Anna Laffrey. “Fish Groups Debate Chinook Proposals.” Sitka Sentinel. February 6, 2025.

The Ted Ferry Civic Center buzzed around 2:30 p.m. on Wednesday as Alaska Board of Fisheries Member Tom Carpenter called a 25-minute break in the ninth day of the Board’s 13-day Southeast Alaska/Yakutat finfish and shellfish regulatory meeting.

This morning, the Board began its final deliberations on state rules that guide the harvest of chinook salmon by different user groups in Southeast.

On Wednesday, Carpenter stood down the meeting as the Board was working through the fourth of 32 regulatory proposals at hand for the Board’s “committee of the whole” session regarding the state’s chinook management.

Jeff Wedekind, who owns Chinook Shores Lodge in Ketchikan, said that Carlson-Van Dort’s RC140, or Board Member Greg Svendsen’s RC109 that suggests a 70/30 percent allocation between troll and sport, rather than 80/20, “recognize the need for higher allocation” in the growing nonresident sport fishing industry.

“When you think about how we prosecute our fisheries, growth is really hard, because there’s a finite number of fish in the ocean,” Wedekind said. “So how do you grow?

“You need to bring more value to the fish that you catch, or you can’t grow,” Wedekind said.

Wedekind, who submitted the formal Proposal 113 to increase sport allocation to 25 percent, said that he would “advocate for (Svendsen’s) RC109 … with stipulations that there would be resident (sport harvest) protections and also a hard cap on that 30 percent” of the combined troll/sport allocation by the sport sector.