As always, there is a lot of fishing action going on after summer salmon.
At Southeast Alaska, beam trawlers are back on the water targeting 650,000 pounds of pink and sidestripe shrimp in a third opener.
Southeast’s Dungeness season reopened on Oct. 1, and a few million pounds are likely to come out of that fishery. There will again be no opener for red or blue king crab because of low abundances.
On Oct. 5, a hundred or more divers also could be heading down for more than 1.7 million pounds of red sea cucumbers. A catch of just under 3 million pounds of sea urchins also is up for grabs, but there may be a lack of buyers. Southeast divers also are targeting giant geoduck clams.
At Prince William Sound, a 15,000-pound test fishery just wrapped up for golden king crabs; likewise, a nearly 7 million pound golden king crab fishery is ongoing along the Aleutian Islands.
Kodiak crabbers have pulled up more than 2.3 million pounds of Dungeness crab so far with a few weeks left to go in the season. A sea cucumber fishery opened at Kodiak on Oct. 1 with a 130,000-pound limit.
Halibut landings were approaching 13 million pounds, or 79 percent of the 16 million-pound catch limit. Homer, Kodiak and Seward are the top ports for landings.
For sablefish (blackcod), the catch was nearing 17 million pounds, or 52 percent of the nearly 32 million-pound quota. Seward, Kodiak, Sitka and Dutch Harbor were getting the most deliveries.
Both of those fisheries end in early November.
The Bering Sea pollock fishery closes on Nov. 1. Alaska pollock is the nation’s top food fishery, and the Bering Sea will produce more than 3 billion pounds again this year. And as always, fisheries for cod, flounders, rockfish and much more are ongoing in the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska.
Finally, the state Board of Fisheries has accepted 275 proposals to address at its as yet undetermined meetings on Prince William Sound and Southeast subsistence, commercial, sport and personal use fisheries and statewide shellfish. Meeting dates have been bumped from this winter to sometime next year because of covid-19 constraints.
The board will consider new meeting dates at an Oct. 15-16 virtual work session.
