Chilkat River king salmon are no longer considered an official “stock of management concern” by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, but opinions are mixed on what actions are needed to ensure they keep coming back year to year.
Harvests have been restricted for a decade because of low numbers of salmon making it upriver to spawn.
The state Board of Fisheries in 2018 decided Chilkat River kings were a stock of management concern after several years of low returns.
That designation typically results in harvest restrictions to protect the fish. For Chilkat kings, sport, commercial and subsistence fisheries faced conservative management since before the designation was made, and that won’t immediately change now that it has been lifted. “We’ve only been able to achieve the escapement goal of 1,750 king salmon under really restrictive management actions,” Haines sportfish biologist Alex Tugaw said.
The restrictions for all three user groups included prohibiting the retention of kings in the sport fishery, and reducing fishing times, areas and/or gear types for subsistence and commercial fisheries.
The Chilkat king salmon escapement goal is the number of kings that Fish and Game says need to return to spawn each year to maintain the population. The range for Chilkat kings is 1,750 to 3,500 large spawners.
This fall, the state Board of Fisheries agreed to “delist” the Chilkat stock of kings at a work session in Anchorage because the fish met that 1,750 threshold in five of the past six years.
Fish and Game uses several tools to estimate the number of large kings that return to the Chilkat each year to spawn, but does not directly count each spawner. The methods include catching kings with tangle nets in the lower Chilkat River in June and July, and using tangle nets, dipnets and collecting carcasses on the spawning grounds in August and September.
Captured fish are returned to the river alive after department staff collects data and checks for the coded-wire tags used to mark the fish as juveniles, and uses the information about returning adults compared to the juveniles to help estimate the run. Prior to 2024, Fish and Game also used fish wheels to help capture and tag fish as part of the mark-recapture experiment.
Fish and Game research biologist Brian Elliott wrote in an email that Fish and Game has used the mark-recapture study as the primary way to estimate Chilkat king abundance for 34 years.
Haines gillnetter Stuart DeWitt, a commercial fisherman since 1997, said he was glad the numbers had improved, and said he thought the numbers of returning king salmon probably justified delisting it in 2022, although he understood the effort to err on the side of caution.
According to the 2022 Northern Southeast Alaska Chinook Salmon Stock Status and Action Plan, the board “may” remove the stock of concern designation after the Chilkat kings met or exceeded the 1,750 spawner threshold in four of six consecutive years, or three consecutive years.
“I’m glad that it’s delisted,” he said. “That’s just a good sign.”
DeWitt said the king decline could be a cyclical issue related to ocean survival, with stocks now trending upward again.
Winter king fishers in Upper Lynn Canal have seen bigger fish this year than in the recent past, which DeWitt said was another positive sign.
But Marvin Willard Jr. said even if numbers have gone up a bit, the king run is nothing like it used to be. Willard is Lingít, from the Kaagawantaan clan. He grew up gillnetting with his grandfather in the 1960s and ’70s, and fished all over Chilkat and Chilkoot inlets and down to Excursion Inlet, including with a rod. In about 1979 or 1980, he said he caught a 44-pound, 14-ounce king from a boat near Cannery Point at Letnikof Cove in Chilkat Inlet. He also fished in the Chilkat River growing up — as did a larger number of folks from Klukwan back then, he said.
“In the river, we used to catch huge king salmon,” he said.
Last year, Willard said he was one of just a few subsistence fishermen out fishing the Chilkat River.
“(I) caught 18 kings live and let them all go,” he said. “I don’t think there’s enough king salmon. It would have been nice to actually enjoy king salmon, but to me I just feel like it’s not worth it. I’d rather be part of the solution than the problem,” and added that he doesn’t think subsistence harvests are the reason kings aren’t returning.
“Our oceans are now starving,” he said. The low king returns are a larger ecosystem issue with several interrelated causes, tied to hatcheries, predation, food supply, harvesting what the state considers the “maximum sustained yield” in the herring fishery, which are food for kings and other marine life, and much more, he said.
