While much of Alaska posted low salmon runs in 2018, sockeye flooded Bristol Bay again for a third straight year of historic runs.
Most recent counts put the total run at more than 61 million sockeye for the 2018 season, which was 10 million over the preseason forecast and added up to the second-largest run in the fishery’s recorded history. Numbers from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G) reported a total catch of 40.3 million sockeye, not far behind the fishery’s largest-ever catch of 44.3 million fish in 1995.
Couple that with relatively high prices, and the Bristol Bay sockeye fishery is looking at one of its most lucrative seasons ever.
“It was a banner year for us. It was non-stop fishing and the price looks good, and I think we’ll get good price adjustments since the market is looking strong," Tyone Raymond, skipper of the F/V Mr. Fox, told SeafoodSource.
Major processors like Trident Seafoods and Ocean Beauty Seafoods have confirmed a base price of USD 1.25 (EUR 1.08) per pound, a bump of about USD 0.25 (EUR 0.22) a pound from last season’s original base price, and up from just USD 0.50 (EUR 0.43) in 2015. Smaller processors like Leader Creek Fisheries and Silver Bay Seafoods set their base price according to the majors, and buyers pay quality incentives for chilled, floating, and bled fish, which has some speculating that the ex-vessel price may approach USD 2.00 (EUR 1.72) per pound.
Meanwhile, the Pike Place Fish Market in Seattle, Washington, U.S.A. was selling sockeye at USD 17.99 (EUR 15.51), and The Cordova Times reported that Costco in Anchorage, Alaska had sockeye fillets at USD 9.99 (EUR 8.61) a pound.
But it wasn’t all good news from Bristol Bay. A large part of the run was in the Nushagak District this season, where fishermen scooped up well over half the catch, with a total harvest of over nearly 24 million fish. That meant competitive, sometimes treacherous grounds in the Nushagak, with nearly 800 out of the fleet's total 1,200 boats crowding into the district at one time. And Raymond said many of the fish were small, a concerning trend for the 40-year Bristol Bay veteran.
“With the Nushagak run, as strong as it was, sometimes those numbers are a little misleading. An incredible number of those were tiny, tiny fish,” said Raymond, who sells to Leader Creek Fisheries. "This seems to be a trend, and there’s not a great market for those fish.”
Across the Bristol Bay in the east side districts, warm waters made for distressingly late runs. The Naknek and Ugashik districts eventually made their preseason forecasts, but the Egegik district posted just a 4.9 million-fish harvest on a 6.5 million total run, nearly three million fish shy of the forecast, with one year class in particular failing to run back up the Egegik River.
Tim Sands, an area management biologist for the ADF&G in Bristol Bay, told the local National Public Radio satellite KDLG that biologists were running genetics to see if the missing Egegik fish had been caught in other districts or had failed to return to Bristol Bay altogether.
