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.

How the 2026 season ran. ADF&G's 2026 harvest strategy forecast a Chignik River sockeye run of 1,735,000 fish: about 816,000 early-run fish returning mainly to Black Lake and 919,000 late-run fish returning mainly to Chignik Lake. It projected a commercial harvest of 1,138,000 sockeye in the management area, about 1,085,000 of them Chignik River fish; that 1,085,000 is the sockeye forecast in the table above. The early run is managed to an optimal escapement goal of 300,000 to 400,000 fish and the late run to 240,000 to 360,000, both counted at the Chignik River weir.

The fishery opened on the weir count, not the calendar. By the evening of June 16 an estimated 48,787 sockeye had passed the weir, and the first 48-hour period ran from June 17 to June 19 in all five districts. The same early-run count also governs the Shumagin Islands seine fleet on the Alaska Peninsula, whose June 16 period ADF&G shortened until Chignik's early run reached its daily objective.

King salmon shaped the rest of the season. On June 1 ADF&G said Chignik River Chinook had missed their 1,300 to 2,700 fish goal in six of the last seven years, with record lows of 731 fish in 2022 and 267 in 2023, and that the Board of Fisheries had voted to put the area's king salmon stock of concern plan into regulation; ADF&G applied its measures by emergency order until the new rules took effect. Seiners had to release kings 28 inches or longer, more than 1,000 kings taken in 48 hours before July 31 closed the statistical areas responsible for seven days, and July openings in the Chignik Bay District were capped at 48 hours with closures between them, such as the 72 hours from July 8 to July 11. ADF&G kept announcing periods after the Blue Sheet total stopped changing: the last, a 48-hour opening in four districts, ran from September 7 to September 9.