Norton Sound's commercial salmon season ends with the counting towers down

Norton Sound commercial fishermen will get no more openings this year. The state closed commercial gillnetting for the rest of the 2026 season Monday, cutting off the late coho fishery for permit holders and for the one buyer expected in the region.

In villages where wage jobs are scarce, those periods pay for fuel, gear and household expenses. Subsistence fishing schedules and restrictions are unchanged.

The state gave two reasons. Catch rates in the most recent openings, across the Golovin, Elim, Norton Bay, Shaktoolik and Unalakleet grounds, ran from below average to poor. And the projects that count returning fish are, in the department's words, "generally inoperable." Before they went down they were showing marginal returns.

Without escapement estimates, the counts of fish that make it past the fishery to spawn, managers cannot confirm there are enough coho to harvest. The department said it is taking a conservative approach.

Most of those counting projects belong to the Norton Sound Economic Development Corporation, not the state, which operates only the Nome and Kwiniuk river towers. The Kwiniuk tower was the last one still running through August, and the department opened a period in late August partly to gauge how many coho were around, since it had little else to go on.

The season outlook published in May anticipated this problem and said what to do about it: if a monitoring project fails, use a neighboring subdistrict as a stand-in measure. The closure advisory does not say whether that was tried.