The summer commercial salmon season is winding down in Kodiak. Between high diesel prices and late salmon returns, this year’s season had plenty of twists. KMXT’s Katherine Irving broke it all down with Kodiak commercial salmon fisherman Darren Platt on Sep. 1.
The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Katherine Irving, KMXT: How has the season been so far?
Darren Platt: It's been a pretty decent season here, I'd say. More fish than we expected, and higher prices than anybody thought we'd get in our lifetimes.
KMXT: And did you know that prices were going to be high at the beginning of the season, or was that a surprise to you?
Platt: We knew they were going to be high, but not where they are now. There's people that always say, "Oh, we're going to get this or that," every year and you just wait till they post a price. And this year, when they posted it, everybody was shocked.
KMXT: And were the prices high for all species?
Platt: Every species had high prices this year. The highest I've seen in my career, I believe. Pinks right now we're getting 70 cents [a pound]. In 2023, we were getting 18 cents a pound.
KMXT: Do you have any idea of why that might be the case?
Platt: I don't really have my nose to that grindstone. But my understanding is that global production is low, statewide production is definitely low. Last year there wasn't nearly as much fish as they anticipated globally, so there's a lot of demand. And then I have been told that the weak dollar is helping us on export markets.
KMXT: With the concern at the beginning of the season about the fuel prices, did that end up affecting business the way that you thought it would?
Platt: I think the higher fish prices have more than made up for the high fuel prices. The fuel prices definitely hurt, we're probably going to have one of the biggest fuel bills I've ever seen, but I made up for that with the fish.
KMXT: From what I understood, it seemed like the sockeye run wasn't the best, but the pinks were really strong. So, how were those seasons for you? You said you got more fish than you thought.
Platt: We didn't get a whole lot of sockeye, and so some of the sockeye runs were weaker. But really, we have some complications in management that kept us from catching a lot of fish that would otherwise be available down in Ayakulik, which is typically the second largest, but in some years the largest sockeye run in Kodiak. They have a problem with king salmon conservation, so even though there was an abundance of sockeye salmon, our fleet wasn't allowed to fish down there for a lot of time that we normally would. And so there's hundreds of thousands of fish worth millions of dollars that we didn't get to harvest.
KMXT: And then for the pinks, it seemed like the estimates were that there weren't going to be that many pinks this year. But suddenly we got this huge amount of pinks. So was that surprising to anyone?
Platt: I think so, just because of the way the rest of the state looked initially. Particularly if you look at Prince William Sound, it was a dire situation for pink salmon, and the Sound ended up getting almost no pink salmon back. And so we were looking at that and seeing early returns as pretty poor here in Kodiak, and were bracing for a disastrous season. We were projected to harvest around 11 million pinks, I think, and we got close to 13 million. So we didn't blow past initial expectations, but it was more than people expected, especially given early season sentiment and statewide indicators.
KMXT: Is it silver season that's up next?
Platt: Yeah, there's still some silver fishing. There’s still some sockeye fishing to do. The Karluk late run has not shown up as strong as we hoped, but there's a little bit of fish there. There's sockeye down in Alitak, and then yeah, there's just silver fishing kind of all over the island. But that's a small fishery. The number of silvers we get really isn't enough to sustain the whole fleet. So you have a lot of guys that are calling it quits now.
I guess another thing to mention though, is that we had very low participation rates this year. A couple weeks ago it was just 105 boats, and we used to have 380 boats fishing in Kodiak, so we have a fleet that's just heavily eroded over time. And hopefully these better prices and consistent runs will rejuvenate and restore our fleet a little more.
