Greetings All:
For those of you who intend to fish the Salisbury spring areas, please consider keeping fish caught in St. John's Bay and Fish Bay separate and informing the port sampler when you unload.
During this year's spring port meetings, a request was made to move the Chatham Strait line towards Salisbury, which would put Fish Bay in Chatham. A second request was to move the Salibury line north, so that St. John's Bay would be added to Sitka Sound area.
ADFG staff was hesitant to move the lines at this time, in part, because it might create early closures in the existing Salisbury area. Instead, they're asking us to gather additional information, so we can further analyze this potential next year.
If you have additional questions, please call Brian Lynch (772-5234) or Pattie Skannes (747-8434) at ADFG.
Dale, ATA
Hello...
Preliminary numbers show a winter catch of around 22,000. This means that a new Board of Fisheries regulation is likely to be implemented allowing for about 500 more Treaty fish to be added to the spring area caps. Hopefully this will mean more time and a few extra hatchery fish in your holds this year. Be sure to thank proposer Fred F in Sitka and other trollers attending the Board of Fish meeting this year, who all worked with Brian Lynch @ ADFG and ATA to come up with a compromise proposal that everyone could get behind.
And a word of warning ...
Due to a line issue that erupted in Sitka last week, I've been reminded that ADFG has the authority to close specific fishing areas if there are known violations occuring on a chronic basis. Wouldn't that be an unfortunate and unnecessary event?!
It's true that there was some confusion last week created by the publication of some conflicting winter line coordinates, which caused some boats to be out of bounds by a slight amount (e.g. several yards) - my understanding is that those trollers were not cited. However, there was no obvious excuse for anyone who was significantly over the line. Let's hope that a little peer pressure can get convince those folks to keep it clean out there, so that a few don't spoil things for the many.
Good Fishing!
Dale, ATA