Eshamy District salmon season closes Friday night

Eshamy District drift and set gillnetters have one last shot at fish before the 2026 season ends there at 8 p.m. Friday, Sept. 18, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game's Prince William Sound Salmon Fishery Announcement #53. The district opened Thursday at 8 a.m. for a 36-hour drift gillnet period and a 12-hour set gillnet period, with the Main Bay Hatchery aquaculture gear zone reserved for set gillnetters during the first 12 hours and for drift permit holders during the last 24.

The department reports no harvest at all in the Eshamy District since the 36-hour period that started Sept. 3. Nothing in the announcements says why. Eshamy was open for the same periods on Sept. 10 with nothing reported.

A 5.3% five-year value share, the set gillnet group's cut of the dockside value of hatchery salmon, tripped the allocation plan's 5% trigger. ADF&G's March 18 allocation plan announcement says that if the group exceeds that threshold, "they will be limited to no more than 36 hours of fishing time per week beginning July 10 in the year following this calculation." The cap applied in Eshamy from July 10.

Escapement, the fish that get past the nets to spawn, made its target: the Eshamy River weir, a counting fence, passed 14,966 sockeye through Sept. 3 against a date-specific cumulative target of 11,740 to 25,286 fish. The weir was pulled Sept. 4.

Here is what gets lost in a two-line notice: the honest measure of a season is not the closure date, it is that a district capped by a value-share calculation reported no deliveries in two weeks. Permit holders wanting more time can reach area management biologists Todd Johnson and Jeremy Botz in Cordova, (907) 424-3212.