Photo/Berett Wilber
The harvest allocation for king salmon in Southeast Alaska is lower than the region’s commercial trollers expected.
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game announced Tuesday (4-1-25) that 130,800 treaty Chinook salmon will be available this year for all Southeast fisheries, down almost 40% from last year’s allocation. From that total, trollers are allowed to catch 92,700 king salmon. The balance of treaty salmon goes primarily to sport anglers.
Sitkan Matt Donohoe is the vice chair of the Alaska Trollers Association.
“We heard that it’s going to be lower than last year and but we didn’t know how much,” says Sitkan Matt Donohoe, the vice chair of the Alaska Trollers Association.
“It’s a devastating number. It’s the worst ever. I mean, what industry can afford a 40% reduction?”
He says it’s the lowest number in the history of the Pacific Salmon Treaty.
“I hope the treaty folks are mistaken, because it’d be even worse if they’re not mistaken, if the fish are in that kind of trouble,” Donohoe says. “But I think the process is flawed.”
The US and Canada established the Pacific Salmon Treaty in 1985 to regulate the commercial and recreational harvest of king salmon in coastal waters from Alaska to Oregon. The process for determining harvest numbers has evolved over the years, and recently has used catch rates from winter king fishing to establish the numbers for the summer season. Regardless of the method, however, the result has been a downward trend in commercial harvest rates over most of the last four decades.
Recently chum salmon have equaled or bettered kings as a money maker for Southeast trollers. But Donohoe says chum and coho can’t be relied on to save small boat fishermen.
“The price of coho was so bad last year that a lot of guys didn’t go fishing, and it was just cheap to go chum fishing,” Donohoe says. “They had pretty good chum fishing here in Sitka Sound, but you can’t count on that.”
The impact of the lower-than-expected harvest allocation on trollers is further compounded by a new distribution of Alaska’s treaty kings. Trollers’ share of salmon was reduced by the Alaska Board of Fisheries at its February meeting this year from 80 to 77-percent, with the three percent difference going to sport fishermen. But the allocation news means sport fishermen will be hit too. “They’re going to have a lower bag limit,” Donohoe says. “Everybody’s in this boat.”
The summer season for commercial trolling opens on July 1. Many trollers take to water much earlier, however, in the spring troll fisheries, which target salmon produced exclusively in Alaska’s rivers and hatchery programs, and are not covered under the Pacific Salmon Treaty.
