Two brothers assaulted a local woman early Friday morning, after she had stopped to assist them.
The attack occurred just after 2am, outside of the Harbor View Bar and Grill. The victim approached Angel Garcia-Casas and Antonio Garcia-Casas, both age 24, after Angel fell and appeared to be hurt. After she helped the man up, he put her into a chokehold and had to be pried off of her by bystanders. Once she was freed from Angel’s grip, his twin brother Antonio also attacked her, hitting her in the face. The two brothers were arrested shortly thereafter.
Three Seattle fishermen were rescued last night after their vessel went aground on Umnak Island.
The crew of the Neptune 1 called the Coast Guard at 11:21 pm, alerting them that their boat had lost propulsion and gone adrift in rough weather. Twenty-five minutes later, the Neptune 1 was on the rocks, and the crew had to swim to shore in their survival suits.
After receiving the mayday call, the Coast Guard launched a helicopter from St. Paul Island to rescue the fishermen. As the helicopter crew traveled down to Umnak, the F/V Alaskan Enterprise also responded to the incident. That vessel was 25 miles away at the time, and it diverted course to shine a light on the Neptune 1 and its crew until the Coast Guard arrived.
Last year, the Bering Sea pollock fleet took nearly 200,000 chum salmon as bycatch – more than they had taken in the past four years combined. Now fisheries regulators are working to find the best way to bring that number down.
The North Pacific Fishery Management Council hosted a teleconference on Friday to get input from rural Alaskans on their proposals. Subsistence fishermen like Nick Turner of Emmonak stressed that lower chum numbers mean less food and less money for their communities.
The U.S. Air Force is proposing a clean-up of a former military installation at Nikolski.
The Air Force has come up with recommendations for five sites at the radio relay station. The dam and water supply house contain no contaminants, so the Air Force is not proposing any action at those two sites. But at the landfill, the Air Force does want to put in place boundary markers to keep people from entering the area, since it does contain both petroleum and asbestos. The most serious work that the Air Force is recommending is the excavations of the petroleum, oil, and lubricants tank farm.
Since it deployed six years ago, the Missile Defense Agency’s most powerful mobile radar has traveled across the Pacific, conducting flight tests and keeping an eye out for any ballistic missiles targeted at the United States. But while it’s been to Seattle and Pearl Harbor, it’s never made it to its homeport of Adak, where a $26-million mooring for the radar lies unused. With the release of Missile Defense Agency’s funding requests, it’s looking even more unlikely that the radar will ever use that facility.
Icicle Seafoods will be paying a fine of $615,000 for handling more crab than it was allowed.
In 2004, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration came down on Icicle for exceeding its brown king crab processing cap by 3.8 million pounds. The crab was processed at Adak Fisheries, which was then controlled by Icicle. The fine was initially set at $3.4 million, but was reduced substantially to just a fifth of that amount.
The latest sector to wrap up their season is the 60-foot-and-under pot boats. They closed on Friday, a full three weeks earlier than last year. Twenty-one vessels participated this year, and they brought in over 14 million pounds of cod at a much faster rate than usual, despite having a larger quota.
Krista Milani is a biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service, and she says that a lot of boats were able to shorten their trips from three days to just two.
Continuing their winning streak, the Unalaska boys basketball team took the number one spot at the Kotzebue Klassic this weekend.
The Raiders had a strong start, vanquishing the Noorvik Bears 70-50 on Thursday. On Friday, they had another decisive win against Point Hope, with the final score being 63-42. They wrapped up their performance at the Anchorage tournament by defeating Kotzebue, the host team, in a 64-38 game.
