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Salmon boats line up to off-load their catch to a large tender in Alaska’s Bristol Bay, home to the largest sockeye salmon fishery in the world. Nine major rivers, along with numerous nursery lakes and shallow estuaries, make the remote, pristine bay in the Eastern Bering Sea a reproductive haven for all five Pacific salmon species that return to their natal rivers each year to spawn. On their way, they are met by hundreds of drift net boats like the Miss JAE that take part in the intensively managed fishery, where fish monitors start and stop the fishing several times each day to allow an optimal number of spawners to pass their counting towers up the rivers. The fish are bled, and stored in chilled seawater until they reach the onshore processors like Silver Bay Seafoods, where the fish are fileted, frozen, and canned for domestic and export markets. The boats can catch thousands of pounds of salmon each day, part of a fishery that generated $2 billion and employed about fifteen thousand people when these photographs were taken.

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Salmon boats line up to off-load their catch to a large tender in Alaska’s Bristol Bay, home to the largest sockeye salmon fishery in the world. Nine major rivers, along with numerous nursery lakes and shallow estuaries, make the remote, pristine bay in the Eastern Bering Sea a reproductive haven for all five Pacific salmon species that return to their natal rivers each year to spawn. On their way, they are met by hundreds of drift net boats like the Miss JAE that take part in the intensively managed fishery, where fish monitors start and stop the fishing several times each day to allow an optimal number of spawners to pass their counting towers up the rivers. The fish are bled, and stored in chilled seawater until they reach the onshore processors like Silver Bay Seafoods, where the fish are fileted, frozen, and canned for domestic and export markets. The boats can catch thousands of pounds of salmon each day, part of a fishery that generated $2 billion and employed about fifteen thousand people when these photographs were taken.

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