April 1, 2021 — Last year’s salmon harvest across all species in Southeast Alaska was one of the worst in 50 years. Here’s what Southeast’s regional commercial fishery supervisor had to say about the terrible season, and about his hopes for the coming year.
A special report released in March paints a stark picture of 2020’s salmon harvest in Southeast Alaska.
“Overall, it was one of the lowest harvests we’d seen, I think since the ’70s,” says Lowell Fair. He’s the Southeast regional supervisor for the commercial fisheries division of Alaska Department of Fish and Game. It was already clear from preliminary reports that last year’s salmon season was a rough one. But just how rough?
For sockeye, the harvest was the second lowest since 1962 — that’s just a couple of years after the Department of Fish & Game was formed and started collecting data.
King harvest was in the bottom five harvests since the early 1960s as well.
Coho and pink harvests came in stronger than kings and sockeye, but were still among the lowest years in recent memory, ranking 48th and 53rd since 1962, respectively.