Grant Hagerman, who manages the commercial troll fishery for Fish and Game, told the Daily News on Thursday that the upcoming 10-day opening is geared toward about 350 boats, or the average number of permit holders that have been fishing and landing chum, pink, coho and sockeye salmon over the past two or three weeks.

 Hagerman said that the third, limited-harvest opportunity for each troll permit holder to catch nine more chinook is not meant to be a directed fishery, and would probably not “persuade trollers that aren’t fishing to go out and catch.”

  “For those that are out fishing coho, out fishing chum, over this ten-day period they’re able to keep almost one (chinook) a day,” Hagerman said. “It’s not very many fish, it may not add up to a lot, but it allows them to try to catch their maximum treaty allocation for the year.”

Hagerman said that trollers who fish the September opener have a chance to harvest some of the 3,200 chinook that remain in the “all-gear” allocation for all fisheries that catch migratory chinook in Southeast Alaska.

“At this point in the season all the other gear groups are done fishing, even many trollers, too,” Hagerman said. “There’s 3,200 fish remaining that the sport fishery estimates they wouldn’t be able to catch, the net fisheries wouldn’t be able to catch… The trollers are going to get an opportunity to try to make a dent in it.”

Overall annual harvest limits for migratory chinook are delegated by the U.S.-Canada by Pacific Salmon Treaty process and regulated for gear groups and areas in Southeast Alaska by the Alaska Board of Fisheries.

 The summer 2023 troll fishery kicked off on July 1, and trollers across Southeast Alaska harvested about 85,000 chinook during an initial 12-day July chinook opener  — about 8,000 more fish than their initial harvest target of 77,100 chinook. Fish and Game managed the initial opener to harvest about 70% of the trollers’ preseason allocation of about 106,800 chinook for the 2023 summer season.

But the troll fleet is losing out on a chunk of its potential summer chinook harvest because sport fishermen are on track to catch upwards of 15,000 more chinook than they were allocated for the summer 2023 season, according to an Aug. 4 announcement from Fish and Game.

 Hagerman said that because of a new regulation, state fishery managers this summer have to account for the sport fleet’s expected chinook harvest overage by docking it from troll harvest limits; the Board of Fisheries in 2022 approved a new rule that dictates that “any underage or overage in the Southeast Alaska sport fishery is added to or subtracted from the commercial troll allocation of Chinook salmon.”

Last year, neither the sport fleet nor the troll fleet reached their chinook harvest limit, so their allocations did not change.

Hagerman said that sport fishermen this summer have “caught a fair amount more … upwards of 15,000 fish over their allocation.”

“So, trollers have had their allocation reduced by that much,” Hagerman said.

After trollers’ initial July 1 chinook opener, state managers saw that the sport fishery was on track for a major overage, and cut that expected sport overage out of the remaining summer troll allocation of about 25,000 chinook.

The resulting summer troll allocation of about 10,000 chinook “was barely enough to have a 24-hour opening,” according to Hagerman.

Fish and Game did authorize a second, 24-hour opportunity for trollers to target the remaining 10,000 chinook on Aug. 11. Trollers during the one-day opener caught about 8,186 chinook that fetched about $5.95 per pound and weighed an average of about 11 pounds, according to preliminary catch data from Fish and Game.

With the upcoming 10-day chinook retention period set for Sept. 1, trollers “can retain some of their chinook bycatch to make a little bit of money and to help us take some of the available harvest that remains on the all-gear allocation,” Hagerman said.

Trollers could each earn about $600 for nine chinook that each weigh about 11 pounds and fetch about $6 per pound, which has been the norm for trollers landing chinook this August.

Amy Daugherty, who is the director of the Alaska Trollers Association, told the Daily News during a phone call earlier this month that the organization is “very concerned about” the new rule that the Board of Fisheries approved that allows sport fishermen to keep their bag limits constant throughout the summer, and cut into trollers’ catch limits if they exceed their sport harvest limit.

The sport fishery overage for chinook catch this summer “isn’t resident sport fish because they’re a constant, it’s the nonresident sector growing,” according to Daugherty.

