Cook Inlet drift fleet limited to Area 3 for a single 12-hour opener Thursday

Upper Cook Inlet drift gillnetters get just a 12-hour opener limited to Area 3 this week, under an emergency order Fish and Game issued Tuesday. Fishing runs 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 6, in state waters of Area 3 only. The fleet also fished a 12-hour period Monday in the Expanded Kasilof, Expanded Kenai and Anchor Point sections under an earlier order.

The driver here is coho, not sockeye. Federal coho harvest in the Cook Inlet Exclusive Economic Zone exceeded both the total allowable catch and the acceptable biological catch, and the department said that overage, "in combination with recent year trends and inseason indicators of abundance, indicates these restrictions are warranted to conserve Northern Cook Inlet and Kenai Peninsula coho salmon."

The state restriction runs alongside a federal one. The National Marine Fisheries Service closed all commercial salmon fishing in the Cook Inlet EEZ from Wednesday through Aug. 15 to keep the fishery from exceeding a 2026 coho cap of 16,619 fish. Because the fishery harvests mixed stocks and can't target a single species, the federal agency said, the whole EEZ closes. It waived the usual notice-and-comment step, citing harvest data that only became available July 31.

The order follows a stretch of sockeye-driven openings — including a July 27 opener where the department added 12 hours as Kasilof sockeye escapement ran more than double its goal, as Alaska News has reported. Area 3, which the United Cook Inlet Drift Association once described in a Board of Fisheries document as "a coho fishery rather than a sockeye fishery," has been the focus of recent board action narrowing drift time and area to pass more coho to the Northern District.