With the commercial salmon season in the far north drawing to a close, Alaska is today on track to post the lowest, all-species harvest of the new millennium.
As the numbers stand at this moment, the catch is slightly over 94 million. If the remaining harvest tracks with the five-year average from here on, the catch would reach close to 100 million, which was once considered a good season but is now considered a grim one.
The harvest last year topped 225 million. The state hasn’t witnessed a harvest under 100 million for 37 years. That came in 1987 when the catch near 96.5 million. The 2024 harvest is likely to top this number, but is equally likely to fall short of the 1988 harvest of 100.4 million.
Such an all-species, 2024 catch falling between those two years would rank this season as the seventh worst in the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s ranking of harvests back to 1975, a year that is tagged as the beginning of serious, science-based management of Alaska fisheries.
