Bering Sea

In this episode of "Island Interviews," author Charles Vaught discusses his new memoir, written about his time fishing in the Bering Sea aboard the F/V Northern Jaeger.

The U.S. Coast Guard encountered four People’s Republic of China military warships in the Bering Sea over the weekend.The foreign vessels were following international law, and told Coast Guard personnel they were practicing “freedom of navigation operations.”

Years after two crab fisheries disasters occurred in the Norton Sound and Bering Sea, millions in relief funds are finally available to impacted fishermen.In March of 2020 a fishery disaster was declared for the 2019 Norton Sound Red King crab fishery and a year later for the 2019-2020 Bering Sea Tanner crab fishery. Roughly four years later, affected fishers can now apply to receive a portion of $14,368,336 in total federal relief funds for both fisheries.

Alaska Congresswoman Mary Peltola introduced two bills Wednesday that aim to deliver on one of her campaign themes: Reducing the number of salmon that the Bering Sea fishing fleet catches by accident. One of the bills would curtail the use of fishing nets that scrape sensitive parts of the sea floor. It would require regional fisheries management councils to designate bottom trawl zones and limit that kind of fishing to those areas.

The North Pacific Fishery Management Council will not move forward with a request to close the Bristol Bay red king crab savings area to all commercial fishing. At its February meeting, the regulatory council looked at the effectiveness of closing the 4,000-square-nautical-mile section of the eastern Bering Sea to commercial trawl, pot and longline fishing, but decided not to tighten regulations in the area.

Three tribal governments and the Center for Biological Diversity plan to sue to stop the project, which they say could lead to more commercial bottom trawling.

Alaska pollock’s “A” season opened saturday. That’s when the pollock trawlers set out into the Bering Sea to scoop up the whitefish that keeps Unalaska’s lights on.

The claims to extended continental shelf territory, to be asserted by the U.S. State Department, include an area within the Arctic Ocean that is bigger than California.

Annual reports for the Bering Sea, Aleutian Islands and Gulf of Alaska reveal mixed signs for fish stocks in changing conditions.

The majority of Alaska’s Bristol Bay commercial red king crab have been caught for the season. This year’s quota was rather low, coming in at about 2.1 million pounds for the entire fleet. To compare, that’s less than half the total allowable catch, or TAC, for the 2018/2019 season. Ethan Nichols is the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s area management biologist for groundfish and shellfish in the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands region. He said even just a couple million pounds was a welcome amount for harvesters during historic lows in the state’s commercial crab industry.