Eshamy District salmon season closes Friday night

The Eshamy District's 2026 salmon season ends at 8 pm Friday, and the last openings have produced no reported harvest at all. The district fished Thursday on a 36-hour drift gillnet period and a 12-hour set gillnet period, and it fished the same periods on Sept. 10. Fish and Game has recorded no deliveries from the district since the period that began Sept. 3.

Nothing in the department's announcements explains why.

The 36-hour limit is not a conservation measure. It comes from an allocation formula: the set gillnet fleet's five-year share of the dockside value of hatchery salmon came in at 5.3 percent, above the plan's 5 percent trigger, which means the group is "limited to no more than 36 hours of fishing time per week" starting July 10 of the following year. That cap has applied in Eshamy since July.

The fish that mattered for spawning got through. The weir on the Eshamy River counted 14,966 sockeye by Sept. 3, inside the target range for that date. The weir came out the next day.

Permit holders wanting more time can reach the area management biologists in Cordova at 907-424-3212.