fish weir

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game has restricted fishing within 500 yards of the McLees Lake river mouth July 1-9.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game was unable to get funding to count fish and collect data this summer at Unalaska’s McLees Lake, where the community harvests a large majority of its subsistence sockeye salmon.

Fisheries technicians wrapped up the 2023 season at Unalaska's McLees Lake weir last week, reporting a total escapement of 26,945 sockeye salmon — the weir's highest count since 2016.

New data from drone surveys flown over Unalaska’s three road-system lakes last summer show low sockeye salmon counts. The counts total less than half of what they were in summer of 2020, according to data released in April by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. But Fish and Game biologist Tyler Lawson said the one-year drop isn’t too concerning. Escapement numbers often fluctuate and there’s more room for error in aerial surveys, he said. “We call them a ‘high error survey,’ which kind of sounds bad, but it's just because in comparison to the weir — which is a very precise tool — there's variability whenever you're up in the air, looking down and trying to count salmon,” he said. While the technology is still relatively new when it comes to counting salmon in Unalaska, Lawson said he’s hopeful that drones will play a key role in helping assess broader trends among salmon stocks in the region.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game has been collecting data on the salmon runs at McLees Lake at Cape Wislow for nearly two decades.While Fish and…

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This summer, Unalaska collected information on the sockeye salmon run for McLees Lake at Cape Wislow. The data is used to gauge the strength of the run…