April 28, 2025 — The Wrangell Ranger District will close the federal subsistence Chinook or king salmon fishery in the Stikine River between May 15 and June 30. It’s the ninth year in a row that the fishery has been closed.
According to a press release from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the preseason forecast for king salmon in the Stikine is low, at 10,000 large kings – salmon greater than 28 inches in length.
April 28, 2025 — This tiny island in the middle of the Bering Sea had recently completed its longest winter stretch in recorded history with above-freezing temperatures — 343 consecutive hours, or 14 days — when Aaron Lestenkof drove out to look at Sea Lion Neck.
It was another warm February day. He saw no sea ice; scant snow on the ground.
Lestenkof is one of the sentinels on the island, a small team with the Aleut tribe who monitors changes to the environment across these 43 square miles of windswept hills and tundra. He is also one of 338 residents who still manage to live on St. Paul, something that has become significantly more complicated as the Bering Sea warms around them.
Over the past decade, steadily warming waters have thrown the North Pacific into turmoil, wiping out populations of fish, birds and crabs, and exposing coastlines to ever more battering from winter storms. The upheaval in the waters has brought so much change to this remote island, where residents still fill their freezers with reindeer and seals, that it has forced many to consider how long they can last.
The warm waters killed off about 4 million common murres — the largest die-off of any bird species ever recorded in the modern era — including almost 80 percent of those that nested on St. Paul. They wiped out about 10 billion snow crabs; caused the collapse of the main Alaskan fishery that relied on them; and prompted the closing, three years ago, of St. Paul’s largest source of tax revenue, a Trident Seafoods crab processing plant.
April 23, 2025 — Alaska pollock is one of the world’s most valuable fisheries, due to the enormous annual harvest volume and the versatility of the white, mild-flavored fish, federal economists say.
Fairly or unfairly, the pollock fishery’s prodigious size makes it an easy target on controversial issues such as salmon bycatch.
Lately, another criticism has taken on a higher profile – the charge that the pollock industry’s pelagic nets aren’t really “midwater” gear, but rather touch bottom much of the time, damaging seafloor habitat and mangling king and Tanner crab. These crab fisheries have seen total closures in recent years due to stock declines primarily attributed to changes in the marine environment.
To address the bottom contact issue, the pollock industry is embarking on an ambitious project to gain a better understanding of how its trawl gear works in the water and, possibly, to develop improved designs.
April 22, 2025 — The commercial fishing industry relies on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for everything from marine weather forecasts to fisheries data. But NOAA — which lost hundreds of employees in February when the Trump administration fired probationary staff — is in the administration’s crosshairs again, according to a preliminary budget proposal from the White House Office of Management and Budget.
The budget calls for slashing NOAA’s funding by more than 27% for fiscal year 2026. It also restructures the agency’s fisheries division, shifting key responsibilities to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Frank Kelty, a fisheries consultant and former Unalaska mayor, said big changes like these could have major consequences for commercial fishing in Alaska.
April 18, 2025 — The following was released by the office of Sen. Dan Sullivan:
U.S. Senator Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) today praised an executive order issued by President Donald Trump to strengthen U.S. and Alaska fisheries. As the chair of the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Coast Guard, Maritime, and Fisheries, Sen. Sullivan has been working with the Trump administration and introducing legislation to address challenges facing Alaska’s fishermen, including global trading practices that disadvantage Alaska fisheries, and regulations that burden Alaska fishermen.
“Last month in my speech to the Alaska Legislature, I issued a clarion call about the need to go on offense for our fishermen,” said Sen. Sullivan. “These great Alaskans have endured a perfect storm of challenges, which include unfair seafood trade practices by dictatorships like Russia and China, and onerous regulatory burdens from our own federal government. I have been working relentlessly with the Trump administration, including with the Commerce and Agriculture Departments, and the U.S. Trade Representative, to get relief for our fisherman. They listened. Today, President Trump gave our fishermen a major shot in the arm, ordering his administration to remove unnecessary federal red tape and develop an America First Seafood Strategy with measures to enhance the competitiveness of our seafood in global markets and hold bad actors in seafood trade accountable. I appreciate the Trump administration’s continued strong focus on advancing the interests and priorities of Alaska across a range of economic sectors, including our fishermen and coastal communities. I thank President Trump, Secretary Lutnick, and Ambassador Greer for taking decisive action on behalf of our hard-working fishermen, and fighting to ensure more Americans and our trading partners around the world are eating ‘freedom fish’ from Alaska—not ‘communist fish’ from the likes of Russia and China.”
