Norton Sound commercial salmon fishing closed for the rest of 2026

Commercial salmon fishing in Norton Sound is closed for the rest of 2026. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game shut the fishery Aug. 31, saying most of the projects it relies on to count fish had stopped working and it could no longer tell whether there were enough coho to harvest.

The department said its escapement projects — which count fish reaching the spawning grounds — were "generally inoperable" and could not produce reliable estimates of whether a "harvestable surplus" existed beyond what the fish need to reproduce. Combined with catch rates it called below average to poor, that left too much uncertainty to keep fishing. It said it was taking a conservative approach, consistent with state regulation requiring precautionary management when the picture is unclear.

The closure ends a lean season across the Norton Sound region — communities from Nome to Stebbins — that had already shrunk from 48-hour openings to 24, with 11 in all.

The season had looked more promising in the spring. The May preseason outlook forecast a coho return near the five-year average and a commercial harvest of 20,000 to 50,000 fish, based on nine escapement projects: two run by the department, on the Nome and Kwiniuk rivers, plus aerial surveys and harvest sampling, and seven run by the Norton Sound Economic Development Corporation on rivers across the region.

The department had flagged the risk even then. It wrote in May that a low-snow winter should mean lower rivers than recent years, and that it was "hopeful that escapement projects may become operational in a timely manner" — while naming fallbacks, like using an adjacent subdistrict as an index, in case they didn't. By August, most had failed. One held: the department said the Kwiniuk River tower was the exception, with coho there on track to meet their escapement goal, and noted the projects had been showing only marginal returns before they went down.