232 
BULLETIN OF THE BUREAU OF FISHERIES 
being smothered by being forced into dense masses during the towing. In some 
cases the pounds have been placed in water too shallow and the receding tide has 
left the herring stranded. Occasionally storms drag a pound ashore, smotheiing 
the herring. Even with the best of care a small percentage of the impounded herring 
will soon die from infection where the scales have been rubbed off against the web. 
The herring pounds are of 1% or 2 inch mesh (stretched measure) and of heavier 
web than the seines. Since they must be left in the water for a long time, they are 
never tanned but are heavily tarred. They are simply strips of webbing about 
80 fathoms in length, put out to form a square with floats on the top and weights 
underneath to keep the web on the bottom. 
THE GILL-NET FISHERY 
In Alaska gill nets are used chiefly in Halibut Cove and a few scattered localities 
such as Simeonof Bay in the Shumagin Islands. (Fig. 3.) Those used at Halibut 
Cove are 50 fathoms in length and 100 meshes (about 3 fathoms) in depth and are 
anchored in one spot while fishing. The mesh used is supposed to be 3 inches across 
(stretched measure). i 2 3 
Since herring seldom gill in daylight, the nets are usually let down at night. 
The gill nets, or set nets, as used at Halibut Cove, are anchored at both ends and kept 
up with buoy kegs. In the morning it is usual to lift the net, to go along it shaking 
the herring into the boat, and then to drop the net back into the water so that on 
reaching its far end it has been reset. 
Gill netting is advantageous where the fish are desired for salting and where the 
majority of the herring are too small for pickling, since, if a proper size of mesh is 
used, only the larger herring are captured. 
Some have ascribed the failures of the herring fishery in the various localities of 
central Alaska in recent years to the inability of the gear to catch the herring, except 
when they come into the bays. Some of the proponents of this theory have made 
attempts in Alaska to gill-net herring by the European method, in which a large- 
power vessel operating at a distance from shore puts out a very long cable buoyed up 
at intervals with kegs. To this cable are attached a number of gill nets. Neither 
the boat nor the cable are anchored while fishing, hence the name “drifting” is 
applied to this method. 
The power schooner Decorah attempted this method in Prince William Sound 
in 1924, but had no success. In 1928 the power schooner Roald Amundsen, equipped 
with 40 gill nets, each 12 fathoms long by 300 meshes deep, “drifted” all summer 
on the Portlock and Albatross banks, off the Trinity Islands, in Shelikof Strait, all 
around Kodiak Island inshore and offshore, and in Cook Inlet. This attempt also 
met with failure. These failures would seem to bear out the evidence of our racial 
investigations; that the herring, being divided into a number of local races, can not 
be found in any large body offshore. 
i Koelz (1926) made experiments illustrating the difference in effectiveness of nets which differ only inch in size of mesh. 
In two experiments in Lake Ontario he found that gill netting of 2^-inch mesh caught double the number of fish of netting with 
294-inch mesh. 
This is significant in that there is a distinction between meshes as manufactured and as fished. The 9 or 12 thread cotton gill 
netting used in Alaska shrinks in tanning and in the water. Thus the 3-inch mesh cotton gill netting used at Halibut Cove is 
3 inches'as’manufactured,|but is almost invariably 294 inches as fished, 
