Saving Seafood

US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick goes against top choices for fishery management councils

July 17, 2026 — U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick has opted to go against some top nominations for U.S. fishery management councils.

In a 26 June announcement Lutnick announced he selected Forrest Bowers, the second choice for the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, instead the Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy’s top choice and current Alaska Department of Fish & Game Board Chair Märit Carlson-Van Dort. For the Pacific Fishery Management Council, Lutnick selected second-choice Chad See, director of the Freezer Longline Coalition, over the Washington Governor Bob Ferguson’s first pic of Jamie Goen, the executive director of the Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers trade group.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

ALASKA: Commercial troll fishery stays open with half of allotted kings remaining

July 15, 2026 — Southeast Alaska’s commercial king salmon fishery will remain open until further notice. The July 1 king opener for trollers, who fish with hook and line, is usually over quickly– it typically lasts anywhere from a handful of days to a week. But this year, with two weeks down, trollers are only at the halfway mark toward catching their target.

Grant Hagerman is the Southeast region’s commercial troll management biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. In an interview with KCAW on Monday (7-13-26) Hagerman said in the past two weeks, trollers have caught roughly half of the 84,000 allotted Chinook salmon.

“Fishing is a little bit slower, definitely,” Hagerman said. “But we have fewer boats. There’s less effort this year as well. So a combination of those two has has prolonged this longer than what we’d anticipated, preseason.”

Read the full article at KCAW

ALASKA: Summer troll update, Fish scarce, catch low

July 14, 2026 — On Friday morning, the 10th day of the summer king salmon troll opening, the catch was less than half of the harvest target of 83,700, fishery officials said. The opening, which was initially projected to last seven to ten days, will continue until further notice.

Department of Fish and Game troll fishery management biologist Grant Hagerman said that since July 1 fish abundance, fleet effort and catch rate have been low.
“Fewer fish, fewer boats, and fewer fish per boat,” Hagerman summarized for the Sentinel.
Hagerman says the fishery will stay open until further notice. Last year, the summer troll opening lasted four days. As of Friday morning, Fish & Game estimates that trollers had caught fewer than 35,000 chinook in nine days in this opening, compared to 40,000 chinook harvested in four days in 2025.
There is a higher treaty allocation this year; Southeast commercial trollers can harvest up to 146,000 treaty chinook. Last year the limit was a record low of 92,730.

AI, drones, and salmon: What new technology could mean for Bristol Bay sockeye counts

July 10, 2026 — Norm Van Vactor stands on the bank of the Wood River facing a mysterious looking grey box with blinking lights.

“So that’s the habitat and the home for our ‘bird’, and it’s a completely self-contained unit,” he said, pointing to the box.

At exactly 8:30 a.m., the box opens and a drone emerges. It quickly takes off on an automated flight path, flying to an observation position above the right bank of the Wood River. It hovers there for a few minutes, with its camera fixed on the river bed.

The goal is to feed the images into a computer model to generate more accurate salmon escapement counts. For over 70 years, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game has used counting towers in Bristol Bay to track salmon escapement. That means techs hand count each fish that swims by. But new technology is on its way to the Bay, Van Vactor is a project lead.

“I feel strongly that there are some tools out there, like this, that could significantly enhance the quality of our data collection that helps manage this fishery,” he said. Van Vactor noted that this project wouldn’t have been possible just a few years ago.

Read the full article at Alaska Public Media

Alaska challenges MSC certification of Russian pollock

July 10, 2026 — Alaska fisheries officials are calling on the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) to reject the recertification of Russia’s Western Bering Sea pollock fishery, arguing the fishery fails to meet the conservation standards routinely required of U.S. fishermen while competing directly with Alaska pollock in global markets.

The request comes as MSC considers formal objections to the fishery’s five-year recertification. According to IntraFish, Alaska Department of Fish and Game Commissioner Doug Vincent-Lang submitted a July 1 letter urging MSC Chief Executive Rupert Howes to halt the recertification, following a formal objection filed by the At-sea Processors Association (APA). MSC expects a decision on the objection during the week of July 13.

In his letter, Vincent-Lang argued consumers purchasing seafood bearing the MSC ecolabel often assume the product was harvested responsibly, despite what he described as significant shortcomings in the Russian fishery’s management.

“For the last five years, the MSC has provided products originating from the WBS (Western Bering Sea) pollock fishery with full access to the most widely recognized sustainability certification in global seafood,” Vincent-Lang wrote. “During this time, WBS pollock has been sold around the world to unwitting consumers who see the MSC ecolabel and believe that their purchases must be ethical.”

He argued the Western Bering Sea fishery lacks “no credible harvest strategy, no bycatch avoidance measures, and no benthic habitat protections whatsoever,” while questioning how the fishery’s previous certification conditions were considered satisfied.

Read the full article at National Fisherman

ALASKA: Only two vessels will fish Alaska’s weathervane scallop season

July 10, 2026 — Alaska’s commercial weathervane scallop fishery opened July 1 with harvest levels unchanged from last season, but despite nearly 400,000 pounds of statewide quota available, only two vessels are expected to participate in one of the world’s most exclusive commercial fisheries.

According to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G), the 2026/27 fishery carries a statewide guideline harvest level (GHL) of approximately 381,700 pounds of shucked scallop meat, with nearly half of the allocation, 190,000 pounds, coming from waters around Kodiak.

Kodiak remains the center of Alaska’s scallop fishery, but as KMXT reported on July 8, there was no rush of boats leaving the harbor when the season opened. “Weathervane scallops are the largest species of scallop in the world, and the only scallop species on the West Coast that has a substantial commercial fishery,” Kodiak-based ADF&G area biologist Nat Nichols told KMXT.

