Yukon River King Salmon Fishery Curtailed

State and federal fisheries managers are cutting subsistence fishing time on Alaska's Yukon River, a sign that this year's king salmon run could be one of the worst on record.

"This is really a serious situation," Russ Holder, a fisheries biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, told the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner on Monday. "If the run does not significantly improve, folks upriver are going to have difficulty reaching 50 percent of their subsistence harvest goals this year for chinook salmon."

Yesterday, subsistence fishing time on the Yukon, Alaska's longest river, was cut in half, and fishermen in the lower river are also restricted to a smaller net size so they catch summer chum salmon, not chinook. Yukon kings are coveted by chefs and retailers for their pronounced, buttery, rich flavor.

As of June 22, the sonar count at Pilot Station was just 30,200 king salmon, Yukon area manager Steve Hayes of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game told the newspaper. The average sonar count for that date is about 63,000, he said.

At this point, biologists are projecting a run of fewer than 100,000 kings at Pilot Station. The minimum number required for escapement purposes - in both Alaska and Canada - and subsistence harvest is 130,000, he said.

The Yukon run usually consists of three to four pulses of kings, with the first two typically making up the bulk of the run, said Hayes. The fact that the first pulse of salmon, detected June 14 to 17, resulted in only about 10,000 fish passing the Pilot Station sonar counter is not a good sign, he explains.

"We would have liked to see 30,000 or 40,000 fish," said Hayes.

"To have four or five days of poor entry between pulses is really abnormal," added Holder. "Usually it's just a day or two, and then we see another pulse coming in."

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