Ship Creek coho slowing as the six-fish limit stays through December

Anchorage anglers can still keep six salmon a day at Ship Creek, but the run that made that possible is winding down.

Silver fishing has slowed, Fish and Game said in its Friday report. A few late fish are still coming in, and anglers should expect to work for them, with little company on the bank.

The department raised the limit to six fish in early August, after surveys counted more than 1,100 coho past the sport fishery at the hatchery. That was enough, it said, to cover broodstock and natural spawning with a surplus left to harvest. The higher limit runs through Dec. 31, from the creek's mouth up to a cable just below the Chugach Power Plant dam, and all six may be coho.

Kings are a different story. Any king hooked must be released in the water without being removed from it. The department closed Ship Creek entirely for eleven days in July and ended king retention for the rest of 2026, after returns came in short of what the William Jack Hernandez hatchery needs for broodstock.

Area Management Biologist Brittany Blain-Roth said in July that king returns were tracking below the level needed to confidently meet those goals. She said the hatchery had enough broodstock for Ship Creek itself, but not for the other Southcentral fisheries its run supplies.

For the coho still coming, the department suggests drifting roe or a shrimp-tipped jig under a slip bobber on an incoming tide.