Taking advantage of the state’s education tax credit, the trade group Pollock Conservation Cooperative has made a $100,000 donation to vocational training in Western Alaska.

PCC is an arm of the At-sea Processors Association, which represents 16 vessels that fish for Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands pollock out of Unalaska.

Its donation went to the Northwestern Career and Technical Center in Nome.  The Center offers vocational training for high school students in the Bering Strait and Nome public school districts as well as more limited training opportunities for community members.  

State Wildlife Troopers have cited the fishing vessel Ramblin’ Rose for possession of undersized St. Matthew blue king crab.  The crabber was boarded last Thursday for a routine inspection while delivering to Bering Fisheries in Unalaska. 

Trooper technician Nick Butryn says he found a substantial number of crab below the 5.5 inch legal limit in his initial survey.   The final estimate was that 5.5 percent of the catch, or several hundred pounds, was undersized.  Butryn says that’s the most he’s ever seen in an offload. 

For the past decade, the Alaskan and Russian pollock fisheries have acted kind of like a seesaw. When the quota for one has been up, the other has usually been down. This year was different though. Both the United States and Russia raised their caps, and the result is that more 6 billion pounds of the fish are expected to be harvested by the end of the year.

The total allowable catch for Russian pollock this year was set at 1.65 million metric tons, while the American quota was put around a million and a quarter metric tons. This supply increase has put a downward pressure on prices for Alaskan fish, which brought about 13 cents a pound this year. Russian pollock commands less value, since it hasn’t undergone the same sustainability certifications that the Alaskan fishery has. That’s in some way a double-edged sword, says Andy Wink. He’s a seafood analyst with the McDowell group who has been tracking the fishery.

Alaska’s pollock fisheries have received another sustainability certification.

Global Trust, a committee of independent auditors, spent nine months reviewing the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska pollock fisheries to figure out whether they were being responsibly managed. They determined that the fisheries met United Nations standards, making pollock the fourth Alaskan fishery certified by the group. Halibut, salmon, and black cod all received Global Trust certification earlier this year.

Who should profit from the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands crab fisheries? 

That was the big question at the North Pacific Fishery Management Council meeting over the weekend.  Answering it generated more than six hours of public testimony and resulted in a vote that split the council.

At the heart of the debate is a practice called quota leasing.

Crab fishing used to be a race.  There was a set amount that could be taken, and vessels competed to get as many pounds as possible before it all ran out. Six years ago, fisheries managers switched over to a system that distributed shares of the harvest to vessel owners based on how much they had caught historically.

After salmon, pollock is Alaska’s most profitable fishery. It’s certainly the state’s most productive one, with fishermen harvesting a couple billion pounds of the fish annually. But recently, the stock has seen some ups and downs. After a couple of years of record low harvest limits, fishery managers raised this year’s cap by half. That didn’t go over well with some fishermen, who argued that the quota should be brought down once again at the North Pacific Fishery Management Council meeting in Anchorage.

After plenty of back and forth between regulators, industry representatives, biologists, and fishermen, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council has capped the amount of pollock that fisherman can catch in the Bering Sea next year at 1.2 million metric tons.

That’s a slight decline from this year’s quota. But for some members of the council, that number wasn’t low enough. Four of the eleven voting council members took the position that the total allowable catch should be set at 1.08 million metric tons, a 14 percent drop from 2011. Council member Ed Dersham said that the concern that some fishermen had expressed over the stock and their descriptions of slow fishing despite increased effort had persuaded him to favor a lower quota.

It was an efficient season for the six boats that fished Eastern Aleutian golden king crab this year.

The boats caught all 3.15 million pounds of quota before Thanksgiving.

According to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s preliminary figures, they owe their speedy season to a higher-than-average catch rate.  Fishermen pulled up an average of 35 legal crab per pot.  That’s almost 25 percent above the average since rationalization and a new record for the fishery.

Technicians have temporarily repaired the rudder of the 656-foot cargo vessel Morning Cedar.

The vessel was en route from Vancouver, Canada to Japan with a load of packaged timber when a hydraulic leak left it without steering.  It's been adrift in the western Bering Sea, north of Adak, since December 5. 

Both the crew and the Coast Guard tried to fix the rudder without success.  The Morning Cedar’s parent company, Eukor Car Carrier, contracted specialists from Norway and Washington to fly out and attempt repairs.