the

bearing sea coast making the run to the herring grounds relatively easy. Each village has its favorite site for setting up camp. For the fishermen from Chivac the northern end of the bay is where they traditionally pitch their tents for a bivouac that might run as long as two weeks depending on the arrival time of the herring and the strength or weakness of the run. Understanding only too well the potential power of the wind driven waves even in the semi protection of the bay. The Chivac fishermen pitch their camps high on the slopes of the neighboring cliffs. Villagers from Scammon tend to arrive later in the fishery and camp further south along the interior shoreline of Coptic bay. Scammon bay fishermen also participate in the black river

commercial salmon runs. Consequently they are not as dependent on Coptic herring. But for the villagers from Hooper Bay and Chivac the money earned from fishing herring at Coptic Bay represents one of their major sources of revenue. Although more than one million dollars has been earned by Coptic Bay fishermen since 1980 much of that money has gone to pay back the Alaska Renewable Resource Corporations loan leading the remainder to the fishermen. It helps each fisherman because they helped them financially. It's not much you know but it helps. It benefits especially these two really it's like Chivac and Hooper Bay. Once camp has been established the waiting game begins. Waiting for the herring to arrive. Waiting for the resource managers to survey the biomass, the total amount of herring on the fishing grounds and finally waiting for the fish to begin to group before their rush to the coast to spawn. The Coptic Bay fishery like all commercial fisheries

in the state is regulated by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. In the late 1970s fishing games close monitoring of Coptic Bay herring demonstrated that the local stocks were strong enough to sustain a commercial harvest. That information paved the way for the decision by the state board of fish to open the bay. Fish and Game biologist Mike Geiger who has been intimately involved in the Coptic Bay fishery since its inception talks about his agency's many activities on the herring grounds. We have basically three people out here monitoring the commercial fishery. We also doing spawning ground work we're going along to beaches and measuring the amount of herring spawner eggs that's deposited on the futures or seaweed. And also we do test fishing to sample the run to determine the age sex and size composition of the population and also measure rope percentages and the maturity of the herring as they come in the spawn.

273. Biologists Craig Whitmore and Steve Clach measure the size weight age and sex of a sampling of herring taken in one of Fish and Games' test myths. 262. Five male. Another aspect of Fish and Games' work involves assessing the amount of row deposited by the herring on rocks and on kelp revealed at low tide. Although a single female may deposit as many as 60,000 eggs, the mortality rate of the row can be phenomenal. Of the millions of eggs deposited along the interior shores of Coptic Bay this season, Fish and Game estimates that only 10% survived. Codfish, birds, and water snails feast on the row. Warm weather, strong tides,

or lack of oxygen can all work against the survival of the fish eggs. Despite five years of data taken from herring fisheries all along the bearing sea coast, much of the life of these fish still remains hidden. We have late rounds early rounds in a herring, a very unpredictable compared to salmon. Fish and Games' primary responsibility is to ensure the conservation of the species, so that the herring of Coptic Bay do not suffer the same fate as the high seas stocks that were overfished by the Soviets and Japanese in the 1970s. At the same time, fishermen must be allocated a harvest guideline that encourages them to participate in the fishery. How to protect the herring stocks while at the same time allowing fishermen the opportunity to make a livelihood is the key issue for Fish and Game. Knowing the approximate tonnage of herring that has entered the bay to spawn is central to resolving the conservation allocation dilemma. This

year's clear skies and calm waters allowed Fish and Games staff an unprecedented opportunity to count the biomass. Well, one of the problems that remains off is that most years though, the waters are muddy and we can't use conventional methods to assess the biomass or the population size. Most areas they use aerial surveys to make estimates of the herring population. Fans off usually muddy, but this year with quite fortunate to do the absence of snowmelt off which has reduced the turbidity. Plus, we had exceptionally good weather. We'd be able to do a couple surveys this year, primarily on the north side with the waters more clear. And we four days ago, we kind of 3,300 metric tons on the north side and the next day we kind of about load 100 metric tons. This is a special announcement to keep her man's off district carrying fishermen on the

Alaska Department of Fish and Games. The commercial herring fishing season will open on 8 a.m. Thursday, May 31st, and continue to further notice the Department of Fish and Games test fishing and spawning ground surveys indicate that a harvest pool, surplus of herring is now available in a caper man's off. Caper man's off district herring fishermen are encouraged to contact the Department of Fish and Games crew at their camp near the Air Force Road as they have any questions regarding regulations or other fishery matters. Again, to repeat the caper man's off district herring fishery will open to commercial herring fishing began at 8 a.m. Thursday, May 31st, and we'll continue to further notice this has been a special announcement to keep her man's off district herring fishermen on Alaska Department of Fish and Games. Joe Paniac and two of his brothers-in-law, Pius and Roger Navalja, are up early that morning and head toward the herring grounds. Another brother-in-law, Dion and Navalja and nephew Andrew Paniac operate the family's other skiff.

