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Salmon catch could have 1970s value

Update: The Alaska Department of Fish and Game is now reporting that higher prices and a larger than expected return of sockeye salmon to Bristol Bay this year helped raise this year’s value of the all-species catch there to a preliminary $128.1 million.

That’s not great, but it could have been worse.

The state figures put the dockside value of the average sockeye at about $4.05 this year, an improvement from the $3.50 per fish paid for bigger fish last year.

This preliminary value, which is expected to creep up as happened after bonuses were paid in 2013, was “34 percent below the 20-year average of $193.4 million” on a “harvest of 31.6 million sockeye salmon…26 percent above the 25.0 million preseason forecast” and big enough to rank as the 10th largest since 2004, according to the report.

The return to fishermen would have been better if sockeye averaging only 4.2 pounds hadn’t set a record for the smallest ever.  The fish averaged 5.5 pounds last year.

The state figures are also not corrected for inflation. A decade ago, the nearly 30 million sockeye caught in the Bay were worth an average of about $6.72 each, according to a state report for the time. 

With that price adjusted for inflation, those same sockeye would be worth $8.89 per fish today or more than double what fishermen were paid for them this year.

Original story

The 2024 Alaska commercial salmon season is essentially over, and the $398.6 million question is this:

“How much worse than the disaster of 2023 will it be?”

Last year saw a big harvest, but record-low prices paid fishermen. The price per pound paid to fishermen this year crept up, but the number of returning salmon was the lowest on record since the late 1980s.

The 2023 catch, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, topped 230 million salmon but had a preliminary value of only $398.6 million as mentioned above. The 2024 harvest will come in at something less than half the number of fish, and even lower in poundage which is what really matters.

“Adjusted for inflation (Consumer Price Index, 2023 prices),” Fish and Game added last year, “the 2023 exvessel value estimate of $398.6 million was the sixth lowest exvessel value reported since 1975.”

Exvessel value is the measure of what is paid commercial fishermen, and the 2024 exvessel number is looking to come nowhere close to 2023. In terms of low value, 2024 will be in competition with the crisis years of the early 1970s when annual, all-species harvests fell as low as 22 million. 

The catch was nowhere near that low this year, but it is sure to fall short of the 100 million mark for the first time in the new millennium. At this point, state catch figures and the history of the small, near-end-of-season catches would indicate a final harvest of about 42 or 43 percent of last year.

On top of this, however, the earnings of fishermen were undercut by the small size of the fish in some areas. The latest season update from the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute (ASMI) put the average weight of Bristol Bay sockeye salmon at 4.2 pounds.

The Bay is home to the world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery and is regularly the state’s biggest producer of salmon revenue. A harvest of almost 52 million sockeye there last year accounted for 45 percent of the total value of the 2023, statewide, all-species salmon catch, according to Fish and Game.

At an average weight of five and half pounds, according to state figures, the 2023 fish were bigger than the 5.1-pound sockeye of the year before, but smaller than the six pound average for the 14 years from 1988 to 2001.

Now, those 2023 sockeye look like monsters compared to the average 4.2-pound sockeye. Fish and Game characterized those sockeye as the smallest on record in a downward trend in the size of Alaska sockeye that began at the end of the last century.

Global warming gets both the blame and the credit here. Rising temperatures in Southwest Alaska have improved food conditions in the lakes where young sockeye grow before going to sea, and as a result many of the young fish now go to sea a year earlier than in the past.

The upside of this shift is that the Bay has seen record returns of sockeye. The downside is smaller fish, though nobody expected them as small as they came back this year. A Bay catch of 31.2 million sockeye – down 23 percent from last year, according to ASMI – coupled to an average weight down about 24 percent translates into a total harvest weight about 45 percent of the poundage of a year ago.

When the numbers on prices are finally tallied next month, the sockeye harvest in the Bay is likely to come in at about half to two thirds of the $181.1 million of last year, and the Bay wasn’t even the biggest loser in this year’s salmon bust.

Bigger loser

Prince William Sound – the pride and joy of Alaska’s free-range, salmon farmers – was far and away the biggest loser.

ASMI reported the pink salmon harvest there down 67 percent from 2022. The comparison is to that year because pink returns oscillate widely between even-numbered and odd-numbered years. 

The Sound catch of more than 58 million pinks last year would simply dwarf the harvest of slightly more than 8.7 million pinks this year – more than 40 percent of which went to provide for the needs of hatcheries, which still didn’t get all the salmon they wanted.

