An Alaska commercial fisherman who prosecutors say robbed creeks of salmon heading to spawning grounds has lost his fishing vessel, nets, skiff and other gear, under a sentence imposed last week in Prince of Wales District Court.
Curtis Demmert, now 32 of Klawock, was fishing in Coco Harbor, on Dall Island to the west of Prince of Wales Island in Southeast Alaska, according to the charging document and other court filings.
It's an area that has been closed to commercial fishing for at least 29 years, a state biologist told wildlife troopers investigating the matter.
"This is extraordinarily uncommon," said Aaron Peterson, an assistant attorney general in the Office of Special Prosecutions. "The level of egregiousness is what sets it off."
Sometimes fishermen fall asleep and drift over a boundary line. Sometimes their GPS tracking system puts them in the wrong spot. That is not what happened here, Peterson said.
Demmert was fishing 65 miles into closed waters – not just barely over the line between legal and illegal fishing, prosecutors said.
Demmert pleaded guilty last year to four misdemeanors: commercial fishing during a closed period, commercial fishing in closed waters, putting false information on a fish ticket and unlawful possession of fish.
On Jan. 10, he was sentenced ...
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