Kodiak salmon harvest

Purse seine, set and drift gillnet around the Kodiak archipelago, a pink and sockeye fishery with a hatchery component. This page tracks Kodiak'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.

Kodiak is a seine and set gillnet fishery working the island's bays and the Alaska Peninsula shore across Shelikof Strait. Pink salmon dominate the catch by numbers, with sockeye from the Karluk and Ayakulik systems and a chum component alongside them, and the season runs from June into September.

The management problem that defines the area is mixed stocks. Fish bound for other regions, including Cook Inlet, pass through Kodiak waters, so an opening here can intercept a run that another area's fleet and escapement goals are counting on. ADF&G manages the area with that interception in mind, which means Kodiak openings can be constrained by conditions somewhere else entirely. It is also a fishery with a large local processing base on the island, so the catch tends to be handled close to where it is landed rather than tendered across the Gulf.

How the 2026 season ran. ADF&G expected a weak year for both of Kodiak's main species. Its December 12, 2025 forecast put the area's pink harvest at 12.3 million fish (7.6 million wild and 4.7 million from the Kitoi Bay Hatchery) and its sockeye harvest in the same "weak" band, the 21st to 40th percentile of Kodiak harvests since 1988. Those are the pink and sockeye forecasts in the table above.

King salmon set the early season. Karluk River Chinook escapements had fallen to 379 fish in 2023, 76 in 2024 and 93 in 2025 against a 3,000 to 6,000 goal, and Ayakulik River kings to 590, 354 and 444 against 4,800 to 8,400. ADF&G kept the Northwest Kodiak District, the Inner and Outer Karluk Sections and the Southwest Afognak Section closed from June 1 through July 5 and the Ayakulik sections through July 15, and from June 9 required seiners across the Kodiak Area to release kings 28 inches or longer. June fishing went instead to the Kitoi Bay and Foul Bay hatchery areas, the Alitak District and parts of the Afognak, Eastside and Mainland districts. The Outer Ayakulik Section opened early, on June 21: under ADF&G's May plan it would open only if the early Ayakulik sockeye run was going to pass the top of its 140,000 to 280,000 fish goal. The Ayakulik weir counted 494,776 sockeye by the time its camp closed August 8.

The Northwest Kodiak District reopened July 6, but the Outer Karluk Section stayed shut until a 33-hour period on August 4. ADF&G's weir sheet through September 13 shows 337,216 Karluk sockeye, 226,694 of them late-run fish, which leaves about 110,500 in the early run against its 150,000 to 250,000 goal, and 308 Karluk kings. Pinks then took over: the week-by-week table above shows the area adding most of its season in the three weeks ending August 22. ADF&G kept opening Westside, Afognak and Eastside waters into late September, with the last announced period running September 24 to 26, after the Blue Sheet total stopped changing on September 5.