Bristol Bay fish counts 2026: daily harvest by district

This is the Bristol Bay commercial harvest read day by day, district by district, off ADF&G's Blue Sheet. It is the number a permit holder, a tender operator and a buyer all check in the morning during the run, because it is the only Bay figure that updates while fish are still moving. Every value is thousands of fish, cumulative for the season to date, and preliminary.

What is on this page and what is not

The Run tracks harvest: common-property and hatchery cost-recovery fish delivered to buyers, as ADF&G reports them. It does not track escapement, the fish allowed past the fishery to spawn, and it does not compute a total run. ADF&G does publish all of that for the Bay. Its own 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. If escapement or total run is what you need, that is the page to read. Nothing here is added to anything there. Escapement and harvest are different measurements of different fish, and this site never folds one into the other.

A search for Bristol Bay fish counts usually means one of two numbers. This page carries the first: how many fish the fleet has caught, district by district. The second is escapement, the fish counted past the fishery on their way to spawn. ADF&G counts those from towers on most of the Bay's rivers, a method it has used there since the 1950s, and from sonar at Portage Creek on the Nushagak. The Bay's river-by-river counts are in ADF&G's own daily run summary, linked above, and daily weir, tower and sonar counts from across the state are in its Fish Counts database.

Why a district cell can be blank

A blank in the district table is ADF&G not publishing a figure, not a district that caught nothing. The Blue Sheet suppresses a cell at the source when too few permit holders fished for a number to be printed without exposing an individual business, and a district can also simply not be reported yet. That is why the table carries a first reported column: when a district appears it can arrive with a large cumulative total already on it, and the Bay total steps up with it on the same day. Read that step as reporting catching up, not as a week's fishing. The daily ledger above shows those steps plainly.

One limit on that column, stated rather than papered over: our record of the Blue Sheet begins Jul 10, 2026, the first day this site pulled the report. A district reading "on or before" that date was already publishing when we started, and we cannot say from our own data when it first appeared. A district showing a later date genuinely appeared then.

Reading the Bay against its forecast

Scope note: ADF&G's 2026 Bristol Bay sockeye forecast is a 33.53 million fish harvestable surplus that includes about 1.27 million Bristol Bay-origin sockeye taken in the South Alaska Peninsula June fishery. Because this page's harvest is the Bristol Bay management-area catch, the percent of forecast divides by the 32.26 million fish in-area expected harvest, not the 33.53 million fish total surplus. That South Peninsula interception is tracked separately under Alaska Peninsula; the full 33.53 million fish surplus is on the forecast page.

Where the rest of the season is

The Bay is one of eight management areas. For Bristol Bay against its full preseason forecast by species, see the Bristol Bay harvest page. For every area at once, see the season scoreboard, and for the April projection the whole season is measured against, the preseason forecast. For how the underlying report works, read the ADF&G Blue Sheet guide.