The Port Moller Test Fishery wrapped up operations for the season last Thursday, July 13. KDLG’s Jessie Sheldon checked in with Jordan Head, director of the test fishery, on the final days of this season and what looked different this year—including this weekend’s big, late in the season push of fish.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Jessie Sheldon, KDLG: Hi, Jordan.
Head: Hi. How's it going?
KDLG: Good. So it looks like July 13 was the last day of Port Muller test fishery operations. So we just wanted to follow up with you here at the end of your season and on the heels of a pretty big influx of fish over the last few days. Starting with that wrap up, can you tell us about closing up shop at Port Moeller for the summer and wrapping up end of Season operations?
HEAD: Around the 10th of July, we started to consider ending the Port Moller test fishery. Each year, at the end of the season, we watch how catches are coming in at Port Moller, if we're capturing the tail of the run pretty well. And this year, it started tailing off around the ninth or tenth of July and then continued to fall. There's a lot of questions going on with what was to come, in Ugashik particularly, so we were able to squeak out one more genetics run to try and give managers an idea of what was to come. But all in all, the season wrapped up pretty business as usual for us. And after the 13th, the boats met up out there somewhere around False Pass. And we have one boat coming back to Seward, one going back to Dutch Harbor. So we transferred all the gear over to the boat going to Seward. And that's actually arriving later tonight and we'll start our wrap up here in Anchorage.
KDLG: Got it. And so jumping into this big recent push of fish, is that something you've seen before in the bay this late in the season?
Head: Yeah, that was an interesting one. So in the second half of the season we had a really nice, normal bell shaped curve at Port Moller where we saw catches increase and increase to a peak and then they started decreasing, wavered a little bit, and then fell off. And that's not really what we saw in-shore. We definitely saw a bimodal, almost like a trimodal run in-shore, which is kind of strange based on what you saw happen at Port Moller. And the best explanation we have at this point is, normally people think of the travel time from Port Moeller to the districts as a conveyor belt; they show up at Port Moller and then seven days later, they show up in-shore. And we really didn't see that this year. We had a lot of strange weather, a lot of winds blowing offshore for long periods of time, particularly the East Side districts. And what ended up happening, or what seems to have happened is, that conveyor belt from Port Moller to the district got delayed a lot. So sometimes you'd see, rather than a seven day run timing from Moller to the districts, you'd see eight, nine, ten, or eleven. And we got slammed with all those fish at once. There were reports of a lot of jumpers outside of the districts for several days and it seems like finally, the weather cooperated with us and all those fish really started pushing. And that's not something you see every year, it’s something you see occasionally. But this was the most pronounced we've seen that in a lot of years. So it caught several people off guard a little bit. But most of the season based on what we saw at Port Moller and what we saw in the catch and escapement, we were thinking the run would come in right around forecast. And I think there's a lot of people that lost faith on that when we kind of saw that big lull, but that big push of fish puts us right back on track for being right around forecast.
KDLG: That's really interesting. And so looking back at the season at the Port Moller test fishery, especially since we last checked in, is there anything unusual in the numbers that you were seeing?
Head: No, and I think that's what's kind of been a little strange. This has been a very strange year all around. We saw a lot of big fish, which we wouldn't have expected and also strange in that we saw a nice, normal run time at Port Moller. But something out there delayed the fish between Port Moller and the districts, and that was the biggest, weird thing that went on this year. Port Moller by and large, seemed like a pretty normal season. There's nothing strange going on. We had a good index of the run. The genetics composition really hit it right on the money again, as it did last year. Pretty good indication of what was heading to each district. It's just a lot of people, like I said, look at it as this conveyor belt and we're finding out more and more that it's really not. Some fish are traveling fast from Port Moller to the district while others are traveling slow and it can kind of cloud that wall of fish that ends up hitting the districts like we saw this weekend.
KDLG: A lot of the analysis of the seasons data occurs over the winter. So based on what you saw on the water this summer, is there anything in particular you'll be looking at in the data this winter?
Head: I think all of us are going to be looking at what weather was doing, what water temperatures were doing, and trying to piece together how we saw something very different in-shore than we saw at Port Moller and why fish may have been holding in between there and the districts, which isn't as typical, as we’ve seen. So I think we'll take a look back at weather reports and look at how that could have impacted what people were forecasting from Port Moller to the districts. Overall though, Port Moller this year was indicating we'd have a pretty on-forecast run, and that's what we're seeing. It's just when those are going to hit the district is what we’ve still got to figure out.
KDLG: Thank you, Jordan for taking the time to talk. I really appreciate it.
Head: Yeah. Thank you so much.
Get in touch with the author at jessie@kdlg.org or 907-842-2200.
