Pink salmon are finally showing up in Southeast Alaska, and that’s good news for the commercial fishing industry. State biologists predicted a season harvest of about 19 million fish, but the pinks just weren’t showing up.
“It’s definitely late,” said Andrew Piston, the region’s salmon research supervisor for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. “It was getting late enough in the year that I was starting to get pretty worried.”
Piston said managers have been limiting commercial openings for seiners and gillnetters because they weren’t seeing sufficient numbers.
“It’s definitely an unusual season,” he said. “I mean, the harvest through this past week was about as low as it’s ever been since, you know, the 1960s. We were off to a historically really bad start.”
But, finally, there’s a glimmer of hope. When pinks showed up this week on the outer coast, managers noticed there were more males than females. That’s a good sign, Piston said, because males typically show up before the females. So, this means more fish are expected.
“We saw catches improve dramatically in a lot of areas,” he said. “So hopefully, this turnaround will keep going for a few weeks, and we’ll end up, you know, getting reasonably close to our preseason forecast.”
The value of Southeast’s commercial pink salmon harvest averaged about $27 million a year over the last decade. Pinks run on a two-year life cycle, with even years, like this one, being weaker.
