It’s almost summer in Bristol Bay, and that means hundreds of commercial fishers are gearing up for another salmon season.
This season, the 2025 sockeye salmon forecast for all of Bristol Bay calls for a total run of 49.8 million fish. That's just above the 20-year average of 48.2 million fish.
In the Nushagak and Togiak Districts, experts are expecting strong runs and an average fish size above that of last year.
KDLG spoke to Tim Sands, the area management biologist for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game in Dillingham. Sands discussed this year’s forecast for the Nushagak and Togiak Districts, what’s driving the numbers, and potential curveballs this season.
Sands: My name is Tim Sands. I am the area management biologist for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game commercial fisheries here in Dillingham and I manage the west side of Bristol Bay.
Sutherland: We're coming into the 2025 fishing season. Can you outline the 2025 forecast?
Sands: So I'll just speak to Nushagak and Togiak because I'm the West Side guy. For Nushagak District, we have a forecast of 20.36 million inshore run. So some of the fish are caught in other places. So we're expecting just over 20 million, hopefully, to show up in Nushagak Bay, to be harvested or escape. And we're expecting to catch about 15 million of those fish.
For the Nushagak District, a 20 million run, up until 2017 it was impossible to even imagine because before that, our biggest run was 15 million. And now we've had several. We've had a couple over 30, and several in the 20s. But that's only very recently that that's happened, and a lot of it has to do with the Nushagak River itself producing a lot more fish than it ever produced, and the Wood being very steady and solid. So I think we're very fortunate to have these huge runs here.
And for Togiak– Togiak is a much smaller system– 980,000 fish is what we're expecting to show up there inshore. And that's a really strong run for Togiak. If it comes in as forecast, it'll be, it won't be a record, but it'll be probably top 10-ish runs.
Sutherland: So last year, across the systems, there was a really large return of 1.2’s. How are you forecasting this year to compare to last year?
Sands: So last year, because the 2019 year was so hot and dry and we saw in 2023 virtually no two ocean fish, then in 2024 the three ocean fish were much lower than expected. So we blame everything on 2019 and the hot, dry summer of 2019 for the poor returns of the fish in those two age classes in those two years.
So in 2024, we had 80% two ocean fish, pretty much bay wide. 80% two ocean and 20% three ocean. This year, for the Nushagak District, is 33% 1.2’s and 64% 1.3’s.
There are going to be a few other, you know, 2.3’s or 2.2’s or whatever. But for the Nushagak, the vast majority of the fish are either 1.2’s or 1.3’s. So I just broke it down into its 33% 1.2’s, 64% 1.3’s, and the missing 3% is the other fish.
Sutherland: Last year, we also saw, because there were so many 1.2’s, a really small fish. Do you have a sense of how much bigger the 1.3’s will be?
Sands: The total run, the bay-wide run, I think somebody pinned this down. I think we said 5.4 pound average for all fish, not by age class. Last year it was 4.53 pounds average for sockeye in Bristol Bay.
So if it's 5.4 this year, it's 9/10th’s of a pound larger. So that's a guess, but it all depends on if it actually comes in at the 60:30 ratio and what the other bays do and also if there's more 2.2’s or less 2.2’s or whatever.
Sutherland: So when can people expect this start date for the fishing season to be?
Sands: For the Nushagak District we have the King Salmon Stock of Concern Plan. So we have three different possible triggers that will allow us to start fishing. We have to project 635,000 sockeye salmon past the sonar, or 763 sockeye salmon past Wood River tower. Either one of those will allow us to fish. And if neither of those happen by June 28 at 9 a.m. then we can start fishing after that.
Sutherland: Do you have a sense whether or not those will happen before June 28?
Sands: My best guess is somewhere around the 26th of June.
In 2023 we hit the triggers on the 25th. In 2024 we hit it on the 26th. The triggers are based on percentages of the forecast. So in theory, we should meet the same percentage of the forecast around the same time each year. But obviously a storm here, or dry weather there, or something else can make a difference in how the fish decide to move.
Sutherland: Do you expect anything last-minute to come up with the King Plan triggers?
Sands: I don't expect it to. I'm not saying it's impossible, but I hope it doesn't. We tried really hard to communicate with our chain of command and nobody has indicated to me that there'd be anything different than what we did last year.
The other part of the triggers that we have for the King Plan are the OEG. So our escapement goals kind of conflict. We want to get a minimum king salmon escapement, but we also want to control socket salmon escapement below a certain level. And so to kind of reduce that conflict, the board also put in these optimum escapement goals that are higher than our normal escapement goals. And so for the Wood River, the upper end of our escapement goal range is now 3 million. And for the Nushagak River, it's two and a half million. And again, that just tells me as the manager that I shouldn't focus that much on controlling the escapement of the Wood River to 1.8 million where it would normally be. Allow more escapement in the Wood to allow more king salmon escapement in the Nushagak. And same thing with the Nushagak escapement. So it's trying to balance that kind of conflict between those two goals.
Sutherland: For the Wood River Special Harvest Area, when will that open?
Sands: So the Wood River Special Harvest Area opens once we hit 1.1 million sockeye salmon escapement past the Wood River tower, and we can project 1.4 million. Now, because we're starting off the season letting over 700,000 fish go up the Wood River before we even start fishing, it's very likely that we will hit that 1.1 million number pretty quickly after we start fishing. In the last two seasons, it's been within two or three days that we started fishing in the district, and then we opened up the Wood River.
Sutherland: How does the projected run size this year compare to last year and past years?
Sands: Last year, going into the season, the forecast for the Nushagak District was around 12 million and we ended up at 19 million. So we definitely had more fish than was forecast. Overall, our forecasts have tended to be under what actually showed up, especially for the last 10 years or so.
Stacy did the forecast. She kind of feels like it's going to be closer this year but there's so many different things that can make that change. Really anything within 20% is really good. And I don't know where we've been but we feel good about our forecasts.
And there's always going to be unforeseen things. Even with the missing 1.3’s from 2019 we still came in above forecast, at least for the Nushagak.
Sutherland: What's the wild card?
Sands: We had this really big escapement in the Nushagak River in 2021, and that's the parent year for the 1.2s. So we had 4.5 million escapement in the Nushagak River, which is the biggest escape we've ever seen. We don't know what kind of productivity we're going to get off that. And also we know that that was likely undercounted because the sonar just is not designed to count that volume of fish. So how much undercounted? We don't know. And what that means for the forecast? We don't know. So that's my wild card, the uncertainty about our 1.2’s coming back to the Nushagak.
Sutherland: How are you feeling going into the 2025 season about the forecasted run?
Sands: You know, I'm always excited this time of year. I'm always very optimistic, and, yeah, very positive. So I'm excited. It's going to be interesting. Every year is different. There's always new little curve balls that come your way.
Stacy made the forecast. We go over the forecast. I was like, “but we could have more fish because of this, or more fish because of that.” She's like, “No, this is what the numbers say.” So I'm always thinking that there's going to be a little more fish than what's on paper. Sometimes that's the case. Hopefully it'll be the case this year.
