Alaska chinook salmon harvest

This page tracks Alaska's statewide commercial chinook salmon harvest, known in the fleet as kings, from ADF&G's Blue Sheet, against the preseason forecast, with the harvest broken out by fishing area. Figures 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. ADF&G's own statewide roll-up still adds Kodiak from the same Blue Sheet row this site holds back, so the statewide figures here understate the season by that shortfall.

Where chinook salmon are caught

Chinook, the fleet's kings, are the smallest-volume salmon species Alaska harvests commercially, and the catch concentrates in three places: the Southeast Alaska troll fishery, Bristol Bay, and the Arctic-Yukon-Kuskokwim river systems. Southeast's mixed troll fishery, which also targets coho, takes the largest single share. In western Alaska the AYK chum and Chinook fisheries answer to a different rule than the rest of the state: commercial openings there wait on meeting subsistence escapement goals first, so a slow AYK Chinook run can mean no commercial opener at all that year, not just a smaller one. Prince William Sound runs a short early Chinook and Copper River sockeye opener before its main pink and chum season starts.

Season and market

Chinook return earliest of the five species, with most Alaska runs peaking in May and June, well ahead of the sockeye, pink and chum fisheries that carry the summer. That early timing and the smallest run sizes of any Alaska salmon species combine to make Chinook the highest-priced per pound of the five almost every season, though the exact gap moves with each year's harvest and market. Most of the commercial catch is sold fresh or frozen rather than canned, marketed as a premium product on the strength of its size, high oil content and flavor. Because Chinook volume is a fraction of pink or sockeye, a small change in the Chinook forecast or harvest barely moves the statewide all-species total but can matter a great deal to the boats and communities that depend on it.