A 20-minute catch on the North Kenai beach/Craig Medred photo
Cook Inlet sockeye above forecast
When cyclones rip through the Asian tropics, do the sockeye salmon of Alaska’s Cook Inlet end up a beneficiary?
One has to wonder with scientists studying climate change now reporting that these “destructive natural disasters…effectively stir the stratified upper ocean and produce significant sea surface temperature (SST) cooling and subsurface water warming.”
Cooler SSTs are thought to favor sockeye salmon, which thrive in colder water, over the smaller and more plentiful pink salmon, the population of which exploded in the North Pacific in the new millennium as the ocean warmed.
“If one looks at the number of category 5 storms” – those classed as super typhoons – “that have occurred since 1982…there has been a noticeable increase in Cat 5s,” Yale Climate Connections reported in November. “A similar increase can be seen in the number of ultra-intense tropical cyclones with winds of at least 180 mph.”
One of those ultra-intense hurricanes hit the Philippines in the middle of November. It followed on two earlier Cat 4 typhoons. It was bad news for the region, which the Associated Press reported had “been pounded by five major storms in less than a month.
What was horrible for the Philippines might, however, have been good for the four- to five-year-old Alaska sockeye salmon that migrate far to the west in the North Pacific Ocean before beginning their migration back to Alaska.
This puts them in that sea-surface water being stirred and cooled by tropical cyclones, as reported in the peer-reviewed Journal of Climate in 2023.
Butterfly effect
As of this writing, no researchers have specifically studied the effect of this expanded “cold wake” on sockeye salmon, but it is obvious there is a possible “butterfly effect” here. Most people are probably familiar with that concept made famous by MIT mathematician and meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz, who in 1972 authored a paper titled “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?”
“The butterfly effect even filtered into pop culture. ‘A butterfly can flutter its wings over a flower in China and cause a hurricane in the Caribbean,’ says Robert Redford’s character in the 1990 movie Havana, adding that scientists ‘can even calculate the odds.’ But they can’t, as Lorenz made clear in his 1990 book, The Essence of Chaos. Nature’s interdependent chains of cause and effect are usually too complex to disentangle.”
Or at least the chains of cause and effect are too complex to disentangle at this time, which is what makes science – a never-ending search for how things work – interesting. In this particular case, all one can say is that the western North Pacific has seen some cooler water in the last few years and suddenly Cook Inlet sockeye are on the rise.
At the same time, it should probably be noted that pinks in Prince William Sound, just to the south of Inlet, aren’t doing as well as forecast this year. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game and the aquaculture associations that run massive production hatcheries there forecast a 2025 harvest of close to 62 million pinks.
To date, the catch stands at just over 22 million, which puts it behind the two-year-ago harvest of more than 30 million by the same date. The 2023 catch ended up reaching about 55.5 million. If this season tracks with 2023, the 2025 harvest is likely to come in at about 40 million, well below the preseason forecast.
Last year was considered a disaster in the Sound with a catch of but 8.6 million of the fish Alaskans call “humpies.” But even-year pinks are genetically distinct from odd-year pinks and the even-year fish return in far smaller numbers. The Sound’s current, annual, five-year average harvest, which yo-yos between the big odd-numbered years and the much smaller even-numbered years, is nearly 34 million.
This year’s catch is likely to top that, but it’s not going to make commercial fishermen happy after last year’s flop. A catch of 40 million this year combined with the 8.6 million of last year would put the two-year average at 24.3 million pinks or about 10 million fish shy of what the Sound’s commercial operators would hope to see.
Pinks are Alaska’s lowest-value salmon and are these days only worth about 75 or 80 cents each to commercial fishermen. But even at that price, a 10 million fish shortage results in a loss of $7.5 to $8 million.
The picture is much rosier for sockeye just to the north of the Sound. Five to six-pound sockeye never come back in the numbers of three to three and a half-pound pinks, but they are worth a lot more – $1.71 per pound on average last year in the Inlet, according to Fish and Game data.
Commercial fishermen in 2024 caught nearly 2.2 million of these fish and pocketed more than $21 million, and they were expected to do even better this year.
In January, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game forecast a return of 6.93 million Inlet sockeye, well above the 2024 forecast of 5.7 million, which turned out to be low.
As of this writing, the 2025 forecast has also proven to have been low, and by the time the season ends and all the numbers are in, it is likely to be way, way low.
To date, close to 3.8 million more sockeye have been caught in commercial fisheries in the Inlet where it is possible the commercial catch could end up double that of last year.
Those fish, plus the in-river sockeye, account for about 7.4 million salmon or about a half million more than forecast. But commercial fishermen aren’t the only ones catching Inlet sockeye salmon before they get counted in-river.
Early salmon dipnetters did so well early that by the last part of July the usual crowds on the North Kenai beach were gone/Craig Medred photo
In Alaska, there are personal use fisheries at the mouths of the Kenai and Kasilof rivers and in some other waters. These are food-security fisheries limited to Alaska residents. On the Kenai and Kasilof, they use set gillnets or dipnets to catch 400,000 to nearly 500,000 sockeye for home consumption every year.
This has been a banner year for the Kenai dipnet fishery, the state’s biggest personal-use fishery. The number of sockeyes swarming into the Kenai topped 107,000 on July 16, and it was only yesterday that a daily count dipped below that number at just shy of 106,000.
The peak daily count came on July 27 when the river’s sonar counter recorded almost a quarter-million sockeye – 247,250 to be exact – swarming up the river. When sockeye enter the Kenai at the rate of over 100,000 fish per day, it is almost impossible to put a dipnet in the river and not catch a fish.
The relatively few dipnetters still working the mouth of the Kenai as the fishery moved toward its July 31 end could well indicate this year’s harvest will set a record because the limited dipnet activity in the late season appears to be linked to most dipnetters getting all the fish they wanted early and going home.
There have been so many sockeye entering the Kenai on a daily basis for the last two weeks that even people who couldn’t figure out that the net on a dipnet should be positioned so that the fish swim into the bag were catching fish.
People who stood in the water with the river’s current stretching the bag downstream to form a cone in the wrong direction were still catching the occasional salmon that bumped into the mesh; momentarily snagged a tooth, gill plates or pectoral fin; and was unable to shake free before the net flopped down to trap it.
Add 500,000 personal-use sockeye or more to the number of fish caught in the commercial fishery and those known to be in-river, and the total Inlet sockeye return to date swells to about 8 million.
And the run isn’t over yet.
The returns to both Kasilof and the Kenai now appear to have peaked, but the Kenai could still see a lot more fish. Between July 28 and Aug. 9 of last year, when Fish and Game turned off the sonar early, more than 400,000 sockeye entered the river.
The year before, when the state ran the sonar until Aug. 28, it counted more than 1.3 million sockeye between July 28 and Aug. 28. The number this year is likely to be that big or bigger for the same time period.
If another 1 million sockeye enter the Kenai between now and the end of August, they could boost the total return to the Inlet for the year to around 9 million or close to 25 percent more than what was originally forecast as an “excellent” return.
That means this could go down as the super-excellent season of 2025.
And with the number of sockeye in the Kenai itself closing in on 2.7 million today – nearly two times the in-river goal of 1.4 million – rod and reel fishermen along the state’s most popular stream for salmon fishing are having a field day.
Fish and Game today boosted the limit for anglers to six fish per day and 12 in possession for the middle Kenai and lower Russian rivers. There are so many sockeye in the Kenai now that some have suggested thw state should be advertising for Outside anglers to come visit Alaska to help catch them to avoid the dreaded “overescapement” commercial fishermen fear.
