What We're Seeing on the Water: The 2026 Bristol Bay Sockeye Run

Every season on Bristol Bay is its own story. After ten straight years of exceptionally big runs, 2026 is shaping up to be a different kind of year.

Here's what our founder, Captain Steve Kurian, is seeing from the boat.

A cold winter set the tone.

The winter of 2025–26 was extremely cold in the Bering Sea. We started the season with Bristol Bay running about 3 degrees colder than average. Water temperature matters more than most people realize — it steers where and when the salmon move. This year, the fish appear to have found a warmer channel to travel through, showing up strong at certain stations.

An early, compressed run.

That cold water is pushing run timing a few days ahead of normal, and the run looks compressed with the fish bunched up and coming through in a shorter window. A compressed run is a double-edged thing. It means a shorter migration, which gives us less time on the water to harvest, and it tends to send more fish up the rivers than managers are aiming for.

Why "more fish up the river" isn't automatically good — the escapement balancing act.

"Escapement" is the number of salmon that escape the fishery to swim upriver and spawn. It's a fine line. You want enough fish upriver to reproduce, but you don't want too many. When a river gets overloaded, the young fish hatch into lakes that have been stripped of food, and fewer of them survive to become "smolt" (the juveniles that head out to sea). Over the last decade, several Bristol Bay rivers have actually been over-escaped, and one of the things we may be seeing now, a run coming in under forecast, it’s the natural echo of that.

Conservative management, and an honest trade-off.

Because the run is under forecast and the window is tight, the biologists managing the bay have gotten more conservative this year, making sure enough fish reach the spawning grounds to keep this the world's greatest salmon fishery for the long haul. On the Nushagak, protecting the king salmon has meant tightening the sockeye fishery right alongside them since nets don’t distinguish what they catch.

For a fisherman, that's a real trade-off, honestly felt: it's the right call for the future of the run, even when it costs harvest opportunity today. But we will take the long and sustainable view every time.

This is what a wild fishery is.

At the end of the day, Bristol Bay sockeye is a truly wild population — not farmed, not fed, not engineered. And every wild population has its peaks and valleys. You roll with the punches: harvest lighter in the lean years, harvest more in the big ones, and trust the cycle. 

What it means for you.

We expect sockeye to be in shorter supply this year. If Bristol Bay sockeye is part of how you feed your family, this is the year to reserve your share early rather than count on it being there later in the season.

We'll keep you posted from the water and when our ordering opens next month.

Thank you for caring where your fish comes from — it's the whole reason we do this.