Below is a timeline of Sen. Sullivan’s recent efforts to advocate on behalf of the competitiveness of Alaska’s seafood industry:
April 10, 2025 — The 2025 Southeast Alaska harvest limit for king salmon will be almost 40% less than last year, a drop of 60,000 fish.
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game on April 1 announced an overall allocation of 130,800 treaty king salmon — fish that don’t originate in Alaska hatcheries — for all gear groups targeting kings in waters off Southeast Alaska and Yakutat.
In recent years, Southeast Alaska’s all-gear allocation has ranged between a high of 355,600 treaty kings in 2016 down to 130,000 in 2018, Fish and Game records show. The regionwide king quota for all commercial and sport fishermen averaged about 200,900 kings a year from 2020 through 2024.
This year’s all-gear catch limit was set based on measures of king abundance calculated by the Pacific Salmon Commission’s “chinook model,” and did not incorporate annual data from the winter troll fishery in Sitka Sound, which the commission had used in recent years through 2023 to estimate the abundance of kings in Southeast and to set the all-gear allocation for the region.
The commission is tasked with implementing the U.S.-Canada Pacific Salmon Treaty. It regulates the catch for migratory king populations along the west coast of both countries.
The commission allocates the king salmon catch between the U.S. and Canada, and the Alaska Board of Fisheries approves management plans to split Alaska’s catch between different gear types and user groups, such as sport and commercial.
April 10, 2025 — State prosecutors have accused Kodiak fisher Duncan Fields and other members of his family of defrauding the state and fish buyers through a coordinated scheme that involved committing perjury and manipulating permits.
Court documents filed Monday state that Fields and his family, who operate Fields and Sons Inc., illegally earned more than $1 million by temporarily transferring various salmon setnet permits to crew members, allowing the family to bypass state limits on individual ownership.
Fields, whose family has been setnetting in Kodiak since 1961, denied the state’s claims, saying by text that the “charges stem from the gifting of limited entry permits to family and crew, something my family and I have done for more than 30 years. This is a common practice in the industry, and we believe that our family has been singled out to try to set an example with a unique application of existing statutes. The charges are not supported by the facts.”
The criminal accusations against the Fields family — which include multiple felonies — surprised fishers and have implications beyond Kodiak.
April 10, 2025 — Bad weather and some last-minute paperwork scrambling at NOAA Fisheries combined to produce low catches during the first weeks of the Pacific halibut fishery.
By April 1, just 3 percent of the 23.79 million pound fishery limit for 2025 had been harvested since the March 20 opener. That poundage applies to the catches for commercial fishermen, sport charter operators, anglers, and subsistence users along the west coast and British Columbia/Canada to the far reaches of Alaska’s Bering Sea.
Alaska always gets the lion’s share of the annual commercial halibut catch and for 2025 it totals 19.7 million pounds, a 2.7 percent decrease from 2024. Reports by NOAA Fisheries show that 873,366 pounds were taken by Alaskan fishermen through April 7, compared to 1,223,849 pounds taken during the same time in 2024, a drop of nearly 29 percent.
As always, the first fresh halibut of the year fetched high prices, although early information was sketchy due to the low landings. Many ports have had so few deliveries that the data remain confidential.
At Seward, prices to fishermen started out at $7 per pound across the board, according to Alaska Boats and Permits in Homer.
April 7, 2025 — The amount of Chinook (king) salmon allocated under the Pacific Salmon Treaty is much lower this year in Southeast Alaska —almost 40 percent lower than last year— and that’s affecting all user groups.
The treaty is an agreement between the U.S. and Canada, ensuring both countries get some fish. Southeast’s sport fishing allocation (the amount of fish the group is allowed to take) is 27,700 wild king salmon — a slice out of the region’s almost 131,000-fish pie.
Patrick Fowler, regional fisheries management coordinator for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, said that overall, under the significantly lower treaty allocation, everyone’s going to fish less.
“The Board of Fish has given us the allocation plan for how big of a slice of the pie for each fishery,” he explained. “But because the base of the whole pie wasn’t as big, everyone’s slice is smaller.”
Fish and Game expects resident anglers to harvest about 10,000 fish, which leaves about 17,000 fish for nonresidents this year.
April 4, 2025 — The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has long struggled to compete with corporate America to recruit tech workers to maintain the complicated computer systems that track the federal seafood harvests off Alaska.
These chronic staffing shortages at NOAA Fisheries’ Alaska Region have been greatly exacerbated by the Trump administration’s efforts to cut the federal workforce.
As of mid-March, the Alaska Region had 29% of its staffing positions vacant, and the Information Services Division, staffed largely by tech workers, had a vacancy rate of 45%, according to an internal agency memorandum obtained by the Alaska Beacon.
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