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The Fisherman
Built by people who actually catch the fish.
Forty-five days a summer. Decades of seasons. The fishery you've probably never heard of, run by the families who've worked it for generations.
The Season
Forty-five days that decide the year.
Commercial salmon fishing in Bristol Bay runs from mid-June to late July. That's it. Roughly forty-five days each summer when the fleet works the run, often around the clock, often for weeks straight, often through weather that would keep most boats tied to the dock. The rest of the year is preparation, repair, and waiting for the next one.
Nick runs a drift gillnet boat through one of the five district zones the state divides the bay into. Drift gillnetting is exactly what it sounds like: a net hung from the boat, drifting with the current, catching fish as they swim toward the rivers to spawn. The fishery has been managed this way for decades. The state biologists call openings and closings in real time based on how many fish are escaping upstream to spawn. If the river hasn't hit its escapement number, the net stays on the deck.
That's why the Bristol Bay fishery still works. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game manages the run in real time, making sure enough salmon return upriver to spawn and create future generations. When fewer fish are moving through, fishing is limited. When the run is strong, the fleet can fish around the clock because enough salmon are still making it upriver. Nick has worked inside this system for thirty-seven seasons and has never missed one.
The Fleet
Roughly twelve hundred captains. One bay.
Bristol Bay is one of the most carefully managed salmon fisheries in the world, and also one of the most concentrated. There are 1,862 drift gillnet permits and 964 setnet permits, capped by law since 1975. Permits are sold, inherited, and passed down, which means many of today’s fishermen are second, third, or fourth generation. Some have been working the same waters since they were kids.
The boats are mostly 32 feet, the maximum length allowed by the state, and the fleet is tight enough that captains know each other by sight. It is also a derby style fishery. When the Alaska Department of Fish and Game opens a district, the fleet has a short window to fish, and everyone is competing to catch salmon while the opportunity is there. Then the fishery closes again so managers can track the run and make sure enough salmon are moving upriver to spawn.
The work is simple to describe and hard to do: set the net, drift, pick the fish, unload, and do it again. Most of the harvest comes from drift gillnet boats working offshore, with the rest coming from setnetters anchored along the beaches. It is physical, fast moving, and deeply local.
That system is part of why Bristol Bay still works. The fishery is certified sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council and has been recertified through each review cycle since first earning certification in 2000.
Things Worth Knowing
Bristol Bay, by the numbers.
Bristol Bay produces close to half of all the wild sockeye salmon caught in the world. In a single summer.
The 2025 run was 56.7 million fish. The fishery has cleared 50 million sockeye eleven years in a row. The 20-year average is 48.7 million.
There are no hatcheries. Every sockeye that returns to Bristol Bay is wild, born in the rivers, raised in the lakes, grown in the open Pacific, and returning to the same waters its ancestors spawned in. The fishery operates without a single fish farm.
The bay is roughly the size of Indiana: 40,000 square miles of watershed. No roads connect most of the major rivers to the rest of Alaska. To get to work, the fleet flies or boats in.
Sockeye get their deep red color from their diet: krill and plankton in the cold Pacific. The color isn't added. It's what wild salmon actually look like.
A drift permit changed hands for about $195,000 in 2021, the price the fishery commands when the run is healthy. The same permit cost $66 in 1975 when the system started.
The Chain
Every bag starts here.
Every bag of Bristol Bay Bites starts on Nick's boat or a boat he knows by name. The fish goes from the net to the processor in Bristol Bay, then to a USDA-inspected facility in the United States where it's freeze-dried. Short chain. No middlemen. No question about who caught the salmon, or where, or how.
Most pet treat brands can't tell you any of that. We can tell you all of it.
