Chucky Panitchaiq Hopson II had been whaling for about a month before he landed one this spring. He captains one of the eight boats that worked together to catch the first whale of the season last weekend.
“I told my crew, at our next opportunity we're gonna take that chance,” Hopson said. “Next day, we got on to that whale, and my crew didn't hesitate to take it, to strike it.”
Hopson said that, by this time of year, Alaska’s largest subsistence whaling community has typically landed 10 or more. But Hopson said the ice edge is ragged this year, with very few flat spots for pulling up a whale. And there is a lot of young ice that’s too thin to support big whales.
In fact, when the crews were pulling up the 50-foot whale last weekend, some of the ice broke under it. Hopson said he thought they were going to lose a lot of the harvest.
“Once it got to the thicker ice, we were able to get it up,” he said. “You know, the community coming together, we were able to harvest the whale.”
Herman Ahsoak, another long-time Utqiagvik whaling captain, said the last time the town landed a whale this late was in 2013.
“It got pretty close to June,” he said about that year.
Utqiagvik, like other coastal Arctic communities in Alaska, relies on whaling as a crucial food source and to maintain Iñupiat traditions. The town has a quota of 25 bowhead whales a year, and residents spend weeks or months preparing boats for the season, hunting, processing and celebrating their harvest.
Andy Mahoney, a research professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Geophysical Institute, said his teams have been monitoring Utqiagvik ice conditions remotely and on the ground.
“We have noticed that the ice is rougher this year, certainly than last,” Mahoney said. “But I think what's making it challenging for the whalers right now particularly is where the ice is rough, and there was a lot of new ice added fairly late in the year.”
Mahoney said that normally, young ice forms earlier in the year. Then wind storms push the new ice against the existing shorefast ice to form ridges. By whaling season, the ice consolidates and thickens.
“The key part of it is timing,” Mahoney said. “I think what happened this year was, those storms just didn't happen until later in the year, so that the ice wasn't super thick.”
Mahoney said the shifts in climate also affect the timing of the storms.
This winter was quite cold in Utqiagvik. But the Arctic overall is warming faster than the rest of the world.
“In a warming Arctic, these sorts of events are going to become more likely. It's not just the warming and thinning of the ice,” he said. “Conditions will be more sensitive to a sort of a mistimed storm if the ice is already thin.”
Daaqsi Moore, one of the hunters who helped the Hopson crew land the first whale, said it has been a challenging season. Crews have been sharing the few trails that they managed to build and to search for whales.
"People were getting frustrated, you know. People get hungry for muktuk,” he said. “It was good to see everybody's spirits flip when Chucky landed that whale.”
Hopson said his crew spent two days on the ice processing that first whale after they landed it. Then they shared some of the harvest with the community – a little taste before the big whaling festival that usually happens later in the summer.
On Thursday, Hopson was headed out to the ice again to try to land another whale for the community. He said he really hopes that first whale won’t be their only one of the season.
