Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologists have released the sockeye salmon forecast for Upper Cook Inlet, confirming what fishermen have been speculating all along: 2009 will not be a banner year.

Run size is forecast at 4.3 million sockeye Inlet-wide, with a harvest expected to be about 3 million, 2.5 million of that by commercial fishermen. While that is down from the 20-year-average, it is actually above the 2008 commercial harvest of 2.36 million sockeye.

ADF&G reports that the lower than expected harvest in 2008 was largely due to a weaker than expected return of age 1.3 (one year in fresh water, three years in the ocean) sockeye salmon to the Kenai River. However, they note that sockeye runs to all five monitored systems were below the forecasted run size.

The 2009 sockeye forecast is broken down into an expected return of 92,000 to the Crescent River, 80,000 to Fish Creek, 822,000 to the Kasilof River, 2.44 million to the Kenai River, and 669,000 to the Susitna River.

The forecasted return to the Susitna River is the one raising eyebrows. UCI Area Management Biologist Jeff Fox explained why.

"The one big change is the Susitna, and that is because we determined that the counter is undercounting, by at least a factor of 2, perhaps more," Fox explained.

While biologists and some fishermen have thought that was the case for some time, recent studies funded by the Legislature have confirmed it.

"It's documented now," Fox said. "We have weirs on four or five lakes that count more than the sonar, and the sonar is counting fish that go to 14 lakes. Plus we have mark-and-recapture (studies) that also tell us there are a lot more fish."

Sport fishing groups from the Mat-Su Valley have lobbied the Board of Fisheries for years to restrict the drift fleet in Upper Cook Inlet because of the perception that commercial fishermen were intercepting unacceptable numbers of Susitna drainage-bound sockeye. Information from the new studies and the numbers in the ADF&G 2009 forecast may put a bit of a hole in that argument. There are probably not going to be any more fish in the Susitna drainage than last year, when biologists were forecasting a run of 344,000 sockeye. The difference is that they will hopefully all be counted. However, that may not translate into more fish on the end of the pole for sport fishermen.

"We did a study in the Kenai (River)," Fox said. "Forty-two percent of the people on Kenai River won't catch a fish, no matter how many there are. That was with sockeye, which is probably the easiest fish for them (sport fishermen) to catch, because they're the most numerous."

Fox spoke to the problem of pike which are voracious and known to eat a large number of sockeye eggs and smolt in the Susitna drainage, which can effectively negate any gains made by restricting commercial fishing and allowing more fish into the system.

"There will be a few fish more," he said, "but it won't be noticeable for very long because the pike are going to eat them anyway."

Beaver dams also are a problem in the Valley, although not as large of one.

"Beavers are way less of a problem than pike," Fox commented, "but the combined effect is pretty significant. When you finally do get fish back, if you let half of them die behind a beaver dam, it isn't helping things."

What to do about the pike and beaver is something that could use some investigation by the Joint Cook Inlet Salmon Task Force, a body formed during the 2008 legislative season to look into the problems of salmon returns in the Mat-Su Valley. While it was originally scheduled to dismantle at the beginning of the 2009 legislative session, that deadline has been extended for one more year.

While the new studies show that more salmon than previously thought have been returning to the area, sport fishermen are adamant that more fish are needed to support the tourism economy in the Mat-Su. Perhaps finding an answer to the pike problem would help.

"The pike problem is hard to solve," Fox said, "but it is probably solvable." For example, he said, "We know that sound pressure waves can kill them."

Asked about that also harming the salmon, Fox replied, "You could time it to where smolt from one brood year are leaving and maybe fry from the next haven't entered the lake yet."

The 2009 UCI sockeye salmon forecast is available on the ADF&G website at www.cf.adfg.state.ak.us/.

Cristy Fry has commercial fished in Homer since 1978. She also designs and builds gear for the industry. She can be reached at cristy-fry@excite.com.