Ray Beamesderfer, Fish Science Solutions

Kenai River Chinook offer some hope

For the first time in five years, there appears the possibility that the return of Chinook salmon to the Kenai River – an Alaska waterway once world famous for the size and number of these so-called “king salmon” – might reach the minimum number of spawners needed to begin rebuilding the run.

This comes despite a still rather grim outlook for the Pacific Ocean’s biggest salmon across most of Alaska.

The Deshka River, once the biggest king salmon producer in the Susitna River drainage north of Alaska’s largest city, is a 2025 bust. A count of less than 1,500 Chinook in-river at the end of this week is a record low for the century.

In 2020,  36 times as many of the big fish had made it past an upstream weir despite an intensive sport fishery underway downstream. There is no fishing now, and few fish.

Other index streams around the region are doing better than the Deshka, but even those looking better than last year aren’t doing great. Nearly 3,600 Chinook in the Anchor River, a clearwater stream near the end of the Kenai Peninsula, compared to the less than 1,900 fish in-river by the same date in 2023 might look like a big improvement.

But 20 years ago, Anchor welcomed more than twice as many of the big fish by the same date despite, as with the Deshka of old, sizeable angler catches downriver from the counting station.

Today’s Chinook are, however, struggling to survive in new, warmer ocean swarmed by pink salmon, the smallest and fastest growing of the salmon species. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game has forecast more than 138 million pinks will return to state streams and rivers this year.

If the Chinook return reaches 1 percent of that number, it will be a good year for the big fish.

Since the start of the new millennium, the largest of the Pacific salmon have been in a generally steady decline in both number and size that has the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration considering whether they need protection under the terms of the national Endangered Species Act.

Old days

A lot has changed since the long-ago summer of 1989 when a 63-year-old Minnesota angler named Bob Ploeger hooked a Kenai king so big he battled it for more than a day and a half.

By the 24-hour mark, the news of his hookup had spread to Anchorage, and Alaska media rushed to the river thinking they were about to witness the catch of a salmon even bigger than the world record 97-pound, 4-ounce Chinook that Soldotna’s Les Anderson had pulled from the river four years earlier.

At the time, so many big kings were being caught in the Kenai that it was widely believed that someone would hook a 100-pounder sooner or later. Fishing records reflect that Jim Cato of Eagle River, a suburb of Alaska’s largest city, landed a 92-pound, 4-ounce king just two months after Anderson’s big catch.

Other big fish followed.

Jim Luton from Soldotna, a city through which the Kenai runs, registered a 91-pound, 4-ounce king in July of 1987. Clint Moeglein another Soldotna resident, landed a 91-pound, 10-ouncer the next year. And Richard Sargent of Des Moines, Iowa pulled in a 89-pound, 3-ounce king in the lead up to Ploeger’s epic struggle that went on for more than 37 hours.

Given some parallels to the battle that the fictional fishermen Santiago waged with a giant marlin in The Old Man and the Sea, a widely read novella that won Ernest Hemingway the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1953, news of Ploeger’s fight with a big fish spread far beyond Alaska.

It became national news and is now recorded by the Minnesota Historical Society as “The Damnest Fish Story Ever:

“In the quiet of their Minnesota country home, Bob and Snookie Ploeger could sit in front of their television set and, time and again, watch that awful moment

“Roll the videotape.

“See Bob Ploeger’s bended fishing rod. . . . See the huge salmon hooked in Alaska’s Kenai River.. . . Watch the landing nets scoop and come up empty. . . . Hear the river guide’s shout of despair. ”

“Bob Ploeger says nothing. . . . Feel the silence of defeat.

“A visitor is tempted to watch that fishing moment unfold again. OK, one more time. Maybe the outcome will change. Roll the tape.

“So begins a classic fishing story of our times. A classic? When there’s a thirty-seven-hour fight between angler and fish, the story is classic….starring a quiet, devout Minnesotan, Bob Ploeger, who at the age of 63 found himself in a modern-day version of Hemingway’s epic
The Old Man and the Sea.”

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End of an era

Some more big fish would follow in the years immediately after the Ploeger affair, but the Kenai was then near the end of a long, great run.

Oregon angler Pat Plautz in July of 1990 caught a king of 95 pounds, 10 ounces, the second-largest catch on record for the Kenai, and there was a 91-pounder caught by California angler Butch Kaping in 1995.

By the 2000s, however, Chinook of 90 pounds or larger were no longer to be found, and the fish would just keep on shrinking over the years that followed. The bar defining a “big” Kenai king would  fall to 80 pounds, then 70 pounds and finally 60, or 50, as both the size of the fish and the number of those returning crept every downward.

Fishing closures followed the trend as the Alaska Department of Fish and Game struggled to shrink the harvest to match the new, smaller population of fish. Commercial setnet fisheries were restricted to minimize the bycatch of the big fish in what was supposed to be a sockeye fishery.

Anglers who once roamed 40 miles of river were limited to fishing only the lower 20 miles, and what had once been a sport fishery that attracted anglers from all over the world started to fade.

The May-June fishery for early-run Kenai kings closed early in 2018 and never reopened. In the years that followed, the more popular fishery for late-run kings was annually restricted in various ways to limit the harvest of those fish, but king returns continued to decline anyway.

By 2021, even the opportunity to catch and release late-run Chinook was eliminated at mid-season.

The closure did not come early enough, however, and the year ended with the Chinook return about 3,000 fish short of the minimum goal for spawners. The river has remained closed to Chinook anglers ever since. The commercial set gillnet fishery was similarly closed to eliminate bycatch.

And yet, the returns of spawners came in  short of the goal of 15,000 big fish in 2022 and 2023.

Then came the disaster of 2024 when only 6,630 big Chinook were counted in the late run return, less than half the minimum goal. 

The good news is that the return to date has already grown to two-thirds of the summer-long return of last year, and the 4,963 kings counted past the river’s sonar as of Friday marked the biggest number seen by the same date since 3,544 in 2023.

The final tally that year reached close to 14,000, which established it as the best return in the 2020s. Based on returns to date, the projection for this year suggests the return could reach as high as 19,500 if the run timing tracks with past years.

That’s always an if, however, and it is compounded by a big pulse of fish on July 8. If that pulse is viewed as a sign the return arrived even three days early, the projection falls to 14,500 fish.

Still, there is reason to hope for the best return in five years even if there aren’t yet enough fish to allow a fishery.