A commercial harvest boost of some two million more salmon, mostly keta (Chum), last week in Alaska has pushed the year-to-date harvest to more than 110 million fish, says Garrett Evridge, economist for the McDowell Groups in Juneau, Alaska. 

Preliminary harvest figures posted daily by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game put the total catch as of September 11 at 111,729,000 fish. That total includes more than 50 million sockeyes, of which in excess of 41 million came from Bristol Bay. The pink salmon harvest of 39.5 million fish includes 23.8 million from Prince William Sound. Ten million of the nearly 19 million keta salmon caught statewide came from Southeast Alaska fishing communities.

Evridge notes in his weekly update to the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute that pink salmon production slowed last week with the addition of 390,000 fish, putting the year-to-date volume just under 40 million fish, six percent above 2016 numbers.

Keta salmon harvests have bumped up significantly over the past two weeks due to Southeast Alaska’s Crawfish Inlet production of three million fish. Statewide year-to-date keta volume is 21 percent below the 2017 pace and seven percent above the five-year average. Add to that 280,000 coho harvested last week, with about three more weeks of fishing expected, the year-to-date harvest is about a quarter below the five-year average.

Chinook production meanwhile was nearly equal to 2017 levels and 170,000 sockeyes were harvested last week primarily in Kodiak.

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