ey have their adipose fins clipped, are tagged and transferred back to the Crooked Creek facility.
“Around 105,000 a year come back down. We’ll see the fish from the eggs we just collected back again for release in spring of 2008,” Breakfield said.
Once returned to the Crooked Creek facility, the young fish are kept in a holding pond for seven days before being released. This is done to imprint them to Crooked Creek so the fish can home in on these waters when they return in a few years to spawn as adults.
“We wouldn’t want hatchery-produced fish going up the Kenai (River) or into other rivers where they could potentially alter the genetics of the fish populations in those systems,” he said.
Breakfield said this is one of the reasons for clipping the adipose fin of hatchery-produced chinooks. It ensures that any hatchery-produced fish, should they stray from Crooked Creek or the Kasilof River, can be quickly and easily identified.
Breakfield said the clipped fins also help sport fishermen differentiate hatchery-produced chinooks from their wild counterparts for the purpose of complying with regulations, since the latter are only allowed to be retained a few days a week.
“Our sustainable escapement goal for Crooked Creek is 650 to 1,700 wild fish,” Breakfield said, but added that achieving this goal without exceeding it can often be challenging.
Breakfield said in 2004 roughly 2,500 hatchery-produced kings and 2,500 wild kings passed through the weir at Crooked Creek during the early run. In 2005, roughly 1,100 hatchery-produced fish and 1,903 wild fish came through. In 2006, more than 400 hatchery-produced fish and more than 1,000 wild fish had passed through the weir by mid-July.
In the short run, some fishermen have benefited from these strong returns of salmon, based on Fish and Game harvest surveys.
“Mostly it’s the Kasilof sportsfishermen that benefit from it. It’s how they were allowed to keep either a hatchery or wild fish three days a week this year as opposed to two,” Breakfield said.
Breakfield said that in 2004, reported harvests indicated 791 hatchery-produced kings and 714 wild kings were kept, while in 2005, it was 741 hatchery-produced fish to 862 wild fish. And by mid-July this year it was 458 hatchery-produced and 941 wild fish.
Breakfield was quick to point out, though, that these numbers are for fish recorded during Fish and Game creel surveys which only take place five days a week, and not the full 24 hours a day that anglers are allowed to fish. He said the final estimate for how many fish are caught “is definitely higher.”
While exceeding the upper-end escapement for Crooked Creek isn’t desired, people reaping the benefits from this fishery’s enhancement is one of the facility’s goals, according to Breakfield.
“We try to help the wild fish by enhancing the sport fishery with hatchery fish. This way people get to keep fish, but wild fish also make it to escapement,” he said.
Breakfield said that this enhancement work is also the reason the Kasilof River can be fished 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
“If it wasn’t enhanced people would likely only be able to fish one or two days a week,” he said.
Breakfield said this 24-7 fishing on the Kasilof River also reduces pressure on nearby waterways that have smaller wild runs, such as the Ninilchik River, Deep Creek and the Anchor River.
While sportsfishermen receive most of the dividends from this Crooked Creek fishery enhancement, they do provide some of the investment for it. It costs roughly $121,700 annually to operate the Crooked Creek facility and this money comes from a combination of federal funding and state funding generated from sportfishing license fees, Breakfield said.
However, this still doesn’t get successful anglers out of that cup of coffee.
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