Every year, the state sets a range of projected sockeye salmon that will ideally evade a fisherman’s net bound for upstream spawning grounds in order to sustain the fishery. Often, kings are swimming hidden among the surging sockeye, like needles in a writhing, riverine haystack. In the hopes that more king salmon may survive to see the lakes upstream, Sands also explained that the Nushagak King action plan widens the season's total escapement goal range by 15% of the forecasted run. They’re called optimal escapement goals and they mean that if the sustainable escapement goal was 900,000, the optimal goal adds a little over one million fish on top.
"Instead of fishing to control the sockeye escapement down to 900,000 on the Nushagak, we're fishing less, which means we're allowing for more sockeye passage, but also more king passage. It's trying to strike this balance of how many sockeye we’re willing to forego harvesting to try and protect kings," said Sands.
Daniel Schindler is a professor in the University of Washington’s Alaska Salmon Program, and is part of the research team monitoring the Nushagak runs - which have been under biologists observation since the 1950s. According to Schindler, the declining king populations are not specific to the Nushagak but until the cause for the dwindling species can be determined, something has to be done.
"We know that king salmon are suffering throughout the range. And the action plan is one attempt to reduce interceptions of Nushagak kings in the commercial fishery, so that more of them can make it into the watershed to spawn. And the hope is that more abundance in the watersheds may lead to some recovery in the populations," he said. "So how this one plays out is anyone's bet. But the reality is management has to try something because kings are lower now than they have been in a long time."
For Schindler, this action plan is a necessary experiment but it is too early to tell how much of a difference it stands to make in the productivity of the Nushagak population. "The downside of it is a lot of sockeye are going to swim up into the Nushagak and into the Wood River. And it's possible many of those could have been harvested. So, like any conservation decisions, someone has to give up a little bit to try to benefit another group," he said.
The question for many fishermen, though, is how much they are giving up. "When you look at 2021, which was more of a normal year, in terms of running size, there were about 1.8 million sockeye that were caught in the Nushagak, before June 28. And so that works out to roughly $10 million to $15 million. So that's quite a bit of money that we're talking about in terms of potential foregone harvest," said Andy Wink, executive director of the Bristol Bay Regional Seafood Development Association.
According to state officials, this plan is an investment in the fishery’s future. But Sands said that investment is hard to quantify at the moment. "When we have 3 million plus sockeye going up the river and you're trying to count 50,000 or more king salmon out of three million sockeye, it's difficult to do."
That’s because the sheer abundance of sockeye cloaks the silvery, spotted kings in their ranks but also, Sands said the methods used to count salmon weren’t made for kings.
One of those methods is sonar. The throng of fish moving through the Nushagak is counted in a wide, shallow part of the river by two corresponding imaging sonars. Each with a range of roughly 150 feet from the shoreline. Perfect for migrating sockeye, which swim almost entirely within 50 feet of shore. But not chinooks.
"The sonar was designed to count sockeye and we are trying to come up with better ways to calibrate and understand the king salmon run," said Sands. Studies included in the Nushagak King action plan place the sonar’s margin of error for counting king salmon at anywhere between 19-65%.
That’s because larger king salmon often swim in the middle of the river beyond the range of sonar and smaller kings may slip under the radar in a column of sockeye.
Just like the sonar, humans can miss a king salmon as well.
"It's two in the morning, you've been fishing for 12 hours, it's dark, you're trying to go as fast as you can to get all these fish out and they all look the same size," said Sands, who knows it may be difficult for a fisherman to spot the telltale black dorsal spots of a king salmon while parsing through a net of sockeye on a busy deck.
He believes the action plan isn’t about adding more to the regulations already in place for fishing crews that end up with a chinook in their net. But he does urge them to report their catch.
"Report your king salmon. If you take them for personal use, report them as personal use trying to separate them in your catch." Sands said, "I will take every opportunity to ask people to do what they can to protect king salmon."
The top end of the Nushagak river king salmon escapement goal is two million this year.
State biologists will assess escapement and research over the next three seasons, and the Board of Fisheries is scheduled to revisit the Nushagak King action plan in 2025.
