Alaska Peninsula salmon harvest

The North and South Peninsula and Aleutian districts: purse seine and gillnet that intercept sockeye, pink and chum bound for systems all across western Alaska. This page tracks Alaska Peninsula'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.

The Alaska Peninsula is reported as one area but fished as two. The North Peninsula, on the Bering Sea side, is a set and drift gillnet fishery working local sockeye and chum runs. The South Peninsula, on the Pacific side, is largely a purse seine fishery, and it is where the area's management controversy lives.

The South Peninsula June fishery takes place while sockeye bound for Bristol Bay and other western Alaska systems are migrating past, so a share of what it lands is not local fish. That interception is longstanding, explicitly managed, and repeatedly litigated in the Board of Fisheries process, and it is the reason a strong South Peninsula June can be read as bad news several hundred miles away. When reading this area's numbers, the June and the post-June portions of the season are answering different questions.

How the 2026 season ran. The 2026 South Peninsula season ran much as 2025's did. On May 20, 2026 the Alaska Department of Law announced that it had disapproved five proposals the Board of Fisheries adopted at its February 18 to 25, 2026 Alaska Peninsula and Chignik meeting, among them a 10-day June closure for seine and drift gillnet gear, shallower gillnets and smaller seines, and king salmon caps on the South Peninsula's post-June fishery. ADF&G's Sand Point office said its 2026 management approach would be very similar to the one used in 2025.

The South Unimak and Shumagin Islands June fishery (5 AAC 09.365) ran from June 6 to June 28 on a fixed schedule. Set gillnets fished alone from June 6 to June 8. From June 10, set and drift gillnets fished four 88-hour periods and seiners four periods of 66 to 88 hours, with two chum triggers on the seine periods: 300,000 chum by June 18 would cut the remaining periods to 44 hours, and 450,000 by June 23 would close the last one. The Dolgoi Island area also closes once its June sockeye harvest reaches 191,000 fish.

The June fishery is tied to Chignik. Under the Chignik early-run sockeye action plan, ADF&G shortened the Shumagin Islands seine period that opened June 16 because Chignik's early run was below the low end of its escapement objective, then extended it through June 18 once the early run met the low end of its objective for June 17, about 37,000 fish. The June catch sits in the first row of the week-by-week table above, which starts when this site's record of the Blue Sheet begins. Fishing went on into September; one of the last announced periods ran 131 hours, from September 10 to September 15, in the Stepovak, Beaver Bay and Balboa Bay sections.