The Yukon's fall chum run could support a fishery, none has opened

The Yukon River's fall chum run is the biggest it has been in years, large enough under state rules to open a commercial fishery for the first time since 2019. None has opened, and the state hasn't said why.

Fish and Game projected this week that the run will top 900,000 fish, well above the 300,000 to 600,000 the river needs to leave behind to spawn. State regulation says that once the projected run passes 550,000 chum, the commissioner may open a commercial fishery. The run crossed that line weeks ago, and by early September the count at the lower-river sonar stood at about 914,000.

The department has issued seven fall updates this year. None of them mentions the commercial fishery, the threshold, or a harvestable surplus.

What the updates do address is a different question: subsistence fishing on the mainstem, and there the department's reasoning is about composition, not size. Fewer of this year's fish are Canadian-origin than usual, 15 percent against a historical average of 30, and the U.S. has treaty obligations to send enough chum across the border into Canada. As of early September the counts at the border were running well below their usual pace. The border goals "may be met," the department wrote, but there isn't enough certainty "to identify a large enough harvestable surplus to support directed fishing on those stocks." That explanation is given for subsistence fishing. The updates do not address the commercial question at all.

Yukon fall chum was designated a stock of management concern last year, a status for runs that keep missing their spawning targets.

The gap this leaves is real for the lower river. There has been no commercial fall fishery on the Yukon since 2019, when it was worth about $1.4 million to local fishermen. Permits fished fell from 424 that year to zero by 2021. A state study once found commercial fishing and processing provided nearly half of household cash income in the lower Yukon.

Subsistence fishing did open this week on the lower river, around the clock in the coastal district and the lower districts. Upriver, the mainstem and Porcupine River closures still hold.