If you’re a TelAlaska customer who’s been having trouble with the internet this week, you’re not alone. Company spokesperson Celine Kaplan says the company has been doing upgrades to its network that are affecting internet services. Kaplan says information about the upgrades is proprietary, but added that it’s related to several new internet packages the company will be rolling out in the near future. She couldn’t provide a definitive timeline for completion of the maintenance work, although she did say that it shouldn’t be affecting cellular service or cable television.
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.
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.
As shipping and energy exploration increase in the Arctic, so do the chances of an oil spill. On Tuesday, the federal government bumped up the deadline for a project that will help responders coordinate if an oil spill ever does happen.
The Environmental Response Management Application or ERMA is basically Google Earth in your web browser. There are a bunch of data layers that can be switched on and off that show information like where drill rigs are located, how thick the ice is and where there’s critical polar bear habitat. All of the information is displayed on a single map, so responders don’t have to call the oil companies, then the weather forecasters, then the biologists, all they have to do is click a box.
The North Pacific Fishery Management Council voted over the weekend to relax economic data reporting requirements for the Bering Sea-Aleutian Islands crab fisheries. Mark Fina, the Council’s senior economic advisor, testified that many of the current requirements are duplicated elsewhere or are not reliable enough for use by analysts.
Fina presented a report outlining three alternatives for updating the program - one alternative being the status quo. The Council opted for the least stringent reporting requirements, eliminating many areas of data collection.
Rapidly advancing sea ice has left crabbers scrambling to get their gear out of the water or stuck in port, waiting for better weather.
As soon as Mark Casto got into port on Tuesday, he was already getting ready to head back out. He’s captain of the crabber Pinnacle. With the ice coming down rapidly, he’s worried about the two hundred pots he still has in the water.
“It’s just finding them again, if you can find them.”
Last year, Vladivostok Air announced that it would be flying passenger planes from Alaska to the Russian Far East during the summer season. Now, the airline has finalized its schedule and is preparing for a July 12 launch date.
Currently, you have to fly down to Seattle and through Beijing, Tokyo, or Moscow if you want to get to Kamchatka. It’s an expensive and time-consuming process, especially given the peninsula’s proximity to Alaska. Mark Dudley is the North American sales manager for Vladivostok, and he says that their weekly summer service should make it easier for travelers to get to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky.
