Southeast Alaska salmon harvest

The panhandle: troll, drift and set gillnet and purse seine across the islands, plus a large enhanced pink and chum harvest and the Yakutat set gillnet fishery. This page tracks Southeast Alaska'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.

Southeast runs the most varied gear mix in Alaska. The troll fleet, hook and line, targets Chinook and coho and is the state's main commercial Chinook fishery. Purse seiners work pink and chum. Drift gillnet fishes chum and sockeye in the northern and southern inside waters. Each is a separate limited-entry fishery with its own permits, and a season can be strong for one and poor for another.

Two structural facts shape the numbers. Southeast Chinook harvest is governed by the Pacific Salmon Treaty between the United States and Canada, which sets an all-gear catch limit tied to a coastwide abundance index, so the Chinook line here answers to an international allocation rather than to local abundance alone. And pink salmon return on a two-year life cycle, which historically produced a pronounced odd-year and even-year alternation in the region's volume, so comparing a Southeast pink season against the year before it can mislead in a way comparing against two years earlier does not.

How the 2026 season ran. NOAA and ADF&G forecast a 2026 Southeast pink salmon harvest of 19 million fish, which they called near average, on November 17, 2025. That is the pink forecast in the table above. It comes from juvenile pinks caught in NOAA and ADF&G trawl surveys in upper Chatham and Icy Straits the summer before: the 2025 index of 1.29 sat near the 2018 to 2024 mean of 1.38.

King salmon run on a treaty clock. The 2026 all-gear limit for Southeast under the Pacific Salmon Treaty is 205,300 treaty Chinook, and the troll fleet's share for the accounting year from October 11, 2025 to September 30, 2026 is 146,000. Winter trolling took 18,100 and spring was projected at 8,100, so the first summer retention period opened July 1 aiming at about 81,300 treaty fish, and the second closed September 4, when ADF&G expected its 33,000-fish target to be reached. Most Alaska hatchery kings do not count against the treaty limit, so the Chinook line on the Blue Sheet and the treaty numbers do not compare one for one. Trolling for other species was extended to September 30, and the winter troll season opened by regulation on October 11, 2026.