September 7, 2021 — A single slick silver salmon lay flat in the center of a floating dock.
The lone coho was the only fish that turned up in the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s test net that mid-August evening. A technician stooped low in her orange rubber gloves and sandals for measurements.
Test nets are one of the tools that fisheries managers use to understand what’s happening with the salmon runs on the Lower Yukon River. Any of the fish caught, once sampled, are given to local residents for food. In normal times, when big pulses of chum surge into the river, managers sometimes have 50 or a hundred fish at a time to donate. But this year, test nets sometimes went as long as three days without a single salmon. People stopped bothering to even check the bins set down the road from the AC store.
So it was a big deal that hours earlier during the morning run, the test nets yielded a catch.
“Word traveled fast that we got three fish,” said biologist Courtney Berry.
“Fishing for water all summer has been … boring,” Berry said.
The salmon situation this year on the Yukon is bad. Kings have been in decline for years, here and almost everywhere else in the state. This summer was the fourth lowest count of kings in the Yukon since 1995.
Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News