Alaska chum salmon harvest

This page tracks Alaska's statewide commercial chum salmon harvest, known in the fleet as dogs, from ADF&G's Blue Sheet, against the preseason forecast, with the harvest broken out by fishing area. Figures 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. ADF&G's own statewide roll-up still adds Kodiak from the same Blue Sheet row this site holds back, so the statewide figures here understate the season by that shortfall.

Where chum salmon are caught

Chum, known in the fleet as dogs, have run second only to pink salmon in statewide harvest volume since statehood. Southeast Alaska and Prince William Sound, both of which run large hatchery chum programs alongside their pink fisheries, account for most of the commercial catch, with the Alaska Peninsula and Kodiak contributing smaller shares. In the Arctic-Yukon-Kuskokwim region, chum shares the same rule Chinook does: commercial openings wait on subsistence escapement goals being met first, so a weak AYK chum return can shut the commercial fishery down for the year.

Season and market

Chum run over a broad window, typically June through August, overlapping both the earlier sockeye fishery and the later pink and coho runs. Chum has typically carried the lowest or near-lowest ex-vessel price per pound of the five species, but that understates its value: chum roe makes up a larger share of the species' total value than roe does for any other Alaska salmon, so the roe market meaningfully offsets a modest per-pound price on the meat itself. Alaska's hatchery program has driven a steady, decades-long increase in commercial chum harvests since the 1980s, on top of whatever the wild runs produce in a given year. A meaningful share of Prince William Sound's chum comes through hatchery cost-recovery fisheries, where processors sell a portion of hatchery-origin returns to fund the hatchery program itself, a financing arrangement that has no equivalent in the wild sockeye or Chinook fisheries.