Cook Inlet salmon harvest

Upper and Lower Cook Inlet drift and set gillnet, a sockeye fishery close to Anchorage that shares its runs with a large sport and personal-use dipnet fishery. This page tracks Cook Inlet'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: no Upper Cook Inlet commercial sockeye forecast is published (UCI sockeye appears only as about 5.60 million fish available to all user groups), while the harvest here is the combined Upper and Lower Cook Inlet catch. Because the numerator and denominator would not share geography, no completion percent is shown for Cook Inlet sockeye. For reference, the Lower Cook Inlet commercial sockeye forecast is 469,000 fish (202,000 natural plus 267,000 hatchery). 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.

Upper and Lower Cook Inlet are effectively two fisheries under one heading. Upper Cook Inlet is the sockeye fishery, drift gillnet in the central inlet and set gillnet along the east-side beaches, intercepting runs bound for the Kenai and Kasilof rivers. Lower Cook Inlet is smaller and leans on hatchery pink production around Kachemak Bay.

No other area on this site is managed under as much allocation pressure. The same Kenai sockeye run supports a commercial fleet, one of the largest sport fisheries in the state and a personal-use dipnet fishery at the river mouth open to Alaska residents, all inside a road-connected part of the state where every user group is present and organized. Commercial openings are set against in-river escapement goals with those other users counted, so a management decision here reflects allocation as well as abundance, and a closed commercial period does not necessarily mean a weak run.

How the 2026 season ran. On February 12, 2026 ADF&G forecast an excellent Upper Cook Inlet sockeye year: a total run of 7.60 million fish with 5.60 million available to all users, including about 4.45 million Kenai River and 1.46 million Kasilof River sockeye. King salmon decided who could fish for them. The forecast for Kenai River late-run kings was 12,718 large fish, under the 14,250 that triggers the stock of concern plan, so on February 11 ADF&G closed the east side set gillnet fishery (the Kenai, Kasilof and East Forelands sections) until further notice and barred drift gillnets within 2 miles of the Kenai Peninsula shore. At a special May 1 meeting the Board of Fisheries replaced set gillnets with set beach seines for those permit holders, which left no way to open the east side set gillnets in 2026. ADF&G allowed commercial dip netting on parts of those beaches on weekdays from June 22 and July 6 through July 31.

After early district-wide openings, from July 8 the drift fleet fished mostly in the Expanded Kasilof and Expanded Kenai sections, the Anchor Point Section and Drift Area 1. The Kasilof ran strong from the start: by July 8 its escapement estimate was 360,698 fish and ADF&G projected about 1.2 million against a 140,000 to 320,000 goal. The Kenai came late. On July 27 ADF&G projected a Kenai run of 3.0 million, well under the 4.5 million forecast, with the sonar at 437,881 through July 24. By July 30 the count had reached 968,423 and the projected inriver run was 1.7 to 2.1 million, above the 1.1 to 1.4 million inriver goal.

To the north, ADF&G projected Deshka River kings at 4,700 to 6,200 fish on June 22 against a 9,000 to 18,000 goal and closed the Northern District's June 25 period; from July 23 it cut Northern District set gillnets to two nets per permit, and to as few as one from July 27, to hold down the harvest of Susitna River sockeye. Coho ended the season early. On August 4 ADF&G said the coho harvest in federal waters had exceeded both the federal total allowable catch and acceptable biological catch, and confined the drift fleet to Area 3; from August 10 it fished Areas 3 and 4 only, after two periods in which the sockeye catch fell below 1% of the season total. Northern District set gillnets closed August 17 until further notice, and the Central District closed for the season on September 30.