The lead-up to Fourth of July proved a bounty for gillnetters in Lynn Canal, with 240 boats each averaging more than 1,600 chum or 7.4 tons of hatchery dog salmon during the season’s third opening.
“The harvest was crazy. It was a huge week,” said Randy Bachman, commercial fisheries biologist for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game in Haines. Lynn Canal catches accounted for nearly 70 percent of all drift-gillnet caught salmon in…