Seiners in Sitka broke the single-day record for harvesting pink salmon not once, but twice this month.
District 13’s previous single-day harvest record was set in 2017 when roughly 950,000 pink salmon were caught. Aaron Dupuis is the Sitka area management biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. He says while pink salmon harvests are down in other parts of the state, they’re surging in Sitka.
“We’ve just been seeing really strong harvests of pink salmon and really strong escapements, which was kind of unusual for an even year, and fairly unusual, given what’s been going on with pink salmon in the rest of the Gulf of Alaska,” Dupuis said. “So it’s pretty special to have a good pink run in the Sitka area this year.”
He says local seiners beat the record on August 6 this year, catching 1.23 million pink salmon in one day. And it didn’t take long for them to beat it again, harvesting 1.28 million pink salmon on August 10.
Dupuis said fishing effort was up this year, in part, because pinks arrived late for some of the fisheries that typically see higher participation.
“So a lot of that purse seine effort moved from the Ketchikan area, Juneau, Petersburg over to Sitka,” Dupuis said. “So right now we have about 20 or 30 more boats on average, and then combine that with pretty good run.”
Dupuis said ocean conditions may have played a part in the “good run.” And the weather played a part in salmon escapement, too – that’s the number of fish that make it past the fishery, into streams to spawn. With the dry August weather, water levels were low when fish showed up.
“In a lot of these other systems, the fish aren’t up the creek. We have the whole escapement sitting there. Kind of the worst case scenario is the fish go up the creek, and then the water drops. Then you can have pretty big mortality events, which isn’t great,” Dupuis said. “But we haven’t had that because the water levels were low prior to the fish showing up.”
As of Monday (8-17-26), Dupuis said the fishery was ranked the seventh largest in the state’s history, with more openings to come. That’s a big contrast from what state fishery managers were anticipating earlier in the summer.
“It started out the season looking pretty grim,” Dupuis said. “Historic low harvest levels and escapement observations going into the last week in July, it was kind of looking like it might be a disaster, and then all of a sudden all these fish started showing up.”
The record pink harvest will sell for a high price. Dupuis said purse seined pink salmon are going for $0.60 per pound, as much as double some recent years.
