About
About The Run
The Alaska salmon season on one screen: cumulative commercial harvest against the preseason forecast, by area and species, from ADF&G's public record, with no fishing or market advice attached.
What this is
The Run is a season scoreboard for the Alaska commercial salmon fishery: how far the harvest has come against the preseason forecast, area by area and species by species, updated through the season, plus district pages, species pages, and the preseason forecast archive. It is built for fishermen, tenders, processors, marine lenders and coastal communities who want one read on where the season stands, instead of clicking through ADF&G's harvest report, forecast PDF and price tables by hand.
Who writes it
The Run is published by Alex Willen. The data pages are generated from ADF&G's public record through the season; the weekly brief reads where the season stands and writes it up in plain English. Every number traces back to ADF&G, and the harvest is preliminary and subject to revision, exactly as ADF&G publishes it.
Where the numbers come from
ADF&G, all public. The live harvest is the Blue Sheet, ADF&G's preliminary in-season commercial catch report, cumulative in thousands of fish, refreshed through the season. The forecast is ADF&G's April Run Forecasts and Harvest Projections report. The ex-vessel prices are ADF&G's preliminary annual season-summary tables, published months after the season. Nothing here is estimated or bought from a private vendor.
How the scoreboard is built
The Blue Sheet reports harvest by district; the April forecast reports by management area. This site rolls the harvest up to the area grain the forecast uses, so the two compare like with like, and shows the cumulative harvest as a percent of the forecast. The full method, the area mapping, the units, the effective dates and the confidential-cell handling, is on the methodology page. That honesty is the whole product: a trustworthy read on the season, not a fast guess.
Seasonality
Salmon is a seasonal business and the site is built for it. In season, mid-May through September, the scoreboard is live. Off season there is no live harvest: the site says which mode it is in and shifts to the forecast and last season's finals. The Run peaks exactly when a heating-fuel market sleeps, by design.
What we will and will not do
We report what was harvested, what was forecast, and what ex-vessel prices ADF&G has published. We do not forecast runs ourselves, and we never tell a reader where to fish, when to sell, what a permit is worth, or where prices are headed. A run beating its forecast is reported as exactly that, a fact about the pace; what it means for the next opener or the price is the reader's call. This is not fishing, financial or investment advice.
New here? Start with how to read this, or see exactly how the harvest is read against the forecast on the methodology page.