Phin plays on the beach with a herring opener in the background.
It seems fitting to draft a blog post about spring on an April morning with a dusting of fresh snow. The weather today is classic for Southeast Alaska where fall, winter, and spring are basically variations on precipitation, temperatures in the 30s and 40s, and the usual Pacific driven storms. But each season has its own hallmark distinct from the weather. Spring’s hallmark is the return of the herring to spawn. I checked the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s website which estimates that Sitka Sound will see a return of 195,000,000 pounds of herring this year. That’s a lot of biomass. When one considers that each fish weighs much less than a pound, one recognizes that it is a whole lot of fish swimming into these waters! From several locations and on different days I have watched seemingly endless schools of fish swimming by. The air here is thick with ocean smell – not a stinky ocean smell but a salty bright smell. It is the smell of spring.
The concentration of herring is a concentration of food for predators. From a good vantage in town one can see up to a dozen whales, tens of sea lions, some stealthy seals, a hundred or so eagles, and thousands and thousands of gulls. You have to watch out when the gulls take flight from the buildings down town because they drop lots of poop synchronously. The cormorants and sea ducks have also returned in large numbers. While not driven by the herring, flocks of migrating ducks and geese will be following the coast northward any day now. It is not hard to imagine that halibut, salmon, and other seafood are under the waves taking advantage of abundance of herring.
Humans too are drawn in by the herring. The sac roe herring fishing fleet arrived to Sitka in mid-March. This year’s harvest goal is 19,500 tons of herring – nearly all of which is sold in Japan as a delicacy (there are all sorts of market issues with the recent Japan quake and tsunami that I won’t go into.) As I write, all but 3,000 tons of the quota has been caught in three “openers”. An “opener” is an official window of time in a specific location that the permit holders are allowed to fish. The location of the opener is announced just hours in advance. Fishermen have to wait by their radios for days to weeks- waiting for the announcement of the next opener. The last opener should be today. The openers are a mad frenzy of boats. There are 50 permit holders, each in a big seine boat. Each seine boat has at least one powerful skiff (small open motor boat) that is used to pull out the net. A handful of tenders (these are the middle-men, big boats who collect the fish from the fishermen and deliver it to the processing plant) stand by to take the fish from the nets. In addition boats belonging to the troopers, fish and game, the coast guard, and random folks are in the mix. A constant drone of more than 15 spotter aircraft circle around. All this is packed into a relatively small area. It looks like mayhem. Embedded here is a video from the second opener of this year. 2 minutes into the video you can see the seine boat, Infinite Grace, pulled onto her side by a massive load of herring in its net. There were too many herring, and they all swam for the bottom of the ocean at once. A powerful force of nature indeed! You can watch the cable holding the net boom in place snap. The herring opener is a local spectator sport.
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| Small fish, short work. |
Human draw to the herring is not limited to the commercial fishery. I filled a five gallon bucket with herring in about an hour. I used a jig with 5 hooks on it. I never waited more than 30 seconds to hook a herring and I always hooked at least two fish each time I brought my hooks in. Often I had three or four fish on at a time and a few times I brought in 5 fish. We will use the herring for halibut, shrimp, and crab bait this summer and fall. Lots of other folks were catching their bait for the year at the same time as me.
Once the spawn started a few days ago the normally clear waters around Sitka turned a milky green – similar to the Kenai River or other glacier fed river. The beaches are awash in tiny herring eggs. Traditional harvest of herring eggs started with the spawn. The Tlingit (local Alaska Native tribe) love to eat fresh herring eggs. One method for the herring egg harvest is to submerge cedar limbs which the herring eggs then stick to. Another method is harvesting kelp with herring eggs. We have eaten traditional herring eggs a few times. I am still not sure I have a taste for them. We collect seaweed from the beach full of herring eggs as well. This makes excellent (if not terribly stinky) fertilizer for gardens.
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| Milky green water in the harbor. The dark mass just off shore is a school of herring. |
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| Traditional herring egg harvesting. |
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| Herring eggs on the beach. |
We welcome the herring into our lives this spring as the forbearers of eagles, whales, sea lions, salmon, halibut, and fishing. We hope that the herring will bring us a freezer full of seafood and a garden full of produce. What an awesome symbol of the abundance of spring in Southeast Alaska! Check out http://www.shobestudios.com/ for more cool Sitka spring pictures from local professional photographer Tim Shobe.
Plus a few random Phin pictures. We have been going on walks on the trails lately with the red bucket. A walk usually doesn't take us very far but we both are loving the experience.
