Unalaska, AK – Area M seiners in Sand Point and King Cove head out tomorrow, after standing down the season's first sockeye salmon opening. The second period of the season starts at 6am on Saturday and rounds up at 10pm on Tuesday, June 15.

Seiners from Peter Pan, Trident, and Snopac chose not to participate in the first opening as a gesture of solidarity with the subsistence chum fishermen on the Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers, who say that seiners may be preventing an adequate number of salmon from reaching their spawning beds. The standdown may also be a precaution against future restrictions by the Alaska Board of Fisheries.

During the period that the Area M seiners sat out, the set gillnet harvest amounted to 8800 sockeye and 4200 chum. A negligible amount of Chinook and pink salmon were also caught. Aaron Potter, a representative with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game said that while he's optimistic about the season, this wasn't quite the start that people were expecting.

"It did come across as a pretty slow opening period," says Potter. "There were a coupe of guys who, for whatever reason, their sites just weren't producing.

Potter says that it's still too early to determine what the harvest - and the standdown - mean for the future. Area M seiners are planning to continue fishing through the rest of the season but will be paying attention to the chum harvest.

"The seiners are probably going to keep an eye on what the harvests are doing, and if they start seeing an increased ratio of chums to sockeye they may talk amongst themselves and see if they want to stand down again," Potter says. "But of course, that's up to them."

The fishery will be open for three more 88-hour periods and the final period will be 64-hours in duration and close at 10PM on the 29th of June.