Chignik salmon harvest

A concentrated purse seine sockeye fishery on the Alaska Peninsula's south side, keyed to the early and late Chignik Lake sockeye runs. This page tracks Chignik'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.

Chignik is the smallest area on this page and the most distinctive. It is a purse seine fishery on the south side of the Alaska Peninsula, prosecuted by one of the smallest limited-entry fleets in the state, and it turns on sockeye rather than pink.

Its sockeye return in two separate runs into the same lake system, an early run associated with Black Lake and a later run associated with Chignik Lake, and ADF&G manages them as distinct stocks with separate escapement goals even though the fleet catches them in the same water. Separating the two in-season is the central management task here, and it is why Chignik's openings can look irregular against a simple calendar. With a small fleet and a small volume, a single strong or weak run moves this area's whole season, so its percent-of-forecast reading swings harder than a larger area's would on the same underlying news.