For the fourth summer in a row, the Kenai River has been closed outright to sportfishing for both king salmon runs. The closures have been a blow to the hundreds of fishing guides who have historically relied on the world-famous king run for their livelihood. The yearslong decline of Kenai River kings has forced guides to change how they do business.
It’s early in the morning and Monte Roberts’ is piloting his boat along the choppy Kenai River to his favorite fishing spot. Riding with him are his doodle, Henry, and a trio of best friends up from the Lower 48 to celebrate a birthday milestone with a day of wild Alaska salmon fishing.
“You guys see any moose?” he called over the whir of the motor.
Roberts has been fishing the Kenai River for almost half a century – initially for kings and now mostly for sockeye. He says the fishery looks a lot different from the glory days of the 1980s, when he remembers being scolded by older fishermen for keeping a 35-pound king salmon.
“They’re like, ‘What’d you keep them little ones for?’” he said.
Roberts is president of the river’s professional guide association. He serves on the citizen advisory board of the Kenai River Special Management Area. That experience, coupled with decades of experience on the river, has given him a front-row seat to the decline of the world-famous king salmon.
Five types of salmon swim in the river. Right now, sockeye are the most abundant. But kings, or Chinook, are historically the biggest. A larger-than-life size carving of Les Anderson and his world-record-holding, 97.25-pound king salmon, caught in the Kenai River, greets visitors to the Soldotna Chamber of Commerce. The fish’s skin mount is proudly displayed inside the chamber.
But it’s largely a relic of the past.
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game counted less than 10,000 king salmon this year. That’s well below the low end of the state’s goal range that’s set to help rebuild the fishery.
Jimmie Jack Drath says summer used to announce itself each morning with the sound of river guide traffic.
“All I remember is just boats running all over the place, you know, and big boats and little boats and just anything, you know, just crazy,” he said.
He first fished the Kenai on a family vacation when he was 13. After catching a 20-pound king, he says he was hooked.
“You get an adrenaline rush every time you get one on, and it was like – there's nothing like it, you know?” he said. “And it never changed for me.”
His parents helped him buy his first boat – an Alumaweld from the sport show in Anchorage. When he started guiding in 1995, he says the deluge of clients seeking king trips was swift. He remembers writing guests’ credit card numbers on the sleeves of his jean jacket to run when he got back to the office.
The biggest king he ever caught was 72 pounds, but he says a guest caught one that was 76 pounds.
Drath says he got into guiding because he loves to river fish. But today, Jimmie Jack’s Alaska Fishing is a more diverse operation. The property is scattered with log cabins that come with all-inclusive fishing packages, and his river boats are dwarfed by saltwater craft he uses to fish for halibut in Cook Inlet.
He says he didn’t always envision a post-chinook business.
“I always thought like we would be done when the kings were done,” he said. “Like I thought, it'd be over, right? And at that time, I already had a lodge business, so it was kind of scary I remember thinking.”
The Kenai River’s sport king fishery didn’t close overnight. Seasons with bait restrictions gave way to catch-and-release only. Then there were regulations that became stricter as the season went on, and runs looked less and less likely to meet state goals.
The state group responsible for regulating Alaska fisheries formally designated the Kenai River’s late-run king fishery a “stock of management concern” in 2023. Then it passed an action plan full of sweeping policies aimed at preserving and rebuilding the run. The same year, sportfishing for kings was closed outright for both the early and late runs.
Diversification has also been a big part of Joe Hanes’ business model at Fish Magnet.
At his property off Big Eddy Road, a group of clients has just returned from a fishing trip. Kenai River guiding is a family business for Hanes. His dad guided in the 1970s and Hanes opened Fish Magnet in 1986. He says the state responded to declining king runs first with a catch-and-release program, and then a slot limit before the total closure.
Hanes says the Kenai River sockeye fishery has always been around, but that it wasn’t always booming. He remembers a spike in sockeye popularity after the Exxon-Valdez Oil Spill in 1989. The subsequent closure of Cook Inlet’s commercial salmon fisheries put a lot more sockeye in the Kenai River, and Hanes said people wanted to catch them.
“It just kind of steadily grew, but it didn't really explode until you know you had the you know the reduction in the king numbers, and then people have to go to Plan B,” he said.
Hanes says the physical demands associated with sockeye fishing pushed many guides into retirement.
“It's pretty much a young man's game, running up and down the beach and netting fish and doing that,” he said. “Compared to kings, was more of a I don't want to get in trouble saying this, but it's a little more of a knowledge base fishery. You know where you could be older and sit in a boat and use what's between your ears a little bit and try to, you know, get bites and stuff like that. It was a super competitive fishery, you know, where years of experience paid off a lot more than just, you know, flossing with a bare hook.”
