Prince William Sound salmon harvest

A drift gillnet, set gillnet and seine fishery with a large hatchery pink and chum component, plus the early Copper River sockeye and Chinook openers. This page tracks Prince William Sound's cumulative commercial salmon harvest from ADF&G's Blue Sheet, by species, against the area's preseason forecast. The numbers are common-property and cost-recovery catch in thousands of fish, preliminary and updated through the season; sport, subsistence and personal-use harvests are not included. Percent of forecast is a share of the full-season projection, not a good-or-bad call, and it climbs as each species opens and peaks: early low percentages are the run still building, not a weak year. In the ex-vessel table, value is that species' whole-season total in dollars as ADF&G prints it, not a per-fish or per-pound figure, so a species with a few hundred fish shows a total of a few dollars.

Three fisheries share the Sound and run on different clocks. The Copper River drift gillnet opener in May is the earliest commercial salmon fishery in Alaska and the one that sets the season's news, landing sockeye and a small number of Chinook into an air-freight market that pays for being first. The seine fleet follows through the summer on pink and chum, and set gillnet works the district beaches. When is Copper River salmon season, and how does it work? covers how the Copper River periods are set and when the season ends.

What separates the Sound from every other area on this page is how much of its volume is hatchery fish. Private nonprofit hatcheries release pink and chum on a scale that makes the Sound's headline numbers a story about hatchery returns as much as about wild production, and cost recovery, where the hatchery sells a share of its own returning fish to fund the operation, appears in the catch figures alongside the common-property fleet. Reading a Sound pink total as a wild-run indicator is the standard mistake here.

How the 2026 season ran. ADF&G's May 1, 2026 outlook projected a Copper River District commercial harvest of 728,000 sockeye, on par with the 2016 to 2025 average of 733,000, and a Copper River king run of 33,000 fish, 27% below its 10-year average of 45,000. The kings set the terms from the first period. The district opened May 22 for 12 hours with an expanded closed area inside the river mouth, and through June ADF&G said every king indicator it had (the forecast, the catch, sonar apportionment and fish wheels) pointed to a weak run. The closed waters were meant to hold escapement inside the 21,000 to 31,000 king goal while the fleet fished the more abundant sockeye.

Then the sockeye came in short. Through June 2 the Miles Lake sonar had counted 47,339 fish, against 107,378 expected by that date on the historical timing of the 2026 inriver goal. After the June 11 period the commercial fishery stayed closed for four weeks; on July 4 ADF&G said it would stay closed until a harvestable surplus of upper Copper River sockeye was likely. With the count at 462,245 against 478,200 expected through July 7 and the inriver goal projected to be met, it opened one 24-hour period on July 9. The district's estimated catch then stood at 243,000 sockeye, about a third of the forecast, and did not move again. The sonar shut down after July 28 at 570,391 fish (600,897 expected by that date), and ADF&G said king passage ended near the low end of the goal, with the count of large kings the lowest in eight seasons.

Coho carried the rest of the year. Copper River Delta survey counts ran below ADF&G's expected range through August (6,800 for the week ending August 29, against 16,147 to 33,807) and then above it (40,780 for the week ending September 12, against 18,286 to 38,285). The district's coho catch estimate went from 15,600 on August 19 to 155,000 on September 4, against a 2016 to 2025 average of 184,000, and ADF&G scheduled 36-hour periods into October before closing the season at 7:00 pm on October 13. The hatchery side of the Sound, where the pink and chum shortfalls ran, is on the pink and chum pages.