• This will finish as a poor season, at least in terms of harvest volume. The statewide, all-species catch stands at 96.2 million fish. The season likely will finish with a harvest under 100 million for the first time in 37 years, since 1987, when the tally was 96.5 million.
• The Prince William Sound purse seine fishery closes today, perhaps appropriately on Friday the 13th. It's been a nightmare year for seiners with a catch of less than 5 million pink salmon, far below forecast. Expect pleas for disaster relief coming out of Cordova.
• Alaska never has produced many salmon north of the Arctic Circle, but this season's production was particularly paltry at Kotzebue. "The 2024 commercial harvest of 5,392 chum salmon was below the 1962-2023 average harvest of 231,196 chum salmon and the poorest harvest since the state started managing the Kotzebue District in 1962," the Alaska Department of Fish and Game reports.
• It wasn't gloomy everywhere this season. On Aug. 12, OBI Seafoods blew the cannery steam whistle in Petersburg to mark 100,000 cases of canned salmon produced.
3 comments:
Doing the math, OBI is likely to lose $4 per case of canned pinks. Lots of effort to lose money. Go OBI!
Five million pinks in PWS was a great harvest until they built all those hatcheries. Now it's a nightmare and disaster? Even those "Friday the 13th" movies grossed over $460 million at the box office, and Jason's hockey mask has become one of the most recognized images in popular culture, after he supposedly drowned as a boy at Camp Crystal Lake. A Paramount classic!
Processors will continue to suffer until they find a way to do value-added in Alaska. The model of shipping frozen round salmon to China leaves the industry exposed to trade wars and Russian dumping.
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