Setting nets for 70 years in Anchorage’s shadow, a family witnessed major shifts in Cook Inlet salmon

UPPER COOK INLET — On a recent morning high tide, Fred Thoerner and his daughter Melina eased a sturdy skiff called Warthog down Anchorage’s Ship Creek boat ramp and motored across Knik Arm to a beach near Point MacKenzie. As the windows in downtown buildings reflected the sunrise, they set anchor in the muddy beach and unfurled their net.

Thoerner is one of just a handful of commercial fishermen still setting nets in the northernmost part of Cook Inlet. His grandparents David and Jean Ring started fishing there more than 70 years ago. He’s 42 and was raised by his grandparents. Hearing their stories and fishing his whole life made him a witness to major changes in the fishery and the city’s relationship to salmon. He hopes Melina, who is 17, will take over from him, the fourth generation of his family to fish commercially in the shadow of the city.

“That’s if there’s still fish,” he said as he trained his eyes on the line of white corks in the water, waiting for a splash.

“This is the worst year I’ve ever had.”

It’s hard not to feel uneasy about where things are headed if you’ve been fishing as long as he has. The fishery is having a near-average year, according to the Department of Fish and Game, with an above-average sockeye run and a below-average coho run. But where Thoerner is fishing, the reds have been paltry and the silvers, which are usually hitting right now, have barely shown up. Hopefully, he said, they’re just late. Of course, it’s been years since he’s caught many king salmon. Chinook have been on the decline statewide since 2008. And all the species of salmon are smaller than they used to be by his eye. Scientists have documented this too, finding kings, reds, silvers and chum began coming back smaller around 1990, with the rate of shrinking accelerating in the early 2000s.

Thoerner also works in real estate, which isn’t the easiest business at the moment either. He uses fishing earnings to supplement tuition at Grace Christian School, where Melina and her sister Naomi attend.

“Fishing better pick up or she can’t go to school,” he said, half joking.

Soon there came one splash along the curve of the net, then another. Thoerner pulled the boat along the line to pick the fish. Melina scooped each one over the side of the boat and untangled it, popped the gills to bleed it and slipped it in the tote. A small silver and a chum.

Northern District setnetters have been allowed to fish from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Mondays and Thursdays since the beginning of July, and unless there’s a closure of the fishery, he expects to fish until mid-August. Thoerner sells his fish whole, under a special permit. He’s never advertised, relying instead on relationships with customers that also go back generations. He communicates with a host of regulars via phone. They meet his boat when he comes in. The reds and silvers go for $15 each. The chums mainly go to one client who makes dog treats.

The sun climbed higher and the morning turned bluebird. Fish kept hitting the net. Thoerner’s mood eased up.

“My phone’s already buzzing,” he said.

It’s hard to square fishing these days with the way it was growing up, and the way Thoerner’s grandfather talked about it, he said. But then, his grandparents started their fishing business before fish farming, the modern system of science-based fisheries management and climate change-related water temperature fluctuations in the ocean and rivers. When they first began, many of the runs in Cook Inlet were recovering after being severely depleted by overfishing, spurred in part by the demand to feed soldiers and the use of massive fish traps, which were outlawed. Anchorage had a much more robust fishing scene with canneries near Ship Creek.

By the 1980s, when Thoerner started fishing with his family, it was gangbusters.

“When I was a kid we’d have two totes of fish and fish on the deck,” he said. “We’d have a boat that was just constantly running back and forth, delivering fish. Now I’m lucky to have one tote full of fish.”

The market for fish was also different. In the early days, refrigeration technology hadn’t advanced enough to make fresh fish affordable or regularly available to home cooks. If you didn’t catch it yourself, salmon came mostly in cans, though fresh fish did appear on restaurant menus. David Ring saw that if he could deliver fresh fish directly to consumers for a decent price, people would buy it.

“My grandfather saw an opportunity to rub some coins together,” Thoerner said. “That’s what he used to say.”

So he began fishing from the beach near his homestead property at Point MacKenzie and selling it from his house in the Sand Lake neighborhood. Fresh salmon made its way into grocery stores but it was still expensive. “Housewives,” as the Anchorage Times reported in the 1970s, preferred cheaper fish, like bottom fish made into fish sticks. It wasn’t until the late 1970s and early 1980s that recipes for grilled fresh salmon began to appear in the Anchorage newspaper food sections. By then, there’d also been a boom in sportfishing, stoked in part by the influx of people who came to work on the pipeline.

Setting a net in Cook Inlet isn’t what it once was. There have been conflicts with other fishing interests, tighter management and increasing disruptions in the fish runs themselves over the last 30 years. Though red salmon runs have been strong the last few years, a serious long-term drop-off in king salmon populations caused managers to shut down the largest part of the fishery — from roughly Ninilchik to Kenai — for the first time. That started last summer and continues this year. There are roughly 730 setnet permits in all of Cook Inlet, but the number of individual people fishing was falling even before the recent closure, according to data from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

The amount fishermen make varies year to year — sometimes by a lot — but overall that average has fallen as well. In 1989, a record earnings year, 668 people fished using setnets in all of Cook Inlet and the average earnings were $219,617, according to Fish and Game. In 2022, the number of people fishing in the Inlet had dropped to 364. That year, the average earnings were among the lowest recorded, at $7,981 per person. The real value of a permit, adjusted for inflation, has decreased by more than 90% from its highest point in 1990, when one cost more than $200,000.

As in Cook Inlet as a whole, in the Northern District, from just north of Nikiski into Knik Arm, where Thoerner fishes on the northernmost edge, the average age of permit holders has climbed and the number of permits being fished has fallen. About 75 permits are being fished in the Northern District now — a fisherman can fish up to two — so the number of fishermen may be lower. Only a dozen or so fish where Thoerner does, nearest to Anchorage, he said.

“We all know each other,” he said. “We communicate, look out for each other.”

Sitting in a boat, watching a net like Thoerner does, you think about what might be happening to the fish. Thoerner wonders if they’re being caught by driftnetters down the Inlet, “corking them off,” as his grandfather used to say. Or maybe something’s happening to them in the ocean, where the temperatures have fluctuated higher with marine heatwaves, as scientists have speculated.

He hates most the idea that any are being caught as bycatch by trawlers and wasted, beautiful fish thrown over the side for the crabs. Bycatch of king salmon by Bering Sea trawlers, which was about 120,000 fish a year at a high point in 2007, has fallen along with the population of kings overall, to fewer than 20,000 fish, most of them from coastal Western Alaska, according to the North Pacific Fishery Management Council.

Thoerner remembers when the kings were huge — twice what they are now — and plentiful.

“We used to sell our kings for $3 a pound,” he said.

He opened the cooler and offered Melina some cheese and crackers. She yawned. Down at the end of the net, a fish splashed. She’s hoping to go to college out of state, she said, but wants to come back to make her home in Anchorage and keep up the fishing. She expected her dad wouldn’t quit until he’s too frail to get into a boat, she said.

“I can’t really imagine doing it without him,” she said.

Late morning, the wind changed, turning the smooth gray water choppy. Thoerner expected that. And the tide fell to where he could see the tip of a particular rock, which, he’d learned from his grandfather, meant it was time to head into deeper water. The tote was half full, a good day by the standards of this summer, more than 100 fish, some of them still flipping around in the bloody slush. A customer had taken orders from all his coworkers and was waiting to buy 90 with a stack of empty coolers. Melina helped haul in the anchor. He turned the boat back toward the city.

“It helps my day to day life, being outside, having a purpose,” he said. “Even if I’m not catching fish like I used to, I just enjoy being out here and passing on that feeling to my daughter.”