April 10, 2025 — The 2025 Southeast Alaska harvest limit for king salmon will be almost 40% less than last year, a drop of 60,000 fish.
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game on April 1 announced an overall allocation of 130,800 treaty king salmon — fish that don’t originate in Alaska hatcheries — for all gear groups targeting kings in waters off Southeast Alaska and Yakutat.
In recent years, Southeast Alaska’s all-gear allocation has ranged between a high of 355,600 treaty kings in 2016 down to 130,000 in 2018, Fish and Game records show. The regionwide king quota for all commercial and sport fishermen averaged about 200,900 kings a year from 2020 through 2024.
This year’s all-gear catch limit was set based on measures of king abundance calculated by the Pacific Salmon Commission’s “chinook model,” and did not incorporate annual data from the winter troll fishery in Sitka Sound, which the commission had used in recent years through 2023 to estimate the abundance of kings in Southeast and to set the all-gear allocation for the region.
The commission is tasked with implementing the U.S.-Canada Pacific Salmon Treaty. It regulates the catch for migratory king populations along the west coast of both countries.
The commission allocates the king salmon catch between the U.S. and Canada, and the Alaska Board of Fisheries approves management plans to split Alaska’s catch between different gear types and user groups, such as sport and commercial.