The Valdez Fisheries Development Association (VFDA) reported it was unable to collect enough spawners for breeding and came up 29 percent short of its egg-take goal. And the Prince William Sound Aquaculture Corporation (PWSAC) reported itself about 40 percent short of its revenue goal for cost recovery. 

This is not exactly the way the system is supposed to work. As originally set up by the state, the hatcheries controlled by commercial fishing interests were supposed to produce big bounties of salmon for fishermen to harvest in “common property” fisheries as the salmon returned from the sea.

Those fish could then be marketed as “wild-caught salmon” with the hatcheries harvesting the leftovers to pay for their operating costs and provide broodstock for the next year’s production.

To date, the system has worked well in the Sound but proven a miserable failure to the north in Cook Inlet where the hatchery operators catch more of the fish than the fishermen. Even in a bad year such as this, however, the fishermen caught more pinks than the hatcheries did in the Sound, though part of this might be attributable to a stronger run of wild fish than hatchery fish.

Fish and Game is reporting that wild fish appear to have returned in good numbers to all the spawning streams and rivers in the Sound, although the Sound is now such a mix of hatchery strays and hybrid hatchery-wild fish that it is hard to determine exactly how many wild fish return to any one watershed.

The only truly good news for the Sound was that a sockeye catch of more than 3.1 million fish was 58 percent greater than last year’s catch of fewer than 2 million. Past fisheries research has shown a correlation between pink and sockeye salmon returns to the Sound with small pink returns related to bigger sockeye returns and vice versa.

What drives that correlation, however, is much debated. Some biologists believe it is simply random. Others contend high production of hatchery pinks reduces sockeye survival though the exact mechanism driving that connection has not been identified.

The Sound and to a lesser extent Cook Inlet also appeared to be exceptions to a downward trend in sockeye statewide. Along with the 23 percent drop in Bay sockeye, ASMI reported a 74 percent decline in sockeye from at Chignik, once the El Dorado of Alaska’s commercial salmon fisheries, a 40 percent drop at Kodiak, and 23 percent fall in Southeast.

Kodiak, overall, looked nearly as hard hit as the Sound with a 51 percent drop in the pink harvest over 2022 adding to the 40 percent drop in sockeye from last year, a 41 percent decline in the chum salmon ASMI prefers to call “keta,” and a 73 percent crash in coho salmon.

Coho salmon returns – which are overall a small part of the commercial picture but a big favorite among anglers – were wildly different around the state. ASMI reported a 225 percent jump in the coho harvest in the Arctic-Yukon-Kuskokwim region of Northwest Alaska along with increases of 22 percent in the Bay and 29 percent in Chignik.

But the fish were almost non-existent in Cook Inlet, crashing in both Kodiak and along the Alaska Peninsula, then up 17 percent in the Sound and down 42 percent in the Panhandle.

Meanwhile, Chinook – the largest of the salmon species, the big fish Alaskans call “kings” – continued their decades-long decline with an already small statewide harvest down another 25 percent, according to ASMI.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is now considering the putting Alaska Chinook on the nation’s endangered species list as a threatened species, though the state of Alaska – along with most Alaska fishing interest both commercial and not – contend the species is at this point depressed but by no means threatened with extinction.

Overall, the situation is such that National Fishermen, a commercial fishing industry trade publication, is reporting some fishermen are talking about getting full-time jobs and going back to commercial fishing as a supplement to their regular incomes.

In the Bay, the publication reported, “the nexus of meager runs (by the standards of the last 10 years) and ex-vessel prices that have reverted to what they were in the early 1980s have some fishermen questioning the viability of the Bristol Bay fishery as an occupation.”

The story went on to suggest the brewing of a possible transition back to late 1970s and ’80s when “an appreciable portion of the Bristol Bay fleet…was comprised of schoolteachers and others whose mainstay professions left them with financial stability and long summer vacations. The latest economic studies across all fisheries in Alaska showed that 29 percent of some 9,900 (salmon) permit holders held other jobs.”

In some parts of the state – most notably Cook Inlet – the commercial fishing fleet is already comprised largely of people who could best be described as hobbyists. They are teachers, doctors, lawyers, businessmen and a writer or two, who can manage to get weeks free in the summer to enjoy what they like to call the commercial fishing “lifestyle” and pick up some extra income on the side.