Alaska's salmon collapse and the trawler fight

After testimony from more than 170 people, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council recommended a first-ever cap on Western Alaska chum bycatch. The council is the 11-member federal body that manages fishing from 3 to 200 miles off Alaska. For chinook, NOAA's fisheries service has limited the Bering Sea pollock fleet's bycatch since 2011, under a rule called Amendment 91. The chum cap is 45,000 fish, counted inside a summer corridor north of Unimak Pass where most of those fish are taken. Chum caught there count toward the cap from June 10 to August 31, a migration window the council's notice calls critical for Western Alaska chum. Each sector, a group of vessels within the fleet, has its own cap, and one that reaches it is shut out of the corridor. The notice says that area covers most of the fishing grounds of the pollock catcher vessels, boats that deliver their catch to a processing plant. The vote relies on a census that already exists. Every salmon in the pollock catch is counted under 100% observer coverage, with two observers on each catcher-processor and cameras below deck. Fin clips flow to a Dutch Harbor genetics lab, whose weekly results say which rivers the week's bycatch came from. An Alaska legislator on the House Fisheries Committee, writing in the Anchorage Daily News, put the vote at 8 to 3. The same account said implementation was not expected before 2028 and described a room where almost nobody was happy. In that telling, Yukon and Kuskokwim tribes called the cap too little and too late. One member voted no because she thought 45,000 was too high. The council's notice credits the fleet's voluntary avoidance plans with cutting chum bycatch nearly 95% over the four years before the February 2026 vote. The action would make those plans mandatory.