Is it AM or PM?

When we're fishing around the clock, it gets confusing. We got in from fishing at about 8 PM, having started at 3 PM. It was a tiny little tide, with very little water movement - from a 5.4 hold up to a 15.2 high tide and then out to a 1.2 at about midnight. We go again at 3 AM, so we get 4 hours of sleep in a row. David was confused about AM vs. PM (it's especially an issue because for so many hours of the day, it's light. And when it's overcast (like it has been), who knows where the sun is?)

For me, I can't figure out when it's time to floss. That's not something I want to overdo. And I can't figure out when it's a nap, meaning I stay in my clothes and when it's bed time, meaning I change into different clothes for sleeping. Probably, they're all naps - at least for the next week or so.

We had about 4000 lbs on this afternoon/evening tide - it was sort of slow. So I thought it would be a good day to mend nets. They get torn up and the loose ends get caught on the rubber of the roller and create a backlash, winding the mesh on the roller backwards and ripping even bigger holes in the net. So it's good to keep them mended - plus they might fish better, though there is the credible school of thought that goes: "holes catch fish." Sometimes we'll see a ring of salmon around a big hole. Probably, a few got through. Would that section have caught any if the leaders hadn't gone through the hole? Hard to say.

So while we were waiting for it to be time to go through the net again, we pulled up to some of the big holes and got to mending. Not easy in those conditions, but it's kind of fun to figure out the hole and find a good approach for a mend. And just when it's looking impossible and I'm beginning to fear that in my trimming, I've cut away too much, I can see how it all comes together and then it's just a mop up job. But it does take time.

In the middle of a big mend, the tender came to accept our fish. We didn't want to abandon the mend and throw off, but we did have fish to deliver. So we got the Grayling and put it under the net and I transferred to it so that Jake and Chris could go deliver out of the Ambi. Josh and I completed the mend and then we became the Old Lady and the One-Armed Guy crew. We were fast and Josh was amazing. This is still recovery day 6 for him. He is meticulous about keeping his injured hand out of trouble, but he does everything one-handed, including picking, handling the outboard (including pulling it up and using his foot to swing down the lever to hold it), pulling the net and everything else. Picking is probably 80% seeing how the fish is caught. I heard Josh advise a new crew member to follow the mesh; it'll always tell you where to loosen the mesh. So when the fish comes on board, one-armed Josh watches it to see which side of the net it should be on, whether the fish should shimmy through the mesh head first (with our help), or back out (with our help), or some combination. The he finds the right leverage point on the net to give the mesh a jerk and the fish and web jump up in that direction, but with a slightly different leverage point now, so before it lands on the deck, he makes the next grab and jerks it up again, loosening it a bit more so that the third grab and jerk will probably have it dropping to the deck. He is still fast. It was a beautiful thing to watch. Together, we were fast on that net.

Bob fixed everything!!! The heater in my cabin now works (no more stinging cold feet), the four-wheeler works (the shifter had somehow been pressed against the frame so it couldn't shift - he figured it out and fixed it). And he tackled the boom truck - that one I wasn't sure about the problem - David said it was slower than last year, which is surprised because Eddie, a gifted and careful mechanic, worked on it over the winter. I'm worried that Eddie gave me directions for how to use the new and improved boom truck... and I didn't pay close enough attention to pass it on to David. And while we were wrapping up the tide, Bob was carefully going through the lines, finishing their ends, and piling them in separate baskets. He said that he wanted to be sure the lines were ready for us when we needed them. It's exactly what I dream of in help - someone with the experience to know that if you get ready now, you'll be rewarded later when you need the line and don't have time to get it ready.

Everyone is sort of scratching their heads about that one big tide we had - maybe it was the storm... I remain confident that many more fish are coming else ADFG wouldn't keep us fishing. Today's report said that 247,000 sockeye have gone up the Naknek and 3,630 have made it up the Kvichak, with another 50,000 or so milling around in the river.

I'm a little concerned that the allocation ruling will shut down the setnetters soon. Allocation was a political decision forced on an unwilling fishing fleet maybe about 15 years ago. At least no one in Naknek seemed to want it. Some of us have been fighting it since, really, to no avail. The Board of Fish selected a group of years - say the 80s (I'm not sure) and computed the "true and correct" catch distribution between set nets and drifters based on those years. So that became the fixed number. The problem is that the drift fleet can move around the five districts in Bristol Bay and set netters stay put - there are a fixed number of sites, and an even smaller number of desirable sites, so we stay where we've always fished. The years that were chosen as the index years happened to be big years for the Kvichak, so a very large percentage of the drift fleet (roughly 40%-50% or 700 to 900 boats) was in the Naknek/Kvichak district, competing with the same 250-300 set netters for those big runs. They caught a percentage of the harvest commensurate with their effort. In the past 10 or so years, however, the Naknek/Kvichak has not been as productive and much of the fleet has concentrated its effort in other districts. So that 84% that was caught handily by 40%-50% the drift fleet in the 80s (when they had about 84% of the gear in the water) is not as easily caught by less than one-fourth of the fleet now. But the number of set netters has stayed the same. To me, this system of allocation is missing the crucial element of fleet effort, or in mathematical terms, consideration of the denominator.

The reason all this is an issue right now is because we received an announcement that the Naknek setnetters have harvested 20% of the catch in the Naknek/Kvichak district, and the Kvichak setnetters have harvested 11% (there are more Naknek setnetters than Kvichak setnetters - and that river system has not lived up to its potential in the past decade or two so the Kvichak setnetters don't catch half the setnet allocation as the regulations say they should). But at 69% of the catch, the Naknek/Kvichak drift fleet, with 75% of the gear in the water, is lagging well behind its target of 84%. In early season, most setnetters and some drifters fish. Drifters are usually slower to get their nets in the water because of the expense of doing so and because they often have kinks in their equipment to work out before they "splash." So even those in the district aren't necessarily fishing.

I'm afraid Naknek setnetters (that's us) will be closed because we're doing too well, putting us in the perverse position of fearing that we're catching too many fish. We used to try to catch lots of fish; now we're punished for it.

But that hasn't happened yet this season (other seasons, yes). And ADFG understands about the effect of drift fleet effort, but I'm not sure how much latitude they have. It has occurred to me to wonder whether Naknek setnetters could shut the whole fishery down by just not fishing - if we don't catch our allocation, does that mean that no one else gets to fish until we catch up? And if we don't catch up, does that mean that the resource isn't harvested this year? I don't think I'm bitter, just frustrated by a regulation that hurts me, this fishery I love, this community and other Alaskan communities that rely on fishing - and I haven't been able to discover what the Board of Fish wants to accomplish with allocation. It definitely hasn't made the fishery more fair. I believe that the polarization of perspectives testifies to that - if one user group argues strongly for a regulation that's intended to make it more fair, and another argues strongly against it, that indicates to me that it advantages one group at the expense of the other. If the target is fairness, the regulation missed the target.

Another consideration regarding allocation is that the state constitution calls for the use of any Alaskan resource for the maximum benefit of Alaskans. Slightly less than half of the drift fleet is Alaskan, compared with about three-fourths of the set net fleet. Regulations that pull set nets out of the water in favor of drift nets use an Alaskan resources for the maximum benefit of non Alaskans. It doesn't seem that that could be justified for long.

But for now, I'll floss my teeth and take a little nap before heading out to try not to catch too many fish.