The Southeast Alaska sport fishery is on track to exceed its king salmon allocation for the summer by 14,000 fish, prompting the state to close the region to sportfishing for kings. The closure went into effect at 12:01 a.m. Monday, Aug. 26.
“King salmon may not be retained or possessed, and any king salmon caught must be released immediately and returned to the water unharmed,” according to the Department of Fish and Game announcement late Friday, Aug. 23.
The king salmon sport fishery will reopen on Oct. 1 for the winter season.
“While the (state’s) management plan is intended to avoid in-season changes to sportfishing regulations, the projected end-of-season harvest for the sport fishery is expected to exceed the combined sport and (commercial) troll allocation,” the department reported.
The sport closure “is necessary to keep Alaska fisheries from exceeding the 2024 Alaska all-gear catch limit as determined by the Pacific Salmon Treaty.”
During a phone call with the Ketchikan Daily News on Friday, Fish and Game Commissioner Doug-Vincent Lang said that, as far as he’s aware, this is the first year the department has ever ordered an in-season halt to all king salmon sportfishing in Southeast.
Last week’s announcement was the second in as many weeks cutting back the king salmon catch in Southeast.
The department on Aug. 6 reported that heavy fishing on kings by sport fishermen — which includes charter boat customers — would take away fishing time from Southeast Alaska’s commercial troll fleet this summer.
The state announced that trollers in August and September would lose out on the remainder of the summer troll fishery allocation for kings because sport fishermen across Southeast were on track to exceed their summer 2024 allocation by about 14,000 chinook.
The summer king commercial troll fishery started July 1, and permit holders across the region harvested about 83,000 kings during an initial eight-day retention period — about 16,000 more fish than the department’s harvest target of 66,700 kings for the opener. The entire summer allocation for trollers of “treaty” salmon is about 92,400.
Though trollers had about 9,000 kings left in their summer allocation, state regulations require that any overharvest by the sportfishing fleet gets charged against the troll allocation to keep the overall total with the treaty numbers. Thus, the lack of a second summer king opening for trollers.
“We’re at the point where we’re getting very close to our overall catch limit, and if we exceed that catch limit we’ve got to pay fish back next year,” Vincent-Lang said. Under the treaty, Alaska must “pay back” any overharvest the next year.
Harvest of migratory treaty kings along the U.S. West Coast and Canada is delegated between the two countries by the Pacific Salmon Treaty. In Alaska, the harvest is allocated between gear groups — sport, trollers, gillnetters and seiners — under regulations set by the Alaska Board of Fisheries.
Hatchery-reared kings are managed outside the treaty.
Trollers this year were allocated a total of 153,000 treaty kings between their winter, spring and summer seasons, while sport fishermen were allocated 38,250.
In 2023, the sport fleet exceeded its allocation by more than 15,000 kings, similar to this year. The state in 2023 implemented new restrictions on the troll harvest in years when the sport catch exceeds its share.
Forrest Braden, executive director of the Southeast Alaska Guides Organization, told the Ketchikan Daily News on Friday “there wasn’t any forewarning” that the department would close down sport retention early, although “there was obviously an indicator that the sport fishery had exceeded its allocation.”
“I think it’s taken everybody by surprise,” Braden said. “I don’t know if anybody saw this coming because the King Salmon Management Plan calls for no closures unless there’s conservation concerns, then this is more of a policy call I think on the department’s part.”
He said the closure is bad for the guided sportfishing business. “Any kind of an in-season closure that changes people’s expectations is problematic and difficult,” Braden said. “You know, people are told one thing and then they get another, and that doesn’t work really well in our industry.”
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