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.