April 30, 2013
Tuesday AM

Terri Wenger Anderson thinks if you call someone names their argument will be moot. Turns out the guy your bad mouthing has been sounding the clarion call to action on the commercial harvest of herring for quite some time. His points are fact based, well researched and absent of vitriol and name-calling; we should all strive to write as well.

Andy Rauwolf reminds me of my uncle Elwood Thomas describing the herring spawns before the wide-spread commercial fisheries “As far as the eye could see, there was spawn everywhere.” Those days are gone because of unbridled overfishing of herring. Andy’s position and mine is we need to leave those fish alone until we have herring spawning all over southeast Alaska again, not just in fewer and fewer places as we “manage” our stocks into oblivion. Leave them alone and let these stocks rebuild coast-wide.

 Thanks To Andy for taking the lead on our herring stocks issue and the continuing coast-wide decimation of those stocks. This is a very important and contentious issue and it needs to be addressed with conservation measures not in a managed fishery.  Recalling the aboriginal accounts of our herring stocks would indicate we are on the very last percentile of our stocks.  Leave them alone.

I thank all of you who take the time to frame, arrange and present well- reasoned articles of your principles and opinions.

Sam Bergeron
Ketchikan, Alaska

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