Southeast pink seining closes at 19.8 million fish; hatchery areas stay open

Southeast Alaska purse seiners are finished fishing pink salmon for the year, after the Alaska Department of Fish and Game closed directed pink salmon common property purse seine fisheries in every district on Friday, Sept. 4, ending a season that produced an ordinary catch at what the department calls the best prices in many years. Fishing is not over everywhere. Common property opportunity remains in select hatchery terminal harvest areas, the waters near hatcheries where returning fish are taken. The closure ended fishing in Section 13-B, the last general area still open.

The common property fleet took an estimated 18.7 million pink salmon against a preseason forecast of 19 million. Counting the drift gillnet fishery and the Annette Islands Reserve, the region's total estimate is 19.8 million fish, at an average weight of 3.5 pounds, just inside the department's average band of 19 to 33 million fish drawn from 65 years of harvest data. Roughly 60 percent of those years produced a larger Southeast pink harvest than 2026 did. A total of 199 permits made landings, down from 200 in 2025 and up from 197 in 2024. The season figures all come from the department's Sept. 4 announcement, which contains no comment from anyone who fished.

The department reported initial estimates of $0.65 a pound for pink salmon, $1.34 for chum, $1.01 for coho, $3.13 for sockeye and $5.52 for Chinook. "Salmon prices were substantially higher than they have been for many years," the announcement said, adding that the final price per pound will not be determined until this winter. Troy Thynes, the Region I Management Coordinator, is listed on it as the contact. The department expects exvessel value, the money paid to fishermen at the dock, to exceed both prior seasons and the 2016 to 2025 average of $56.5 million. The Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission recorded $44.4 million in gross Southeast purse seine earnings in 2024 and $49.7 million in preliminary 2025 earnings. Even so, average Southeast seine permit prices fell to $125,000 in 2025, the lowest since 2010.

The forecast, issued jointly by NOAA and the department on Nov. 17, 2025, placed 19 million fish at the lower end of the average harvest range and near the weak boundary, with an 80 percent prediction interval of 13 to 30 million. The last opening of the year was a single 15-hour period in Sitka Sound on Sept. 3, which produced about 82,000 pink salmon from 27 boats.

District 13, the Sitka management area, produced 8.23 million pinks, more than 44 percent of the regional harvest and what the department calls the third highest on record for that district, while District 114 recorded no harvest of any species. Hatchery chum in terminal harvest areas came in at 1.4 million fish, below the 2016 to 2025 average of 2.0 million.

The department said it will keep monitoring fall chum runs to Cholmondeley Sound, Security Bay, Port Camden, Nakwasina Sound, Chaik Bay and Excursion Inlet, and that pink salmon escapement surveys are still under way.