September 18, 2019 — “Unpredictable” is the way salmon managers describe Alaska’s 2019 salmon season, with “very, very interesting” as an aside.
The salmon fishery is near its end, and a statewide catch of nearly 200 million salmon is only 6% off what Alaska Department of Fish and Game number crunchers predicted, and it is on track to be the eighth largest since 1975.
The brightest spot of the season was the strong returns of sockeye salmon that produced a catch of over 55 million fish, the largest since 1995 and the fifth consecutive year of harvests topping 50 million reds. The bulk of the sockeye catch – 43.2 million – came from Bristol Bay, the second largest on record.
It was a roller coaster ride in many regions where unprecedented warm weather threw salmon runs off kilter and also killed large numbers of fish that were unable to swim upstream to their spawning grounds. Many salmon that made it to water faced temperatures of 75 degrees or more in some regions.