Halibut survey's bait price jumps 70% as scientists try again to reach Adak

International Pacific Halibut Commission staff recommended a 2027 survey plan last week that would try again to survey halibut near Adak, where no boat bid on the work this year, even as the price of its bait jumps 70%.

The survey is the commission's own longline count of where halibut are and how many there are. It feeds the stock assessment behind each area's catch limit, at a time when halibut are near a 40-year low.

The chum salmon bait the survey already bought for 2027 cost $4.09 a pound, up from $2.40 this year, a 70% increase staff called unanticipated. Even the basic plan would lose about $533,000 next year, and the expanded one about $1.36 million, or $614,000 after a U.S. contribution.

The western Aleutians have been hard to cover. All 58 survey stations near Adak went unfished this year because no vessel bid, according to the staff paper. The standard charter rate drew no Adak bids in 2023 either.

That gap matters. The commission's January report found halibut's share in the Bering Sea and Aleutians has been rising, but thin sampling in that western area from 2023 to 2025 has made the stock's trend there less certain.

That U.S. money, $749,000, would add six regions, including two near Adak. But staff warned that at the usual rate, the Adak stations could again go unfished.

So staff offered a pricier option: pay a fixed $5,500 a station, 28% more than the highest bid previously accepted there, to cover all 118 Adak stations. That would cost about $585,000, compared with $220,000 for the two smaller Adak regions. Staff asked commissioners whether the difference is worth it.

Staff project $4.69 million in losses over five years, enough to exhaust the survey's reserve without more contributions, though they called cost projections highly uncertain. That reserve held about $1.16 million on Sept. 30, under a third of its target. Without an adequately funded reserve, staff wrote, the commission could have to scale back coverage "in precisely the years when maintaining it matters most."

This year, six longliners fished 619 of 717 planned stations. Whales made 19 of the fished stations ineffective, 14 of them sperm whales and five orcas.

The commission picks a design at an online meeting Dec. 1 and sets 2027 catch limits in January.