“It’s my opinion: I don’t believe the state cares much about the recovery of fish,” he said. “They think the hatchery fish are going to solve this problem of overfishing.”
Willard said it’s not just the salmon numbers that are down. He said too many herring are caught, which should feed the salmon. There are fewer eagles in the Chilkat Valley, which feed on those missing fish. And bears have been exhibiting different behavior, staying out later looking for food. “There’s lots of things going on around here,” he said.
Fish and Game data also shows a much larger population of Chilkat kings in the past.
According to Fish and Game’s delisting memo, more than 3,500 Chilkat kings returned each year to spawn from 1991 to 2006.
Since 2007, the stock has only exceeded the spawner goal once, and the Chilkat kings failed to meet the lower end of the goal in 2007, 2012-2014 and 2016-2018.
After giving Chilkat kings the stock-of-concern designation in 2018, the state fish board also approved a set of more restrictive management actions intended to help restore the salmon population, although Fish and Game had already limited fishing out of concern for the stock.
Those restrictions were in place in the Upper Lynn Canal, and also impacted other Southeast Alaska fisheries where Chilkat kings are caught.
For the commercial fishery, Haines area management biologist Nicole Zeiser said in an email about the delisting that without conservative management measures, the returning kings could be harvested instead of returning upriver to spawn, potentially putting them back in stock of concern status in a few years.
“Prior to 2018, harvest rates of Chilkat River Chinook salmon (were) as high as 40 percent and since 2018, harvest rates are at an all-time low of around 5 percent,” she wrote. “Until we see a substantial rebound in these stocks, conservative management is necessary to continue meeting escapement goals. Restrictions in the District 15 gillnet fishery can be lifted once a majority of the run is in river.”
The likely commercial restrictions include reducing time and area, night closures and gear restrictions, she said.
If any restrictions are lifted, DeWitt said he’d like to see the gillnetters’ fishing area increased, even for just a day at a time while Fish and Game sees how it affects the king catch.
Management restrictions intended to protect kings returning to the Taku and King Salmon rivers (which remain stocks of concern) will also help protect Chilkat kings, given the stocks’ close proximity, partial overlap in run timing, and use of the same migration corridors, Zeiser said.
Those restrictions include reductions in fishing time and area, gear stipulations for the drift gillnet fishery and prohibition of retention in the troll and seine fisheries, and delayed timing for the Juneau-area personal use fisheries, she wrote.
Haines-area subsistence fisheries will also see another season of conservative management in 2025.
“This includes reducing time and area in the Chilkat Inlet and Chilkat River subsistence fisheries and recommending all live Chinook salmon be immediately released,” she said.
If any restrictions are lifted, the subsistence fishery would be the first priority for allowing additional opportunity, Zeiser said.
On the sportfishing side, Tugaw said king retention is still prohibited after April 1 this year, as it has been for the past decade.
“If you look at the harvest averages over the last 10 years, when there was still a king salmon fishery up there, we would be missing the lower end of that goal based on the escapement we’re seeing,” Tugaw said. “To me, that means we’re meeting that escapement because of these restrictive management actions.”
The 2025 forecast from Fish and Game estimates that 3,000 kings will return to the Chilkat to spawn this year.
If the run comes in larger than expected, the restrictions could be loosened, he said.
DeWitt, who also enjoys sportfishing, said he hopes that comes to pass.
“I hope we get a sport fishery, a small resident sport fishery,” he said. “It’s my favorite past-time, to be honest, in the spring. It would be cool if we got a good enough run.”
Tugaw said it’s taken efforts by all users to conserve the fish in recent years, including sport fishers, traditional harvesters, the charter sportfishing industry, and commercial fishers. He said he was “thankful for a lot of the residents being supportive of doing what needs to be done to keep the fish sustainable and coming back.”
Willard said the restrictions aren’t enough.
“I think king salmon needs to be on the endangered species list,” he said. “When do you put it on the endangered species list, when they’re extinct or when there’s a few left? They’re not recovering,” he said.