KMXT 100.1 FM Public Radio in Kodiak, Alaska
As we mentioned last week on KMXT news, the Kodiak salmon season has been winding down since the pink salmon peak on August 10th. Before the season started, Fish and Game management biologist James Jackson predicted the runs to be about average, and he was spot on.
"You know, averages are one of those funny things," he said. "Sockeye catch is a little below average. Pink catch is right between the five and 10 year average. Chum catch is about average; coho is well below average, and chinook are about normal."
He said there was a pretty good pink run to the west side this year, and was a little more than what was expected.
A big slug of nearly 22, 000 sockeye salmon was harvested on Sunday, pushing the red salmon season catch over the 2-million mark. The pink salmon catch was under 100,000 two days in a row over the weekend, bringing the humpy harvest to 16.2-million for the season. The five-species total is 19,225,835 through Sunday.
— (Salmon 2 29 sec "Probably a lot of that had to do with some really good runs to Karluk and Ayakulik and Sturgeon. In general, the west side did pretty good. They’ve been hurting over there the last four or five years because they’ve been hit with poor sockeye returns to Karluk, and they also had three of the last four years had poor pink runs. So this year, so far, we’ve had decent returns to Karluk for sockeye and the pink run’s been pretty good so there’s been some extended fishing time, which has made for some happy people over there.")
Jackson said salmon escapement up the rivers to spawn has also been good this year:
— (Salmon 3 20 sec "Right now for sockeye we’re looking great almost everywhere – except there’s a few places, maybe Upper Station looks a little light. But for sockeye we’re looking great. Pink salmon we got excellent escapement. Right now we’re probably tracking close to 5-million pinks are going to escape the island, which is good escapement. Which we’ll put those in the bank for 2014.")
He added that king salmon in the Kodiak Management Area surpassed the lower end of the desired escapement range, unlike most other chinook drainages in the state.
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