The harvest is so great this year that the government has agreed to buy the surplus to protect fishers from depressed prices and wasted catch. That improvement came to a species that is among the most challenging to manage because its life journey crosses so many political and user-group boundaries. The Fish and Game Department determines how many salmon must be allowed to reach the spawning grounds on each river to maintain the stock. It's more complicated than it sounds. The agency uses sonar and human counters to estimate the number of fish passing through a river's mouth.
Commercial boats wait in the bays for the signal for an ''opening'' to start fishing.
If there is a big enough surplus, the unusual tradition of ''personal-use days'' kicks in. Then city residents are allowed to catch fish for a day or more using almost any gear they want, from gill nets to a hook and line. Subsistence users also are allocated a percentage of the fish. Finally, sport fishers get their share, and unlike rainbow fishers, salmon anglers almost always want to bring fish home. It constructed a mesh dam at a choke point on the Deshka so it could get an accurate count of how many king salmon made it upriver.