ADF&G Blue Sheet: how to read Alaska's salmon harvest

The ADF&G Blue Sheet is the Alaska Department of Fish and Game's running count of the commercial salmon harvest, posted through the season in thousands of fish. Its formal name is the Preliminary Alaska Commercial Salmon Catch Report, and the fleet has called it the Blue Sheet for decades. It is cumulative, so each figure is the season total to date for a region, area, district and species, not a single day's catch.

Read it at the source: ADF&G posts the report at the Preliminary Alaska Commercial Salmon Catch Report. It is public, it is free, and it is where every harvest number on this site comes from. The rest of this guide is how to read it without getting it wrong.

What the Blue Sheet counts

The harvest on the Blue Sheet is common-property and hatchery cost-recovery fish, and nothing else. Common-property means the traditional competitive commercial fisheries, the drift and set gillnetters, the purse seiners and the trollers who make up the fleet. Cost-recovery means the fish a hatchery sells to fund its own operation. Sport, subsistence and personal-use harvests are not in these numbers, so the Blue Sheet is a commercial figure, not a total-fish figure. Read it as what the fleet delivered, not as every salmon that came back.

Thousands of fish, updated through the season

Every value is in thousands of fish. A line reading 1,500 is 1.5 million fish, not fifteen hundred, and a Bristol Bay sockeye line in the tens of thousands is tens of millions. ADF&G refreshes the statewide totals twice a day and updates the detailed harvest daily, from about mid-May when the first fisheries open to the end of September when the season winds down. In the off-season the report sits static until the next year's fisheries start.

Preliminary, and it will change

The header on the report says preliminary and subject to revision, and it means it. In-season numbers are the best running estimates managers and processors can assemble while fish are moving, and they get trued up after the season as fish tickets are reconciled. Some cells are blank on purpose. Where too few permit holders fished for a number to be published without exposing an individual business, ADF&G suppresses the cell at the source, so a blank is a confidentiality rule and not a zero. A district can also sit blank for weeks and then appear with a large cumulative total already on it, which is reporting catching up rather than a week of fishing. None of this makes the Blue Sheet unreliable. It makes it a live estimate, which is what an in-season fishery needs.

Areas and districts: getting the grain right

ADF&G's top layer is the management area. Bristol Bay, Prince William Sound, Southeast, Kodiak and the rest are areas. Below each area sit the districts, the level where fishing is actually opened and closed. Bristol Bay alone breaks into five districts, Naknek-Kvichak, Egegik, Nushagak, Ugashik and Togiak. This site reads the Blue Sheet at the district grain and rolls the districts up to the management area, because the area is the grain ADF&G's April forecast uses. Matching the two lets the scoreboard put harvest and forecast on the same footing.

Where the Blue Sheet stops

The Blue Sheet is a harvest report. It counts fish the fleet landed and sold. It does not count escapement, the salmon allowed past the fishery to swim upriver and spawn, and it does not carry a total run. Those are separate measurements taken by separate crews on separate gear, and the difference matters: a fishery can be closed hard in a strong run because managers are protecting an escapement goal, and the harvest line will flatten while fish are still pouring in.

ADF&G does publish the other side for the state's biggest sockeye fishery. Its Bristol Bay Daily Salmon Run Summary carries daily and cumulative escapement, in-river estimates and a total run figure by district and by individual river, including the Kvichak, Naknek, Egegik, Ugashik, Wood, Igushik, Alagnak, Nushagak and Togiak. ADF&G combines catch and escapement into a total run on that page. The Run does not, because this site ingests the Blue Sheet and not the escapement counts, so no figure here is a total run and escapement is never folded into a harvest number. For the harvest half of the Bay read day by day and district by district, see our Bristol Bay daily run summary. For escapement and total run, use ADF&G's.

Worked example: reading one line

Take the scoreboard above. Each row is a management area, its cumulative Blue Sheet harvest set against ADF&G's preseason forecast, with the percent of forecast in the last column. Find Bristol Bay and read across: the harvest landed so far, the forecast and the share of the forecast in the bag. A high percent means that area's run is well along, either because it is running strong or because its calendar peak has already passed. A low percent early in the summer usually means the area has not opened in force yet. The percent is a pace read, not a verdict. A big number is income to a permit holder and supply to a buyer, and the Blue Sheet takes no side on which.

The Run reports the Blue Sheet as ADF&G publishes it. We do not forecast where the harvest will finish, and we do not adjust ADF&G's figures. For the reporting week the harvest is organized by, see what is a statistical week.