Cook Inlet salmon forecasts and returns for the past 20 years/ADF&G
Scientific guestimating
For years now, Cook Inlet commercial fishermen have been trooping before the Alaska Board of Fisheries to complain that the state is undermining the productivity of the Kenai River, the most popular salmon stream in the 49th state, by allowing too many sockeye salmon to escape into the watershed to spawn.
And now comes an over-escapement-linked forecast for a 2026 return of approximately 4.45 million fish of those fish, a forecast that, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, is 12 percent above “the historical (1986–2025) average run of 3.98 million and 23 percent fish more than the recent 10-year (2016–2025) average run of 3.61 million.”
It is also a forecast that reflects a trend in rising forecasts and rising harvests that began in 2021 and has been going up ever since. All but one of these growing returns came off Kenai over-escapements that ranged from small to huge.
Last year’s sockeye return, which was forecast at 4.19 million but blew up into an actual return of nearly twice that size at 8.04 million, came primarily off a 2021 return of more than 1.1 million fish more than the river’s “sustainable escapement goal” of 1.4 million sockeye.
This was over-escapement of a monstrous sort.
This was a level of escapement that, at least in the eyes of Cook Inlet commercial fishermen, should have devastated the 2025 sockeye run, but instead did the opposite. Quite obviously, the reality of over-escapement isn’t as simple as the theory of over-escapement.
The theory itself is pretty simple.
If you put too many adult salmon on the spawning grounds, they will crowd each other out and diminish spawning success. But despite this drop in spawning success, they will still put enough eggs in the gravel to hatch and produce more sockeye fry than the watershed can support.
Thus, when all these fry drop back into the watershed’s lakes to feed for a year or two before going to sea, the competition between them will be so great that even more than normal will starve (the natural death rate among young salmonids is high even in the best of times) with the end result being that fewer smolts will go to sea than if the escapement had been smaller.
And, of course, the fewer the number of young salmon going to sea, the fewer the number of adults likely to return years later. Or at least this is the theory in general.
The art of science
Needless to say, however, survival at sea, something about which we still know way too little, can throw the return way off either up or down. And thus, it must be recognized that the science used to arrive at an estimate for an escapement level needed to maintain a “maximum sustained yield” of returning salmon is far from an exact science.
It’s more like hit-and-miss science that misses more than it hits, but generally provides an accurate “range” of what might happen.
In the case of the Kenai, this all revolves around four-year-old salmon, comprised of those that spend two years in Kenai watershed lakes before going to sea for two years and those that spend a year in freshwater before three years at sea.
These fish make up the bulk of the Kenai return every year. But there are so-called “1.2 salmon” and “2.3 salmon” in the mix as well, with those numbers reflecting, first, the time in freshwater and, second, the years at sea.
The 1.2 and 1.3 salmon will return this year off over-escapements of 314,565 in 2020 and 167,750 in 2022, according to state data. But the bulk of this year’s return is expected to come predominantly from the 2022 parent year, which was almost 168,000 above the top of the biological escapement goal.
But the data here gets messy here, because the escapement count is made by a sonar downstream from a significant part of the now large sportfishery that takes place on the Kena River. That fishery can now harvest anywhere form 250,000 to 400,000 sockeye upstream from the sonar.
So sometimes the over-escapements aren’t really over-escapements, no matter how much they might look like that to commercial fishermen trying to use over-escapement to leverage every possible salmon into their nets.
Various models, based in part on the extrapolation of what survival at sea might look like based on the size of the return of 1.2s in the previous year, are used to make each year’s forecast. The 2026 forecast is predicting a return of 4.5 million with the 1.3s and 2.2s comprising about 3.3 million or roughly 74 percent.
How accurate the 2026 prediction, only time will tell. The final return has matched the forecast in only three of the last 19 years, but it has been within the range of the forecast in 18 of those 19 years.
This is, however, partly due to the range being set very wide in the previous decade. The upper and lower bounds of forecasts used to show a difference of 3 million to 4 million fish, but the range has since shrunk closer to 2.5 million.
Last year’s return came as a surprise as it went well over the top of therange set at about 7 million. This illustrated two things: 1.) The difficulty of accurately forecasting salmon returns; and 2.) the huge variabilities in survival of salmon at sea.
