Bristol Bay Igushik set gillnet season opens June 15 with 15-hour blocks

The season's first commercial openings have been called for the Igushik Section near Dillingham — the quiet leading edge of the world's largest sockeye salmon fishery, and the start of the few frantic weeks when most of Bristol Bay's catch, and money, gets made.

The numbers behind that opening are enormous. Bristol Bay is the largest commercial sockeye salmon producing region in the world, its nine river systems and nursery lakes feeding a run that returns each summer in the tens of millions. For 2026, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game forecasts a Bristol Bay run of roughly 45 million sockeye, with a projected harvest about 21 percent below the booming 10-year average of 41 million fish but still well above the long-term average of 23 million — and the bay remains, by far, Alaska's largest sockeye producer.

The Igushik openings are the first trickle of that flood. Set gillnet fishing in the section — part of the Nushagak District, one of the bay's five — begins June 15 with initial 15-hour openings, timed, as ADF&G's preseason outlook put it, to start "when a market is available, likely mid-June." It's the warm-up before the run crests in late June and early July and the full drift fleet's push begins; openings remain subject to run strength and processor capacity.

Permit holders can track openings through ADF&G's recorded westside line for the Nushagak District at 907-842-5226.