The Unalaska Fish and Game advisory committee will address a proposed ban on trawl fishing in Unalaska Bay at their meeting Thursday night. The controversial proposal comes from the Unalaska Native Fishermen’s Association or UNFA. President Vince Tutiakoff says the proposed ban is in response to several issues, starting with an observed decline in the abundance of other species in the bay, like salmon, halibut and crab.
“And we have seven or eight small boats that fish the bays and they have gear issues out here. Several of them have lost gear due to trawling. And, you know, replacement of gear for a small boat pretty much takes their season away.”
Aboard the F/V Alaska Knight, one of two vessels that surveyed in the Chukchi Sea last summer/Credit: Stephanie Joyce
Fishing is off-limits in the Arctic, but last summer, a pair of commercial trawlers traveled north to the Chukchi Sea. They were on a scientific mission, to conduct the first-ever comprehensive study of the Chukchi’s ecosystem.
Franz Mueter is the lead scientist on the study, and he's attending the Alaska Marine Science Symposium in Anchorage this week to present some of the results. He says his team came back with heaps of samples.
Less than a year after completing one small boat harbor, the City of Unalaska is beginning the process of overhauling the other one. City council voted Tuesday night to start scoping work for replacement of the floats at the Bobby Storrs harbor.
“We want to build a dock that is similar to the Spit Dock and CEM [Carl E. Moses], so that we are maintaining like facilities," said Public Works director Nancy Peterson.
An overhaul of the Bobby Storrs small boat harbor is slated for the near future, and that process could begin at Tuesday night's city council meeting. Ports Director Peggy McLaughlin is recommending that the council award PND Engineering a $22,000 contract for scoping work on the new harbor. That includes determining the current condition of harbor facilities and drafting a conceptual plan for the redesign.
This week, field researchers are gathered in downtown Anchorage to talk about the changes they’ve seen in Alaskan coastal waters, with a particular focus on the Arctic -- including the Aleutian Islands and Bering Sea.
KUCB’s Lauren Rosenthal is at the event and has this preview.
The Unalaska Raiders basketball team played two charged home games against Dillingham this weekend. Unalaska City School principal Jim Wilson says both teams played with lots of energy, defensively and offensively.
“They were close games, hard-fought games, hotly contested games, and you know, both teams just really did a great job of playing hard and I think both teams got better over the course of the weekend.”
The Bering Sea’s largest fishery got underway on Sunday with the opening of pollock A season.
The quota is slightly up from last year, at 1.266 million metric tons. Roughly 40 percent of that is slated to be caught during A season, which runs until June. Despite the smaller volume, the winter fishery tends to be more lucrative because the pollock are carrying valuable roe, but Unisea fleet support supervisor Guy Collins says prices could be down this year for both fish and roe becuase of larger quotas in both the US and Russia.
This week last year, the Russian fuel tanker Renda and the icebreaker Healy had just made the first-ever wintertime fuel delivery to the U.S. Arctic. The saga made headlines in the national and international press, and brought attention to the challenges of operating in the far north.
When the Healy was in Unalaska this fall, KUCB's Stephanie Joyce sat down with Captain Beverly Havlik to look back on the unique journey and the lessons learned. This is an excerpt from that interview.
Two boats that regularly fish out of Unalaska were prosecuted in 2012 for illegal halibut fishing, as fisheries blogger Wesley Loy first reported.
The skippers of the F/V WonderWorker and the P/V Lady Gudny both pleaded guilty to Lacey Act violations earlier this year for harvesting halibut without the proper permits. According to plea documents, Nikolai Yakunin and Gisli Kristjansson worked together to catch and process 2,000 round pounds of halibut from areas near Atka in 2009 without having purchased individual fishing quota. The total value of the fish was estimated at $4,800. For the misdemeanor violation, the two were required to pay just over $5,000 in fines, and were placed on three and two years of probation, respectively.
