This year’s surprisingly low pink salmon harvest is not expected to significantly affect raw fish tax funds to the Haines Borough.

“No place did well in pink salmon,” said Tom Sunderland, vice president of marketing with Ocean Beauty Seafoods. He said it was a surprise that the numbers came in under the forecast, but no one knows why the figures are down. Mike Forbush, Ocean Beauty’s southeast regional manager, said the pink salmon harvest fell almost a third under the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s predictions. The department predicted the humpy harvest numbers would reach 90 million statewide in 2016, but only 36 million pink salmon were caught.

Forbush said no one has a full understanding of why the pink salmon harvest cycles year to year because not much research is done on salmon in the open ocean. He said biologists don’t know how water temperature, predators or other factors affect the number of fish that come back up river.

Forbush, based at the cannery at Excursion Inlet, said it was very apparent there that it has been a low year for pinks. “We fly the fishing grounds almost daily and we noticed that the pinks were down especially at the north end,” Forbush said.

Excursion Inlet cannery processes 25 million pounds of pinks and 7 million pounds of chum in an average year, including chum from Douglas Island Pink and Chum hatchery near Juneau.

Forbush said the cannery processed about the same amounts of DIPAC chum in 2015 and 2016. Consequently, the chum figures will cushion the impact of the low pink salmon numbers on the raw fish tax money that comes to the Haines Borough, Forbush said.

Author