Fishing

Fishing for kings on the Kenai River is again off limits this month. It’s the third year in a row the Alaska Department of Fish and Game has closed the fishery early amid low king salmon counts.The closure also means set-netters who fish the east side of Cook Inlet are no longer allowed to fish this season. Their fishery closes when king counts are down.

Bristol Bay's Nushagak District broke its record for the largest single-day harvest. Fisherfolk caught 2.46 million salmon on Thursday. That’s about 600,000 fish over last year’s record daily harvest, which was set last year. The district had back-to-back record harvests exactly one year ago, when fleets caught 1.7 million on June 30 and 1.82 million on July 1.

Regulatory area 521, in the central Bering Sea just northwest of the Pribilof Islands, recorded the highest bycatch totals for nearly all prohibited…

Halibut bycatch mortality in the Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea/Aleutian Islands regulatory areas for the week ending August 24th was highest in Area 620,…

Sockeye salmon continued pouring into Upper Cook Inlet. Six hundred forty thousand found their way into the nets of the commercial gillnet fleet, up from…

July continued to report the lowest catches of prohibited species in 2019 throughout groundfish fisheries in the Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea/Aleutian…

Longliners targeting Pacific Cod posted the highest poundage of halibut bycatch for the week of July 13, according to public data released by the National…

Halibut landings across the state have slowed down as boats turn their attention to salmon. Homer landed 109,763 pounds of halibut on fifteen deliveries…

The first two openers of the 2019 Upper Cook Inlet drift gillnet season are done. The June 20 and 24 Central District fishing periods each yielded about…

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game has been trying to find out if hatchery fish from operations in Tutka Bay Lagoon and Port Graham have been straying…