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Sakhalin fishery companies puzzled by absence of salmon

"July is coming to an end but the Pacific salmon, which the scientists said would get here in the amount of up to 200,000 tons doesn’t show up," the local fishing association representative says

YUZHNO-SAKHALINSK, July 28. /TASS/. Fishery companies on Russia’s Far-Eastern island of Sakhalin are puzzled by the absence of salmon fishes on approaches to the island’s shores.

The regional Council of Fishermen has sent a letter to the Acting Governor asking him to organize aerial photography of the eastern coast in order to establish the real situation with the availability of salmon this season, Sergey Senko, the chairman of the Association of Fishing Collective Farms and Enterprises of Sakhalin told TASS.

"A highly complicated situation has taken shape at present," he said. "We had a scientific forecast for big fishing and our enterprise made borrowings and brought in people and what we actually see is the absence of fish."

"July is coming to an end but the Pacific salmon, which the scientists said would get here in the amount of up to 200,000 tons doesn’t show up in any form at present," Senko said. "What should we do in this situation? Pay our productions teams and wait or dissolve them?"

He indicated that research organizations could not provide any explanations for the phenomenon citing reductions in the finances allocated for science. Research groups at the Sakhalin Research Institute of the Finishing Industry that should be monitoring and establishing the quantities of some or other populations of Pacific salmon, their migration and conditions.

"In the wake of it, we’re asking the Acting Governor to take concrete steps to clear out the real situation with the approach of humpback salmon — for instance, the aerial photography from planes and helicopters of the eastern Sakhalin coastline," Senko said.

In the meantime, experts at the Sakhalin Research Institute of the Fishing Industry have told TASS an unusually late start of the amassed fishing season is not uniquely Sakhalin-related and is registered in practically the whole northern sector of the Pacific starting from America to Sakhalin and Kamchatka.

It is not ruled out that humpback salmon is concentrating somewhere in the northern areas of the Sea of Okhotsk and waiting for better conditions in which it would approach the Sakhalin coast, an expert said.

"We don’t remember any such abnormal situation with the arrival of salmon fishes but still we hope the fish will eventually come here in the originally forecasted amounts," he said. "The fishing companies are to wait until the second peak of the season when the salmons get to the island, too."