Inside Hooper Bay’s brown tribal council building, nearly 50 people gathered to hear more from state officials on why they decided to close chinook salmon fishing in the coastal area from the Naskanat Peninsula up to Point Romanof. That closure includes Hooper Bay, Scammon Bay, Chevak, Emmonak, Kotlik, Nunam Iqua, and Alakanuk.
State biologists said that the closure is intended to protect chinook salmon while they migrate upriver to spawn in Alaska and Canada. But most in the crowd were subsistence fishermen and fishing means survival.
