Prince William Sound salmon harvest

A drift gillnet, set gillnet and seine fishery with a large hatchery pink and chum component, plus the early Copper River sockeye and Chinook openers. This page tracks Prince William Sound'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.

Three fisheries share the Sound and run on different clocks. The Copper River drift gillnet opener in May is the earliest commercial salmon fishery in Alaska and the one that sets the season's news, landing sockeye and a small number of Chinook into an air-freight market that pays for being first. The seine fleet follows through the summer on pink and chum, and set gillnet works the district beaches.

What separates the Sound from every other area on this page is how much of its volume is hatchery fish. Private nonprofit hatcheries release pink and chum on a scale that makes the Sound's headline numbers a story about hatchery returns as much as about wild production, and cost recovery, where the hatchery sells a share of its own returning fish to fund the operation, appears in the catch figures alongside the common-property fleet. Reading a Sound pink total as a wild-run indicator is the standard mistake here.