The Port Moller Test Fishery is a one-of-a-kind research tool and an essential part of the Bristol Bay commercial fishing season. Located roughly 200 miles southwest of the Bristol Bay fishery, it’s been running in some form since 1967. Two research vessels fish up to 13 stations, sampling the catch each day to help inform fishing fleets, processors and managers and assess the run size and timing.
KDLG’s Jessie Sheldon checked in with Jordan Head, former fisheries technician now director of the test fishery. It’s run by the Bristol Bay Science and Research Institute, with funding support from processors and the Bristol Bay Regional Seafood Development Corporation, or BBRSDA.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
KDLG: Thanks for joining us, Jordan.
Jordan Head: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me.
KDLG: So for new listeners, can you tell us what the Port Moller Test Fishery is, and why it's important for folks out on the water?
Head: Yeah, so the Port Moller Test Fishery has a pretty long history. But essentially, what it is, it's a snapshot into the future. So Port Moller Test Fishery operates by going out on about 24 different stations that start about 10 to 20 miles offshore of Port Moller, and go all the way out to Hagemeister Island by the Togiak district. And what happens is they fish about a 30 minute drift gill net set at each of these stations on a daily basis. And as you can see, on a day to day basis, we might fish less than others due to weather and where the fish are different things like that. But we get catch per unit effort information, and that's what you see in those daily reports. In addition, we're sampling fish for age, sex and length information, as well as genetics. And about every two days or so, us with the Department of Fish and Game are able to put out the genetic analysis of what fish were caught over the previous two days. So that gives fishermen, managers, industry about a seven day window into what's coming to the Bristol Bay districts. That's the main goal of the Port Moller Test Fishery is to be an early warning system for the bay as to what's coming over the next week.
KDLG: And can you talk a little bit more about the Port Moller genetic testing? I know that that's something that's now being done on board as of the last couple of years, is that sampling process staying on board this season?.
Head: Yeah, so historically, what happened was, we had vessels out there fishing, they would come into Port Moller drop off samples that we'd have to get plane charters to get those to the lab in Anchorage. The genetic data wouldn't come out til three, four days later. So you'd only really have a two to three day snapshot of what was to come. BBSRI and the ADF&G lab did a lot of work to see if we could start doing genetic analysis on the vessel. So a couple years ago, we went live. And we did them both on the vessel and in the lab as kind of a cross check. And those experiments went really well. And so last year, we went full onboard genetics only. We've continued that into this year. So we have a connex on one of the vessels that we have turned into a genetics laboratory, it has all the genetics equipment in there. And each time the boats meet up, all the samples are transferred from to that boat with the connex on it, the lab. We communicate with the Department of Fish and Game laboratory, we come up with an experimental design for each run of genetics. Then we have technicians on the boat in the lab who go ahead and run that and then send that information over to the Department of Fish and Game for the final analysis. So that's been going on the boat for three years now. It's been fully done on the boat for the last two, including this year. And that has taken the timeframe from when the fish are collected to when the genetics are released, from I think it averaged around three days this year, we've been averaging about one day after the genetics are collected from the fish where those results are being released.
KDLG: Got it, so after last year being your first year of doing, you know all the genetic testing onboard, is there anything you're changing this year for your sampling?
Head: No, most of the tweaks and adjustments came the year before when we were kind of lining everything out and making sure everything worked. And this year is pretty much business as usual with a couple exceptions we've just as far as logistics go, who's on call when we've had to make a couple of minor adjustments to things just to be more available throughout the whole day if the boats don't meet up early enough in the day, and they meet up later in the evening and adjusting some of those things, but by and large, the whole protocol on the boat is, is the same as last year.
KDLG: Can you talk a little bit more about the catch indices and what those numbers mean? There's up to 12 different stations with nets out on a given day, so what a catch is in those different stations mean?
Head: Yeah, so the cash indices, what they mean is, it's the catch per unit of effort. And so on Port Moller, that's standardized to catches in one hour in a 200, fathom gillnet. But we may not always fish for a full hour. Typically, we actually fish for less time than that, and our sets are about a half an hour. And then you have to expand that to be what would catch in a full hour. And the reason that we don't do a full hour every time is I think a lot of fishermen can attest to out there, if you have really a lot of fish passing by your net can saturate with fish pretty quickly, and you don't catch as many as time goes on. So what we were seeing is, the indices would grow, and then they would kind of plateau. And that means that your nets are saturated and it's not really capable of catching more fish. And a lot of fish will, instead of running into the net and getting caught, they'll see a bunch of fish in that net and start avoiding it. So what we did several years back is we reduced the amount of time the net is in the water. And that allows for indices to have a higher potential peak, because they're not getting saturated during that half an hour. So what you're seeing in the indices is not necessarily the number of fish that were caught. It's the number of fish that would have been caught had that net been fished for an hour.
KDLG: Thank you for breaking that down and then what do the different stations mean?
Head: Yeah, station two is about 20 miles out offshore Port Moller. And then every ten miles there's a station, right. So when we talk about station two, then station four, station six, those correspond station to being closest to Port Moller. Station 24 is all the way across Bristol Bay, by Hagemeister island. So they're kind of going from southwest to northeast, Station 2 up to 24. And there's a transect, straight transect line that goes all the way across the bay, and so the boats will start on the outside at Station 2 and 22. And they'll work their way towards each other on one day. They'll meet up in the middle around station 12, which is right in the middle of the bay. And then they'll work their way back out the next day fishing those stations.
