Hello From The King Salmon Grounds!

Hello from the king salmon grounds! It’s what should be one of the biggest weeks of our season: the 2025 King Salmon Opener!

Every summer, we are granted one (maybe two) chances to head out and catch king salmon. The first — and most important — chance is July 1st. We catch the vast majority of our year’s king salmon in that first week of the month. Our fishing fleet (the Southeast Alaska Troll fleet) is granted a specific number of king salmon to harvest each summer, to be caught on a first come first served basis.

This king season, the general mood among the troll fleet has been low. Our fleet has been allocated 37,700 king salmon to harvest. This is a ~50% reduction compared to our the 2024 season! 37,000 may sound like a lot of fish — but the Southeast Alaska Troll Fleet is the largest in the state. We are made up of around 1,000 permits, spread over the 600+ mile panhandle of Southeast Alaska. Though not all permits are owned by active fisherman, there are still a lot of salmon trollers competing for a relatively small batch of fish.

King salmon management is weedy, complex, and like most things in this modern world: rife with conflicting science, political opinion, and interest groups. At its best, it’s a collaborative relationship between science and policy. But in any relationship… There’s winners and losers. This season, the Southeast Alaska Troll fleet were the losers.

The king salmon we’re out harvesting are known as “Treaty Kings”. King salmon are highly migratory — and since we harvest during their summer feast in the ocean, we’ll catch kings originating from not just Alaska, but also Canada, Washington, and Oregon. Therefore, King Salmon management is a multi-state, multi-nation collaboration, and even within each group (say, Alaska) there's multiple conflicting interests (i.e. sport fish groups, commercial fish groups, tribal groups).

All that to say: king salmon is by far our most volatile source of income. We LOVE catching them, are thrilled when we get to, but have learned to not depend on a robust king harvest to earn a living. It’s one piece of the making-a-living-harvesting-fish puzzle.

 

On to today: it’s the second day of our opener! Management originally anticipated a 3 - 4 day opener, so every “ding” of our email is an expectant closure announcement. No news yet, so we’ll keep at it and harvest what we can. The first day of fishing was just fine — not outstanding, but certainly not terrible! Today is slower, but still worthwhile.

After comparing the fish hold to our outstanding pre-orders, I’m going to pull King Salmon Boxes and Salmon Bundle Boxes from the website for now. As soon as I know how many kings we’ll have for this opener, I’ll reopen them! But we’d rather be safe than inadvertently over-sell.

And otherwise, nothing too exciting to report from F/V Fairweather! The boat’s running great, crew is working hard, and the weather has been kind. Pre-king salmon opener, we spent the last week in port offloading lingcod, gearing up for salmon season, and spending some great time together in Sitka-town as a family. We happened to be in town for some minus tides, and got take Monti on some great low-tide critter hunting adventures!

Those kinds of mellow days will be few and far between now that we've kicked off salmon season. But simultaneously, we are so thankful to be here catching salmon for you. Once kings are closed down, we'll transition to targeting Coho Salmon. Day two of salmon season down, about 88 left to go. 💛