Dougherty said that the chinook allocation for all fishing gear groups in Southeast Alaska that’s set by the Pacific Salmon Treaty process is already “very abbreviated” compared to recent years.

The Pacific Salmon Commission, the body that implements the Pacific Salmon Treaty, announced in February that it will use a new method to set chinook harvest caps for Southeast Alaska which combines annual data showing the effort and harvest of king salmon by the winter power troll fishery in the Sitka Sound area (District 113) with the chinook salmon abundance model that the commission usually uses.

Fish and Game in March announced an all-gear 2023 harvest limit of 201,900 treaty chinook salmon for Southeast Alaska. The department announced a year-round troll fishery allocation of 149,100 treaty chinook, down 44,100 fish from last year’s preseason catch limit for the winter, spring and summer troll fisheries.

“We know (chinook) abundance in the water is very high yet we ended up with a very low overall number, meaning all-gear,” Daugherty said of the current chinook allocation for all Southeast Alaska fishermen.

“This all stems back to the modeling that the Pacific Salmon Treaty team came up with,” Daugherty said. “They had to modify their modeling and it seems like it still needs significant adjustment.”

While chinook catch limits are down, effort is down for the troll fleet.

Just over 600 troll permit holders have landed salmon this summer, according to Hagerman

 “That compares to 20 years ago where there were over 900 permits fishing,” Hagerman said on Thursday. “Effort is down considerably.”

“This year it’s just been accentuated, or course, with really low chum prices and not knowing if we’re going to have a July king opener until just a week or two before the fishery, with the lawsuit,” Hagerman said.

The 2023 troll season was muddied from the beginning; for most of the winter, troll fishermen weren’t counting on catching any chinook, which typically make up half of trollers’ summer profits.

A series of U.S. District Court orders in a lawsuit filed by a Washington-based environmental group imperiled the hook-and-line salmon fishery throughout the spring. In May, a federal District Court judge effectively shut down the troll fishery over Engandered Species Act protections for southern resident killer whales that home in the Puget Sound and prey on migratory chinook, which could be intercepted by Southeast trollers.

But in late June, days before the summer troll fishery opened July 1, a Ninth Circuit Court judge in Washington issued a “stay” in judgment on behalf of the defendants and interveners in the lawsuit, including the State of Alaska and Alaska Trollers Association.

The judge ordered that the summer chinook troll fishery could continue to operate while NOAA Fisheries personnel fix errors in the environmental documentation that authorizes the troll fishery despite its potential impacts on endangered species.

Hagerman said that because of the preseason uncertainty, some troll fishermen “have gotten land jobs or gone longlining or did other things, so we’ve had just another drop in participation this year.”

A midseason market collapse for chum and pink salmon put another damper on effort and potential profits for trollers, and all gear groups that catch salmon in Alaska.

On Aug. 5, Seattle-based Trident Seafoods Corp. announced that it would offer all Alaska fishermen just 20 cents per pound for the chum salmon and pink salmon that they catch because “chum markets have collapsed.”

Regional processors quickly followed suit and dropped the prices that they pay fishermen for chums and pinks to 20 cents, a dramatic slash from 2022, when processors paid Southeast fisherman a record high average of $1.32 per pound of chum salmon.

Last year, Southeast fishermen earned an average of 52 cents per pound of pink salmon, and in 2021, sold their pinks for an average of 38 cents per pound.

Hagerman told the Daily News during a phone call on Aug. 15 that the collapse of chum salmon prices to just 20 cents per pound “was pretty devastating.”

“I knew right away seeing that drop that this is going to have a major impact on how many trollers in the troll fishery are going to be out there trying to target chum, it’s just not worth their while,” Hagerman said.

“It’s absolutely had an impact not only on the troll fishery but on the other fisheries as well,” Hagerman said. “Obviously (fishermen) have to make a certain amount per pound to pay for fuel and groceries and deckhands and their overhead.

“Trollers’ overhead is obviously not as much as seiners’ but considering that prices were about a dollar higher last year, to go from almost $1.20 down to 20 cents is a huge hit,” Hagerman said. “Even at five or six pounds at 20 cents, you’re looking at a dollar per fish or something like that, it’s hard to make ends meet.”