Bristol Bay salmon harvest

The world's largest sockeye salmon fishery: five districts of drift and set gillnet at the head of the Bering Sea, fished hard through June and July. This page tracks Bristol Bay'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. 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. 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.

Five river districts make up the fishery: Naknek-Kvichak, Egegik, Ugashik, Nushagak and Togiak, each managed to its own escapement goals, and each opening and closing on its own run. Drift gillnet boats are capped at 32 feet by limited entry, which is why the fleet looks the way it does, and set gillnet sites are fished off the beach. The season is compressed to a degree nothing else in the state matches: the bulk of a run measured in tens of millions of sockeye moves through in about three weeks around the first week of July.

That compression makes processing capacity, not fish, the binding constraint in a large year. When the run arrives faster than the plants can take it, processors put boats on limits and the tender line becomes the real bottleneck. It is also why the Bristol Bay base price is announced late and revised afterward: buyers price a season whose volume they cannot know in advance. ADF&G forecasts the run from smolt abundance and sibling returns, and the preseason number the percentages on this page are measured against is that forecast rather than any historical average.