Featured SalmonState Column
A Tale of Two Salmon
Bristol Bay’s sockeye run began breaking records in 2018. The same year, Chignik, which is on the other side of the Alaska Peninsula, failed to meet its minimum escapements for the first time in recent memory. Now, Chignik’s residents and fishermen are working to address and bring attention to these unprecedented declines, and to save their way of life.
Connecting people to salmon during COVID-19
Some fast food restaurants in the Lower 48 have stopped serving hamburgers. Meatpacking plants have shut down. Grocery stores are frequently sold out of flour and rice. But Americans can buy Alaskan seafood directly from the fishermen who caught it — and, in increasing numbers, that’s what they’re doing.
Fishermen catch 2 billionth sockeye salmon in Bristol Bay this year
In 2019, during the fishery’s 2nd largest harvest on record, Bristol Bay commercial fishermen hit another historic number: the 2 billionth sockeye salmon caught by commercial fishermen since record-keeping began in the late 1800s.
“Surfing the salmon wave” in Bristol Bay
By mid-August Bristol Bay’s river systems are choked with fish, but early July, when most of the bay’s sockeye salmon are fighting their way in from the sea, is another story. What’s a bear — or a grayling, trout or gull — to do?
The short answer is: start surfing.
Upriver during a record year at Bristol Bay
As fishermen leave Dillingham and canneries shut down, the Wood River system in the Bristol Bay watershed brims with sockeye salmon.
The second week of August, I got to spend several days upriver. Sockeye schooled at the mouths of small streams off the lake system, their fins cutting through the water. They choked ankle to knee-deep streams more narrow than the width of your dining room table. Females dug redds in the same part of the streams they were born in, fighting off both other females and undesirable males. The bodies of those who arrived before them littered the banks, and as later fish dug redds, unearthed eggs floated downstream, snapped up by opportunistic rainbow trout and arctic char.
Casting for fish, and guides, in Bristol Bay
Triston Chaney, a 19-year-old college student raised in Dillingham, knew before this year that he loved fly fishing. What he didn’t know is that he’d love helping other people catch fish, too.
With the help of the Bristol Bay Fly Fishing & Guide Academy, he’ll soon start a job doing just that.