We count every fish. Nobody counts the diesel.

Somewhere on the Nushagak right now there is a crew reading a sonar screen, counting fish as they pass.

Not modeling it from a conference room in January. Counting, on the river, every day. Alaska runs sonar and weirs and towers on rivers across this state, and the numbers come in daily, and when the count says a river isn't getting what it needs, the department closes the fishery. Sometimes within hours. It happens by emergency order, in season, while boats are sitting on the grounds waiting.

I want to be clear about how unusual that is. Most of the world manages a fishery by setting a quota in a conference room in January and then finding out in December how wrong it was. Alaska manages fish the way you'd manage anything you actually intended to keep. Escapement first, harvest second, and the harvest is whatever's left over after the river gets what it needs.

It is, genuinely, the best fisheries management on the planet. Written into the constitution. Sustained yield, in perpetuity.

So here's the question I can't get out of my head.

We built all that to protect the fish. What did we build to protect the ability to go catch them?

What this season actually looks like

Let me give you real numbers rather than a mood, because the mood going around isn't quite right.

Bristol Bay's Nushagak district was forecast at 18.39 million sockeye. As of July 31 it had produced about 9 million. Roughly half. Naknek-Kvichak came in close to its forecast, about 6.1 million against 6.2. Kodiak's sockeye, chum and pink were all running below average for the date. Southeast's pink harvest was described by the department as very poor and well below average for the time of year.

Statewide, the preseason forecast called for about 125.5 million fish against last year's 194.8 million. That's a forecast, not a result. Anyone quoting it as a finished number is telling you something that hasn't happened yet, and I'd rather you hear the honest version from me.

Now the part that complicates the story people expect:

Prices went up. Silver Bay set a Bristol Bay sockeye base around $1.60 a pound, about thirty cents better than last year and eighty cents better than 2024. Southeast sockeye ran near three dollars. The industry's total value came in around $541 million last year against $304 million the year before.

So it's fashionable right now to blame the processors, and I'm not going to. This year they paid more.

The thing nobody counts

If the fish are mixed and the price is better, why does everyone in this business look tired?

Because the fish and the price are the two things everybody watches, and neither of them is what's actually squeezing anyone. What's squeezing them is the stack of costs underneath, and almost every item in it is energy wearing a different hat.

Diesel for the boat. Diesel for the tender that comes to get your fish. Electricity for the plant that processes it. Electricity for the freezer that holds it, which never turns off, all year, whether there's a fish in it or not. Fuel for the plane that flies it out of a place with no road. Fuel for the truck that takes it to the port.

And here's the asymmetry that should bother you as much as it bothers me. We know, to the fish, what came up the Kvichak yesterday. We have a Board of Fisheries, in-season managers, emergency-order authority, and a hundred years of institutional knowledge about how to keep a run alive.

We have nothing remotely like that for the cost of running a freezer.

There's no in-season manager watching a processor's power bill. The single largest variable determining whether a permit holder can afford to fish next year isn't managed by anyone, and it never has been.

Why I'm telling you this now

Because it's the same problem as your heating bill, and I don't think most people have connected those two things yet.

This summer a utility went looking for gas to get Southcentral through winter, offered roughly double its contract price, and found no sellers. Not an expensive market. An empty one. Matanuska Electric's CEO says he can't guarantee reliable power this winter and may need rolling outages.

I grew up on the Kenai, which means I grew up around people whose whole year gets decided by two things: what the fish do, and what fuel costs. One of those is the ocean's business and always will be. The other one is ours, and we've never treated it that way.

We have the gas. It's mapped. It's been mapped for decades. What we never built was the connection between where it sits and where Alaskans live and work.

Fifty years of studies and almost. The fleet pays for that. The plant pays for it. The kid deciding whether to buy into a permit pays for it, and mostly decides not to.

What I'd do

Treat energy as fisheries infrastructure, because that's what it is. A cold-storage plant is not a side issue to a fishing economy, it is the fishing economy, and it runs on electricity we've priced like a luxury.

Manage the cost side with the same seriousness we manage the resource side. We didn't get the best salmon management on earth by hoping. We got it by counting, publishing the count, and acting on it in season. There's no reason the cost of operating in this state should be the one number nobody tracks.

And finish the connection. Not another study. The thing itself.

We built an entire scientific apparatus to make sure there will always be fish in these rivers. That was the right call, and I'd defend it against anyone.

Now let's build the other half, so there's still somebody here who can afford to go get them.