Fall fishing in Washington state’s Puget Sound did little to alleviate a market shortage of chum salmon after Alaska’s summer salmon season turned in abysmal numbers.
In Alaska, fishermen caught just 8.7 million chums, a steep drop from the previous three-year average of around 20 million fish and well below the pre-season forecast of 19.5 million.
Dan Lesh, a consultant for the McKinley Research Group, called Alaska’s 2020 chum numbers “amazingly depressing.”
“The [chum salmon] didn’t show up, with only 45 percent of the forecast harvested. On top of that, the ex-vessel prices were quite low,” Lesh said. Total value for the 2020 chum fishery was USD 26 million (EUR 21.8 million), less than half the previous 10-year low of USD 63 million (EUR 52.7 million) in 2014.
Puget Sound typically contributes around one million late season chum salmon to the market, but Randy Babich, a fisherman who also runs the Longbranch, Washington-based processor Trader Bay Limited, told SeafoodSource the total 2020 run was under 500,000 fish.
“It was really, really low. To put it in perspective, for my company, it was the smallest number of fish I’ve taken since my wife and I formed Trader Bay 31 years ago,” Babich told SeafoodSource. Babich added that the poor run was complicated by management issues that kept non-tribal fishermen off the water.
“Fishermen feel left out of their cut of fish of around 60,000 fish. That could have been half-a-million pounds, which is easily USD 500,000 [EUR 418,200]. Everybody needed it and the Washington economy needed it. We process all this fish in Seattle and move a lot of it value-added,” Babich said.
According to Victoria, British Columbia, Canada-based seafood supplier Tradex Foods, the low harvest had pushed chum prices to what may be their highest ever, and Babich said the few fish Puget Sound fishermen caught were fetching a good price.
“The bright side – if there is one – is that there’s a decent demand for chums and ikura because supply has been so pathetically low,” Babich said.
While final Puget Sound harvest numbers were unavailable, Babich estimated fishermen had caught around 160,000 chums this fall. After a harvest of 1.4 million fish in 2017, the Puget Sound fishery dropped to 850,000 in 2018, with just 287,000 chums caught last year.
Canada’s fall chum season has seen an even more vertiginous decline, falling from a banner 3.3-million fish harvest in 2016 to just 186,000 last year. Historical averages put Canada’s fall chum average similar to Puget Sound, at around one million fish.
The poor returns in Washington and Canada in combination with Alaska’s shortfall prompted Tradex to advise buyers to look for replacement species, predicting chums would be unavailable at some point before the 2021 season.
“Bright skin chums are extremely short right now. Good meat color chums are limited as most landings have been producing dark pales,” Tradex analyst Kyla Ganton on the company’s weekly 3-Minute Market Insight program.
Babich was hopeful the Puget Sound run would return in the coming years, with Pacific Ocean water temperatures returning closer to historical averages and strong escapement in the region.
“The blob affected the food out there, but we have good escapement going on in all the natural systems throughout the South Sound and Northern Sound,” he said. “It was a tough one, but we have hope for the future.”
Photo courtesy of The Old Major/Shutterstock
