For Southeast Alaska’s salmon trollers, the longest day of the year falls on July 1: opening day of Chinook salmon season.

Every July 1 finds us – two humans and our boat, the 43-foot Nerka – forty miles offshore in the Gulf of Alaska. We’ll be in our boots ‘til sundown: checking our hooks, processing the catch, handling every salmon with meticulous care. We’ll talk about our partners, Pacific Northwest chefs and grocers, who will build their own work around our harvest. Throughout the day we’ll exclaim at breaching humpbacks, a Layson albatross soaring by, a school of herring flipping on the surface. Everything is an interconnected wonder.

One hook, one fish. Following ten thousand years of First Nations’ seasonal harvests and environmental stewardship, this ethos has guided Southeast Alaska’s commercial troll fleet for almost 150 years. As second-generation fishermen proud of the conservation values regulating our work, it’s surreal to find our fishery in the Wild Fish Conservancy’s crosshairs.

On April 17, the Duvall-based organization filed an injunction in federal court to block king salmon trolling in Alaska this season, effective July 1. The injunction comes just a month after the WFC’s lawsuit against the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for authorizing Alaska’s Chinook troll fishery, alleging troll interception as the cause of the Southern Resident orca’s nutritional deficiencies. This lawsuit addresses none of the very real threats to the Southern Resident orcas and salmon – Puget Sound’s habitat loss, pollution, dams, climate change – but instead seeks to shut down some of the hardest working advocates for salmon: community-based fisher-folks in a sustainable fishery over a thousand miles away.

Having this unfold amidst pandemic days, when everyone’s circumstances are already precarious and any sense of normalcy wildly off-kilter, has been brutal. Salmon trollers are literal mom-and-pop operations, struggling to stay afloat with little-to-no margins. The vast majority of the fleet – 85% – are Alaskan residents. Southeast Alaska’s coastal communities have spent decades sacrificing to compensate for the Lower 48’s freshwater habitat destruction, illustrated by the cuts to our Chinook quota in Pacific Salmon Treaty (PST) negotiations: 35% in 1999, 15% in 2009, and at least another 7.5% in 2019. When it comes to saving Chinook salmon and the orcas that depend on them, no one has more at stake than commercial fishing families. Our livelihoods depend on healthy stocks and fisheries managed for the long-term. Conscientious consumers know this; it’s why Alaska has consistently been lauded for its “best practice” fisheries, world-renowned as a model of sustainability.

Last summer, Alaska’s trollers fished a total of seven days for kings. Eliminating the lowest impact fishery on the water will not reduce the toxicity of Puget Sound or the PCB levels responsible for “peanut-head” offspring, nor will it address the impact of the Lower Snake River dams and the rampant habitat loss caused by America’s fastest-growing metropolis. Notably, Washington’s Southern Resident Orca Task Force, expert stakeholders, isn’t backing the WFC’s lawsuit. Instead of helping orcas, this will devastate Southeast Alaska’s coastal communities and our partners across the country.

Fisherman/environmentalist: we’re old enough to remember when folks had to choose one or the other. That’s a tired trope performed by both sides, and we reject it. We are a commercial fisher-family. We are environmentalists. The WFC speaks for neither.

As harvesters, we are responsible for telling the story of our salmon. Few of our land-friends will ever watch a king salmon breach the water’s surface as dawn breaks over the Fairweather Range, but if we do our work properly, they’ll feel reverence for the fish on their plate. Only through alliances between commercial fisher-folks, conservationists, service industry professionals, tribal members, sports fishing groups, scientists, & consumers – can we hope to turn the tide for the long-term survival of the Southern Resident orcas. The WFC’s lawsuit is not the path that will get us there. 

As of May 12, we’re still uncertain as to how our 2020 salmon season will unfold, waiting for a federal judge in Washington to rule on the WFC’s injunction. Please visit the Alaska Trollers Association to donate to ATA’s Legal Fund.