In the final weeks of Alaska’s summer salmon fishing season, with the yield estimated at 216.5 million fish, the harvest just keeps on coming. In the second week of September alone, fishermen delivered 2.4 million salmon, mostly coho and late running keta, the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute said in a September 18 market update report produced by the McDowell Group in Juneau.
Late sockeye runs are producing more fish for processors in Southeast Alaska, while the Bristol Bay harvest is being hailed as one for the history books. The total inshore run is the second largest in 20 years and the preliminary value, $214 million, is nearly double the 20-year average. Bristol Bay sockeye averaged 5.5 pounds this season, below the long-term average of 5.9 pounds, but similar to recent years, according to the report.
The statewide catch to date of 136 million pink salmon compares to a forecast of 142 million fish and 190.6 million humpies harvested in 2015, while the sockeye harvest of more than 52 million fish far exceeds the nearly 41 million reds estimate, and is slightly lower than the 52.9 million reds caught in 2016. The pink salmon catch is down by 26 percent from the last odd year harvest of 2015, while the sockeye yield is down just 2 percent from last year.
The coho harvest, still underway, stands at 4.5 million, nearing the predicted 4.7 million silvers and already exceeds the 2016 harvest of 3.9 million fish by 36 percent. The keta harvest, also still ongoing, stands at 23.5 million fish, far above the 16.7 million forecast and up 54 percent over last year’s 16 million fish intake. The keta harvest for Alaska’s Arctic-Yukon-Kuskokwim region – mostly the Lower Yukon – has come in to date with 1.7 million fish, up from the 2016 1.4 million fish, although below the 2017 forecast of 2.7 million.