Read the full article at National Fisherman

Alaska’s 2021 salmon harvest has blown past the season’s forecast

August 31, 2021 — Alaska’s 2021 salmon harvest has blown past the forecast and by Aug. 27 had topped 201 million fish, well above the 190 million projected at the start of the season.

The catch was bolstered by a surge of pink salmon to the three top-producing regions: Prince William Sound, Southeast and Kodiak, combined with strong landings of sockeyes.

“Pink salmon runs are over 95% complete, based on average run timing. Effort drops off quickly this late in the season, so it is difficult to predict where that harvest will end up,” said Forrest Bowers, deputy director of the Commercial Fisheries Division at the Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game. “My guess is up to another half million late-run sockeye salmon and perhaps 10 million pink salmon will be harvested. If that occurs, we will end up with around 143 million pink salmon, 54 million sockeye, and 207 million total salmon harvested. 2021 could end up being the sixth-largest sockeye and sixth- or seventh-largest pink salmon harvest on record.”

Pinks are the “bread and butter” catch for Alaska salmon fishermen and total landings were approaching 137 million, well above the 124 million projected for this season.

At Prince William Sound, which had a catch forecast of about 25 million pinks, nearly 62 million had crossed the docks.

“Wild stocks are returning stronger than anticipated (to PWS) given the uncertainty about spawning success from the 2019 parent year which was negatively impacted by drought conditions,” said the weekly Fish and Game inseason summary.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

ALASKA: Subsistence users, scientists seek answers for chum salmon declines

August 31, 2021 — Bill Alstrom lives in St. Mary’s on the lower Yukon River. It used to be that if he wanted fresh salmon for dinner, he’d throw a net in the river to catch a couple. But with fishing closures this season, he can’t do that anymore.

“It’s hard to comprehend that this is happening in my lifetime,” said Alstrom. “It makes me sad just thinking about it.”

Chum salmon stocks have sharply declined over the last two years in Western Alaska. It’s a major problem because people in the region, like Alstrom, depend heavily on the fish for food and for work. With chinook salmon low for decades, chum were the fish that families could depend on until last year, when the summer chum run dropped below half of its usual numbers. This year, the run dropped even further, to record lows. The State of Alaska has closed fishing for chum to protect the runs.

Scientists are in the early stages of trying to understand the crash.

Biologist Katie Howard with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game said that the chum declines are not just occurring in the Yukon River.

“When we talk to colleagues in the Lower 48 and Canada, Japan, Russia, they are all reporting really poor chum runs,” she said. “So it’s not just a Yukon phenomenon. It’s not just an Alaska phenomenon, but pretty much everywhere.”.

So why are the chum numbers so low? The short answer is that no one really knows for sure. But there are a lot of theories.

Every week during the summer, subsistence users, biologists and fishery managers gather on a weekly teleconference hosted by the Yukon River Drainage Fisheries Association. They share information and ask each other questions, and the subsistence users bring up one theory for the decline again and again: bycatch.

Read the full story at Alaska Public Media

ALASKA: Kenai River sockeye run over-escaped by 1 million fish

August 27, 2021 — Nearly 2.5 million late-run sockeye are projected to pass through the Kenai River by the end of the month, over-escaping the river by over 1 million fish.

Those numbers concern fishermen like Joe Dragseth, a drift-netter in Kenai. He said he worries about the health of the river. And, he said, it’s unfair commercial fishermen have been restricted while so many fish have made it up the river.

“Basically, they’re taking the living away from us,” he said.

Alaska Department of Fish and Game sets both in-river and sustainable escapement goals for the run each season. The philosophy is returns will be best if the run falls between those goalposts.

This season, and the last several seasons, the sockeye run has surpassed the upper limit of those goals.

This year, the department set an in-river escapement goal of 1 million to 1.2 million for the run. Now, it’s projecting 2.4 million fish will pass through the sonar at mile 19 of the Kenai River by the end of the month.

For Kenai Peninsula set-netters, who’ve had abbreviated fishing seasons due to “paired restrictions” with the Kenai River king run, it’s been particularly hard to watch.

Read the full story at Alaska Public Media

Court case is final hope for Inlet drifters

August 27, 2021 — A late-season bumper run of sockeye salmon has pushed the Kenai River to its highest escapement in more than a decade.

Unfortunately for the commercial fishermen in Upper Cook Inlet, they have had to watch many of them go by.

Over the course of the season, Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologists upgraded the estimate for the run’s escapement multiple times, upping the in-river bag limits for the sportfishery and opening some additional time for the drift gillnet fleet.

With the setnet fleet out of the water after July 20 because of poor king salmon returns to the Kenai, controlling sockeye escapements to the Kenai and Kasilof fell on the drift fleet and on the in-river dipnet and sportfisheries. Both rivers are ending their seasons significantly greater than the upper end of their escapement goals.

ADFG is projecting a final escapement in the Kasilof of 519,000 sockeye compared to the top end of the escapement goal of 320,000; the sustainable escapement goal for the Kenai River has a top end of 1.3 million and ADFG is projecting an in-river run of about 2.4 million sockeye.

Unless something changes, the drift fleet is likely to lose a major chunk of their fishing area at the end of this year, too.

The National Marine Fisheries Service is currently working its way through the regulations review process for a new fishery management plan amendment that will close the federal waters of Cook Inlet to salmon fishing. That section, known as the Exclusive Economic Zone or EEZ, covers the section of Cook Inlet that’s three nautical miles and farther offshore; drifters typically harvest half or more of their salmon from there during the season.

“For most of the fleet, the EEZ is the preferred area for fishing,” said Erik Huebsch, a drifter and vice president of the United Cook Inlet Drift Association. “Without access to the EEZ, the drift fleet cannot harvest enough salmon to meet expenses and cannot afford to operate.

Read the full story at the Alaska Journal of Commerce