It’s complicated
Fisheries biologists once thought they had this all figured out. Send more young salmon to sea, get more salmon back. It was this thinking that led the state into the salmon hatchery business in the 1970s when Alaska salmon returns were tiny, largely due to over-fishing and colder waters in the North Pacific Ocean.
The thinking then was that using state hatcheries to put more fish to sea would guarantee more fish coming back, and this idea worked, although not exactly in the way the state intended. The state was never able to produce significant volumes of high-value salmon species – kings (Chinook), sockeye and coho (silvers).
The goals for Chinook, sockeye and chum were never met. The goal for coho was met once in the years that followed. And FRED eventually faded into history as another failure in Alaska’s historic efforts at the sort of “state capitalism” that has proven successful in China.
FRED hatcheries, which had been funded by state taxpayers back in the days when the state had an income tax, were then turned over to collectives controlled by commercial fishermen. Those collectives were freed from the original hatchery idea of producing “common property” fish for all Alaskans and given the authority to harvest their hatchery fish to generate revenue in the same way ranchers using public rangelands in the Lower 48 do, except there were no grazing fees required as in the latter case.
The collectives, nicely labeled as “public, non-profit” (PNP) corporations controlled by fishermen’s “associations,” promptly abandoned the idea of producing expensive-to-grow kings, sockeyes and coho in significant numbers, and turned the hatcheries into factories successfully pumping out cheap-to-produce pink and chum salmon with great success.
Alaska’s still standing, record harvest of 272 million salmon in 2013 was “powered by a record pink salmon harvest of 219 million,” according to Alaska Fish and Game. Forty-two percent of those pinks – 91.7 million salmon – were credited to hatcheries.
In the years that followed, the PNPs would continue to have great success in producing pinks, the smallest and least valuable of the Pacific salmon, in Prince William Sounds, and larger and slightly more valuable chums in Southeast Alaska, where hatchery chums are steadily replacing wild chums as hatchery operators expand their open-ocean farming.
The hatcheries in the Sound, a region which historically supported harvests of wild pinks averaging only 4 million pinks per year, have been the poster child for hatchery success. “Between 2010 and 2019, harvests rose to approximately 50 million annually, over 80 percent of which was of hatchery-produced salmon,” a peer-reviewed study documenting a hatchery-salmon takeover of the Sound reported in 2024.
How long this can be sustained is an unknown. Salmon runs, even human-manipulated salmon runs, tend to be cyclical because humans have no control over the ocean pastures and little insight into how much food salmon will find there in any given year.
All indications are that some of the Sound pinks, or humpies as Alaskans often call them, at sea in 2024 suffered a food shortage because Sound returns faltered badly last summer.
“The PWSAC pink salmon run of 12.35 million fish was 56 percent below the forecast
of 28.00 million,” that report said, while the Sound’s “wild pink salmon harvest of 6.56 million fish was 65 percent below the forecast of 18.63 million fish.”
Whether this is just a blip in the continuing trend of huge humpy harvests in the Sound or a harbinger of things to come is unknown. There have been some suggestions that a “cool pool” of water in the Gulf of Alaska in 2024 might have had something to do with this.
Cooler water is believed to favor sockeyes, which boomed in Cook Inlet in 2025, and disfavor pinks that have, for a couple of decades, been taking over the pastures of a warming Pacific.
The general view leans toward a blip, given that global warming is holding steady with 2025 reported as the third warmest year in modern history behind only 2024 and 2023. But humans have shown no ability to accurately predict the future.
The future
The big questions here for Alaskans center on what an ocean in flux means for various species of salmon and whether the trend of the moment, which is looking good for the state’s most popular and contentious salmon fishery in Cook Inlet, will continue or start to falter.
Some might remember that it wasn’t long ago that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) was “Seeing Red Across the North Pacific Ocean.” From 2014 to 2016 or thereabouts, the Gulf of Alaska was caught up in what came to be called simply “The Blob,” an unprecedented ocean warming event that caused havoc in the ecosystem.
But not all salmon benefited from The Blob. Cook Inlet sockeye at sea during the heat wave suffered badly. The 2018 sockeye return to the Kenai basically collapsed. The state was forced to shut down commercial fishing, order an early end to personal-use dipnetting, and close most of the river to angling.
When Cotten attempted to explain the biological need to close fishing to ensure enough salmon reached spawning grounds to maintain future returns, he was shouted down by those angry that he hadn’t already closed the dipnet fishery, which was catching so few fish that the harvest was meaningless.
