Bristol Bay’s late-arriving sockeye run has contributed to a healthy commercial harvest of more than 47.6 million sockeye statewide, though some fisheries have yet to heat up with strangely behaving tardy returns.
Statewide, the sockeye harvest has already surpassed the 2014 total and on the contentious Kenai River, king salmon have rebounded from the lows of 2012-14 and the run size has eased restrictions on all user groups.
After one of the latest run starts in the history of the fishery, Bristol Bay is nosing closer to its original Alaska Department of Fish and Game commercial harvest projection of 37.6 million. As of July 29, the total commercial sockeye harvest in Bristol Bay is 35.5 million fish.
To read the rest of the story, please go to: Alaska Journal of Commerce