Flossing is the sockeye-specific fishing technique that involves reeling in your fishing line with the hope that your hook will catch on the lips of a fish swimming upstream near shore with its mouths open. When the fishing is hot, that’s not as hard as it sounds. But when there are fewer fish, that means anglers spend a lot of time casting. Like, 600 casts per hour.
But Hanes says he never thought about leaving the industry, even when the king fishery closed. Like Drath, he’s also diversified his business, which now also offers saltwater halibut fishing and lodging.
“Fishermen, they always adapt to survive,” he said. “You know, everybody has to adapt and change, and you know, we've adapted. But the whole deal with the in-river sport fishing is we've given and given and given. We've given everything we can give.”
Fish Magnet is one of multiple guide operations flanking a manmade canal in Soldotna. A short boat ride away is Shannon Martin’s homebase.
She’s the executive director of the Kenai River Sportfishing Association, or KRSA. That’s the largest sportfishing advocacy group in the state. Like a lot of guides, she doesn’t hit the water without her trusty canine companion – a black lab named Rigs. Moseying down the canal, she points out what she calls “pickles” – that’s the green and yellow sticker on boats that indicates they’re registered with the state as a guide vessel.
Standing thigh-deep in the rushing river, she says there are a lot of ways to measure the impact of the declining local king runs.
“It essentially just shifted from fishing in a boat, rods-out king fishing in the lower river to fishing from the shore, rods-out, flipping for sockeye, and then the timing changed as well,” she said. “Like, our local economy used to see a lot of business in late May and June because of the early run of kings.”
It’s not cheap to start guiding, she says. Having recently gone through the process of becoming a sole proprietor of her own operation, she rattles off the startup costs: $20,000 minimum for a boat and motor, $1,000 for a guide permit, $900 for Coast Guard certification, another $1,000 for liability insurance, a vehicle that can tow your boat and clients.
And all that, she says, to fish a season that might not pan out. State run forecasts are, after all, a best guess.
The Kenai River is also the only place in Alaska where guides also need to complete a 40-hour college course before the state will give them a commercial operator’s permit. The so-called Kenai River Guide Academy was started in the early aughts after king runs started to drop.
Martin, who teaches at the academy, says the curriculum has changed over the years as king runs have dropped. Among other things, attendees are instructed in things like habitat protection, setting client expectations and how to interact with private property owners.
Back on the riverbank, Roberts explains that sockeye fishing is a numbers game. He knows, for instance, that he casts about 600 times per hour, during a half-day trip. And he can do a back-of-the-napkin estimate of how many fish will swim past him based on the previous day’s counts and the tidal fluctuations.
Today, it’s undeniably slow. Over nine hours, the four men rake in 13 fish. And Roberts issues a sort-of battle cry after every catch, hook or other fish interaction.
“Thank you river, may I have another!” he yelled multiple times throughout the day.
Henry, his doodle, barks every time someone gets a fish on hook, and licks the fish clean of blood before Roberts plops them in the cooler. The group has mostly sockeye, but also a silver. And Roberts says he can tell they hooked a king by the way one of their reels spun out of control before the line snapped.
And he can tell you sockeye are more valuable, fetching two-to-three times as much money as silvers, which start losing their scales when they hit the shore. But, silvers are higher in Omega-3 fatty acids and make for better smoked salmon. It really comes down to preference, he says.
Roberts, like some other guides, is confident kings will return to the Kenai River. But he says that’s going to be a decades-long, not yearslong, process. And in the meantime, he says sockeye fishing isn’t so bad.
Cameron Carmody, one of Roberts’ clients, tried sockeye fishing on his own. Then he booked a guided trip.
“I really like working with guides because otherwise you’ve just got to figure it out yourself, which you got a fund of knowledge of zero basically, and you're starting from scratch, whereas they have all the fishing knowledge and they get you on fish and it's very satisfying.”
Multiple guides agree that, at the end of the day, their clients are generally interested in experiencing Alaska. That’s over catching a certain type of fish, or a certain amount of fish, or a certain size of fish.
Roberts says there are lessons to be learned from the decline of the king fishery. It’s a cautionary tale he says could repeat itself with other species if the state and anglers aren’t careful.
“I would love to be able to fish king salmon again in my lifetime,” he said. “But I’m not recklessly optimistic that I’m going to.”
He and other guides say all fishery user groups are unified around a common desire to see the kings come back. But, until they do, the guides say they’ll settle for selling the splendor of Alaska.