The in-river return had peaked with a sonar count of 62,500 sockeye entering the river July 21 with fishery managers thinking they were starting to build toward a forecast return of around 2.5 million. The forecast would turn out to have been hugely optimistic.
In the last days of July, when sockeye should have begun flooding into the river at the rate of 50,000 to 100,000 per day as they had done the year 2017 and in many years before, the return was down to a daily trickle of 9,000 to 19,000 fish per day.
The closure of the commercial fishery and of the dipnet fishery following the Walker meeting did help the state achieve its in-river spawning goal of more than 750,000 sockeye. With commercial nets out of the water, state fishery managers saw some 30,000 to 50,000 sockeye days in early August.
This didn’t make commercial fishermen any happier.
With their anger about being shut down for conservation reasons and there constant efforts to leverage claims of “over-escpaement” to put more fish in their nets, it might be easy for the average Alaskan to think of them as the greediest interests involved in the seemingly endless Cook Inlet “fish wars.”
Money, money, money
But their capitalism can be excused in that nearly all Alaskans involved in debating how many sockeye should be allowed into the popular river a three-hour drive south of the state’s largest city have financial incentives for joining in the verbal war.
Tourism interests want more fish rather than fewer in the river instead of in commercial nets because people come from around the world and pay good money to fish the river. Tourism is now a $5.6 billion industry in the 49th state, according to the Alaska Travel Industry Association, and anyone trying to negotiate the aisles in the Soldotna Fred Meyer during the fishing season gets an in-your-face introduction to the mob of people who follow the salmon to the nearby river.
The crowds there in July make most days during salmon season look like the mob-generating Black Friday after Thanksgiving in the rest of these unUnited States. This obviously gives Kenai retailers good reason to want more salmon in the Kenai, not only to help fill their stores with out-of-state tourists but to draw Alaska residents south from the Anchorage metropolitan area, now reported to be home to 407,213 people or about 55 percent of the entire population of the 49th state.
Alaska’s unique, resident-only, personal-use salmon fishery encourages 25,000 to 30,000 Alaskans to also want more sockeyes in the river so they can dip them out with nets, slaughter them, and put the filets in their freezers to provide a year’s supply of fish.
With salmon now retailing at $10 per pound or more in American supermarkets, this is no small thing. The average Cook Inlet sockeye weighed 5.4 pounds last year, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. A fisherman good with a knife can get about two and three-quarter pounds of filets out of each such fish.
The starting bag limit for Kenai dipnetters is 25 sockeye. At 2.75 pounds of filets per fish, this works out to almost 69 pounds of filets worth something upward of $687 at $10 per pound. But most fishermen are part of family units and the bag limit for dipnetters goes up by 10 sockeye for each member of the household.
So a couple is looking at being able to take home close to $1,000 worth of salmon or more, and the base value for a family of four is up over $1,500.
For those who know what they are doing, this is a nice, little Alaska benefit of living in the 49th state, although there are plenty who don’t know what they are doing and mainly waste gas driving to the Kenai to dipnet when it might make more sense for them to buy their salmon off commercial fishermen who were last year getting paid an average of only $2.57 per pound for the sockeye they caught, according to state numbers.
What the average Alaskans gets out of any of this is hard to say, given that most of Alaskans don’t fish.
State licensing records indicate that only about 22 percent of Alaska’s estimated 555,500 adult residents purchase a fishing license allowing them to harvest salmon. The number of Alaskans dipnettiung is even smaller at somewhere down around 10 percent.
Taxes on the commercial fishing industry fail to cover the costs of managing and policing it, leaving the state to pick up the cost by using other revenue sources, and the only taxes on sport and personal-use fishing come in the form of sales taxes in the communities near where most people fish or from bed taxes on people renting rooms.
Tourist anglers do spend hundreds of millions of dollars on Alaska vacation’s every sumer, but exactly how much is unclear because the doesn’t really track non-commercial fishery spending.
How Alaska manages its fisheries to produce the greatest economic value for all Alaskans would seem to be something the state’s political leaders should have started talking about long ago, but Alaskans don’t seem all that interested in the economic management of what was once of hte state’s most valuable common-property resources.
They’d rather fight over who gets a bigger portion of the annual salmon return to the state, and over-escapement is a nicely disingenous part of that fight that helps distract from the bigger issues.
Categories: Commentary, Outdoors
