Pink salmon start to show up after ‘very weak’ early run

By Orin Pierson, Petersburg Pilot

and Larry Persily, Wrangell Sentinel

Pink salmon — the backbone of the Southeast seine fleet — finally started to show up the first weekend of August, after what state biologists were comparing to the poorest early returns on the books.

“Pink salmon’s been — up until this last week — pretty poor so far,” Troy Thynes, the Southeast Alaska management coordinator for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, said last week. He described strong escapement and harvest in District 13 near Sitka, and a dramatic jump in fish counts and catches in the Clarence Strait area, particularly the lower end of District 2.

Preliminary estimates compiled Aug. 4 put the regionwide season-to-date purse seine harvest at roughly 1.6 million pink salmon. Sitka’s District 13 leads by far: 71 boats have landed an estimated 587,000 pinks, up from about 351,000 a week earlier, when it was the region’s lone bright spot.

Southeast’s pinks arrive in three overlapping pulses — an early, middle and late run — generally sweeping from north to south and from the inside waters outward. The early run, made up of the region’s northernmost and most inside stocks, came in “very weak,” Thynes said, in a season that had managers reaching back decades for comparisons.

“At least since the 1980s,” Thynes said. Some runs in the 1960s and 1970s were worse, he noted.

The middle run, historically the largest of the three and the seine fleet’s bread and butter, typically peaks in mid-August. Port samplers working the docks — tracking the shifting ratio of males to females that signals how far along a run is — suggest this year’s return is running late.

The department’s preseason forecast, released in April, called for a Southeast pink harvest of 19 million fish, roughly in line with 2024’s harvest of about 20 million. “We weren’t expecting a big run by any means,” Thynes said.

Managers have been in the air nearly every day, he said, flying escapement surveys, looking for where they can provide opportunity for seine openings. For all the technology available, Thynes said, the core method hasn’t changed in more than half a century: “Flying in the back seat of a Super Cub is still the best tool we have out there for monitoring salmon escapement.”

Trident Seafoods, which buys, packs and ships pink and chum salmon at its Wrangell plant, declined comment on the season, Alexis Telfer, vice president for global communications and marketing for the Seattle-based company, said in an email last week to the Wrangell Sentinel.

Trident generally runs its plant for a couple of months each summer to handle salmon, with staffing levels dependent on the volume of fish delivered by the commercial fleet.

In May, Telfer said the company planned to start cleaning and packing salmon in mid-June, with a peak summer employment of 150 workers. She declined last week to comment on how many shifts the plant is running or the schedule for shutting down operations, usually in August in past years.

For Katie Taylor, Fish and Game seine manager for the Petersburg area, the summer has meant long stretches with nothing to open for harvesting pinks. Two of her early districts — Districts 7 and 10 — saw some of the worst July escapement that anyone can remember, she said. Neither showed sufficient escapement to open to seining so far this summer.

Districts 5, 6 and 9 — including the first seine openings of the season in the Sumner Strait area — opened Aug. 2 and again on Aug. 6. The Aug. 2 opening, while not suddenly a banner return, was “strong enough to be a nice change from what we’ve seen so far this year.”

Thynes framed the coming stretch bluntly. “We’re kind of in our make-or-break time,” he said. As for which way it breaks: “Got the rally hats on, and we’re hoping for the best.”

If the seine fleet has been holding its breath, the gillnet fleet has had little to complain about. Built around hatchery chum and sockeye rather than pinks, the gillnet fishery “actually had a great year so far,” Thynes said, with hatchery chum returns around or slightly better than forecast and sockeye running well — all of it lifted by strong prices across every species of salmon this year.

The Department of Fish and Game on Aug. 7 reported the average price for chum salmon in Southeast at $1.47 a pound, more than double last year’s average price of 66 cents a pound. Fishermen report even higher prices in early August.

Preliminary fish ticket data and pending call-in harvest numbers reported through Aug. 7 show 439,900 chums and 135,500 sockeye taken in Southeast, the department said.

The chums are averaging 9.5 pounds, outweighing last year’s average by 2.2 pounds and 2.1 pounds heavier than the average for the past five years, the department reported.

District 1 below Ketchikan posted strong hatchery chum and sockeye returns, Thynes said, while in District 6 there was ample fishing time in Sumner and Clarence straits, good movements of hatchery chum bound for southern Southeast, and healthy sockeye runs, including a solid return to the Stikine River.

Sockeye catches in the Wrangell-Petersburg area have been “at least on par with last year,” he said. Taylor added that Districts 6 and 8 have seen very good sockeye returns so far

.

One weak point for the seine fleet has been hatchery chum. The early-season chum areas that traditionally carry seiners — Thynes named Hidden Falls, Southeast Cove and Thomas Bay — didn’t match levels of recent years, though the chums that were caught fetched strong prices.

As of Aug. 4, the Thomas Bay terminal harvest area had produced about 54,000 chum for the season.

More opportunity is still to come, Thynes said, as several hatchery runs shift from cost-recovery harvest to common-property fishing later in the summer and into September.