Pius, who has not fished herring before, is assisted by Joe in setting the first of their two nets. With the 300-foot net buoyed and anchored at both ends, the fishermen set out for a second likely spot. Returning later to the initial site, Joe and Pius lift the net to assess the strength of

her run. Not satisfied that the run has peaked, the fishermen decide to delay pulling in the net. Later in the morning, noticing increased activity just below the surface of the water, the men set to work, calling in the net and shaking out the contents onto the deck of the boat. A herring fisherman's dream, a clug of net.

More and more fishermen are attracted to this part of the bay, so that in a few hours, the waters are strewn with nets. Even as fishermen are hauling in a full load, the emptied net is being reset off the other side of the skiff. With his boat loaded to the gunnels, Paniac moves out into the bay's deeper waters, where the processing ships await. Coming alongside, fishermen must wait in line to deliver their catch. During the first year of the fishery, that weight could stretch into many hours as the fishermen themselves had to hand shovel the herring into huge nets or brailers. But more recently,

the crew of the processing ship has been given the job of vacuuming the herring into the mother ships, reducing the weight to only a few minutes. While the herring are being transferred to the mother ship, fishermen bore the processor to take care of other important business. The agreement with Seerow extends beyond the normal buying and selling of raw herring. Seerow sells the fishermen outboard motors, fuel, nets, anchors, and other equipment at reduced prices, bringing all of the ordered goods to the herring grounds just before the start of the season. Seerow deducts the cost of these items from the fishermen's earnings. In return, the stochnotic fishermen agree to sell their herring to Seerow. This type of contract is common in western Alaskan herring fisheries. The agreement helps the fishermen by providing them with easy access to much needed equipment. The fishermen further benefit by being able to count on the processor showing up on the herring grounds. In 1984, the stochnotic fishermen took full advantage of the convenient purchase plan offered by Seerow

buying more than $100,000 worth of equipment. With his catch neatly transferred to the processing ship, a fisherman sends up his Department of Fish and Game Permit card to have the weight of his catch and the row percentage recorded. Fishermen are paid according to the weight of row in a sample of herring taken from the catch, a sample of 100 pounds of herring, for instance, that yields 10 pounds of row is known as 10% row. At the end of the 1984 season, based upon an average row count of 8.6% processors paid out just over $305,000 for herring caught in Coptic Bay. All but a small fraction of that figure was paid to the men of the stochnotic fishing cooperative. The villagers were able to enjoy the lion's share of the profits this year, due to a ruling made by the Alaska Board of Fisheries during a December 1982 meeting. At that meeting, a delegation of villagers and fishermen advocates came before the board to

complain about what they considered to be the unfair competition offered by larger, more well-equipped fishing boats from outside the area. Those vessels came into Coptic Bay and harvested a major portion of the resource during the first two years of the fisheries existence. The fishermen explained that the small size of the fishery, compared to other herring grounds on the baron coast, called for extraordinary measures by the board. Comparing duties to other areas like Norton Sound for Toolkit, kind of a kite line is something like 3 to 5,000, you know, and we have only 350 metric ton kite by a million folks of food. It's a very small fishery. The board agreed with the fishermen, concluding that as the Coptic Bay herring fishery represents a major source of income for residents from the three villages, the Capra Manzoth herring grounds should be made into an exclusive registration area fishery on a two-year trial basis. So beginning in the spring

of 1983, anyone who registered for the Coptic Bay herring fishery had the fish there and nowhere else in Alaska, and any fisherman who worked herring at any other Alaskan herring fishery during the 1983 and 1984 seasons was prohibited by regulation from entering Coptic Bay to work. Exclusive registration has apparently been successful for the herring fishermen of Coptic. The first two years we operated, we weren't, we weren't really too successful. The exclusive registration area is to help the local fishermen just to fish in that area. After having harvested only a third of the herring taken during the initial 1980 season, the local fishermen were able to take 88% of the herring caught in 1983 and almost 100% of the harvest in 1984. The 1984 herring season marked the end of Coptic Bay's two-year trial period as an exclusive registration area. If the villagers hoped to renew the exclusive registration

designation, they will have to go before the board of fish once again to convince that body of the need for maintaining the fishery special status. For Joe Paniac, there is no question they may need. It is important to be an exclusive registration area for hosts because it's just a small fishery.