KDLG: So within the Port Moller Test Fishery, how many vessels are operating this summer?
Head: Currently we have the R/V Ocean Cat, and that boat has been fishing for with the Port Moller Test Fishery for about five years. Also this year we have the R/V Miss Leona where the genetics lab is located. And it's that boat’s first year, this year, So each boat fishes about four to six stations per day. So in order to fish 12 to 14 stations. These are big research vessels, you know, they’re 90 plus feet and they don't move real fast. So there's a lot of ground to cover out there, so it requires two vessels. It can take them an hour or more depending on whether to get from one station to the next.
KDLG: Right, and with all of the fisheries data that's collected in season, what kinds of research and analysis are done over the winter?
Head: So the Port Moller Test Fishery is primarily an in-season tool for industry and management. Every year we go through and we look at one, ways to improve it. Ways that we can get a little more information out of the test fishery. There's an annual report each year, which can be found on our website where Scott (Raborn) goes through, he does a lot of analysis, looking at patterns of water temperature, and how that may have affected fish migration patterns. How the fish entered every year run timing type things, and there's a lot of good information and those reports which can be found on the Port Moller Test Fishery page at the BBSRI website.
KDLG: Okay, so in summary, looking at things like the run timing and water temperature, like you mentioned, what were the significant findings about last year's run?
Head: Last year was interesting, because something happened to catchability, about midway through the year. There was a pretty big shift in water temperature, about halfway through the year where those inside stations were. We had a lot of fish on the inside stations early on, and it shifted towards the outside stations. And we're trying to correlate that to how water temperature was changing. But also, in the middle of the year last year, we noticed that indices dropped, and that didn't correlate to what showed up in-shore. And so that's in the kind of the annual review report, we try to document things like that that go on and hypothesize as to why that could happen. We think that kind of water temperature basically caused fish to be swimming a little bit deeper. And the catchability of fish dropped, and so therefore the indices dropped. It wasn't that those fish weren't there. They were just going deep and under the nets. And we fish pretty deep nets out there, about 100 mesh deep net.
KDLG: Wow, so was that shift to warmer water midway through the season?
Head: Yeah, the water was warmed up. As the season went on, and fish seemed to be swimming a little deeper, and some of them were getting underneath the nets at times last year. But overall the genetic component of the project worked really well, and it corresponded very well to what showed up in the district. This year, the water temperatures are much colder and much more uniform across the entire Port Moller transect. And we've been seeing indices that have been tracking very well with what's showing up in-shore.
KDLG: Okay, and what does it mean when there are discrepancies between catch index data and what shows up in the districts?
Head: That's the million dollar question. Yeah, that's been challenging to find out over the years, sometimes it tracks very well and the catchability of fish at Port Moller doesn't change throughout the season. You see a very good correlation between what shows up in-shore, and what was caught at the test fishery. There's other years like last year, where something happened about midway through and catchability changed, and all of a sudden, it didn't line up very well. And those are things that happened from a year to year basis. And those are the kinds of things we look at over winter to try and see what could have happened, and how we can adjust our operations to make sure those things don't happen again and provide a really good tool for the industry and managers.
KDLG: Right. So alongside escapement numbers and harvest numbers from the districts, every day we're reading out catch indices data and stock composition from Port Moller's test fishery. Anything in particular folks should look out for in these numbers this season?
Head: I think one important thing that's been going on this year is we can see that the age classes coming in are much older. We've had a lot of three ocean fish, both one threes and two threes caught in Port Moller. And that seems to be what's showing up in-shore as well. And with that, with older fish, comes a little bit bigger fish. So even though the run looks to be coming in, right around forecast, those fish are larger on average than they were last year. So that does mean a slightly bigger run, if that makes sense. The fish will come in about on forecast, but the age class is a little bit different. So we could be seeing a little more poundage than we were expecting, based on the forecast.
KDLG: Anything else unusual in the data that you're seeing that's different from past years so far?
Head: I think what's unusual is we've gone through a series of years over the last several years where we were looking at records on a daily basis, it seems like. Things seem to have calmed down a little bit more and seem to be coming in a little more normal this year. I think we're looking at a run that's tracking pretty well to be right around forecast, and probably peak inshore around the 6th or 7th of July, which would be pretty average run timing. So nothing super unusual about the data other than age classes a little bit different than what was predicted.
Another unusual thing, we posted in our updates the other day that we intercepted a UAV glider drone in the middle of the Bering Sea. I think we confused people a little bit on that. So I kind of wanted to clear the record on that if I could. Yeah, so I think how that was written a lot of people thought we may have caught that in the nets, or just intercepted it. But the University of Alaska Fairbanks reached out to us and asked us if we'd be willing to recover one of their drones in the Bering Sea for them. And so they were able to steer that drone towards our boat on the transect, and we were able to recover it for them. It wasn't something an accidental catch. It was a planned and well executed catch by the captain out there. And that'll be returned to the university after the season once the vessels get back to Dutch Harbor.
KDLG: Cool, and what kind of data was that collecting?
Head: So I believe that was what they call a glider drone, and essentially it motors around on preset transects around the Bering Sea. And they have tagged crab, hydroacoustic tagged crab, and they were looking for those tags. And so that was kind of the essence of their study tracking crab movement through the Bering Sea through use of tags. That glider drone was going around and receiving that tag information and who's going to report that back home.
KDLG: That is so cool. Thank you so much Jordan.
Head: Yeah, absolutely.
