Friday, August 7, 2026
- Aug 7
- 5 min read
Alaska
Overall Prince William Sound harvest rises to 1.9M fish
The Cordova Times by Margaret Bauman - August 5, 2026
Prince William Sound’s commercial fishing fleet upped their harvest to 1.9 million salmon through Aug. 1 – up from 1.4 million a week earlier – in a season that has seen a lower overall catch.
Commercial troll fishery to close briefly on Sunday
KCAW by Katherine Rose - August 6, 2026
The Southeast Alaska commercial troll fishery will close briefly next week.
National
NOAA Fisheries Enforcement Officers Deploy for High Seas Patrols Combatting Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated Fishing
NOAA Fisheries enforcement officers join international partners in Operation North Pacific Guard to combat illegal fishing, protect marine life, and ensure a fair market for U.S. fishermen.
NOAA Fisheries by staff - August 6, 2026
Enforcement officers from NOAA Fisheries’ Office of Law Enforcement have successfully wrapped up deployments for Operation North Pacific Guard, an annual international mission targeting illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing on the high seas.
International
Market Advisory Council lists challenges in EU CATCH rollout
SeafoodSource by Nathan Strout - August 6, 2026
The European Union’s Market Advisory Council (MAC) acknowledged that there have been difficulties in rolling out the bloc’s CATCH digital certification system and improvements must be made to ensure the initiative’s long-term success.
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The EU’s Own Market Advisory Council Offers Improvements to New CATCH Program
SeafoodNews by Peggy Parker - August 6, 2026
On August 4, the Market Advisory Council (MAC) of the European Commission (EC) announced recommendations calling for “… operational stabilization and strategic alignment of CATCH with the aim of ensuring proportionality, legal certainty, and market stability.”
As a stakeholder-led organization composed of representatives of the entire value chain (primary producers, auctions, processors, traders, suppliers, retailers, trade unions) and other interest groups (environmental and development NGOs, consumer groups), MAC’s comments added weight to comments made by exporting nations to the EC over its new IT program, known as CATCH. The purpose of the new digital process is to streamline checks and verifications of catch certificates for fishery products entering the EU to avoid products coming from illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing.
Since 2016, the MAC has published several pieces of advice on topics connected to fishery and aquaculture products.
In its August 4 recommendations, the MAC noted that Food Business Operators face “recurring operational, technical, and administrative challenges.”
“The EU fisheries value chain is highly integrated and dependent on stable logistics and predictable import procedures,” Yobana Bermúdez, Chair of the MAC, said in a statement.
“Through the digitalization and streamlining of data, CATCH can be a key tool to reinforce the fight against the presence of IUU products in the EU market. Nevertheless, the long-term credibility and effectiveness of the new tool depend not only on the robustness of controls, but also on the practical usability and reliability of the system for authorities and operators, including SMEs, alike.”
To ensure the long-term success of CATCH, MAC recommended seven areas that need immediate attention:
1. Harmonized guidance that includes clarification on application requirements where transitional, technical, or administrative errors have occurred.
2. Strengthened coordination between the EC, member states, and the single liaison offices.
3. Remediate operational shortcomings such as missing master data, restrictive validation rules, and alignment of gear classification codes, while also providing structured channels for reporting operational issues.
4. Support progressive development of full system-to-system interoperability to reduce duplicate data entry, improve administrative efficiency, and facilitate the handling of complex documentation.
5. Offer structured bilateral technical exchanges with relevant third countries and regional authorities to facilitate interoperability, improve mutual understanding of traceability architectures, and support workable digital integration pathways.
6. Introduce operational functionalities enabling delegated actions within CATCH to allow authorized representatives, including customs agents, freight forwarders and Producer Organizations, to perform specific tasks on behalf of operators.
7. In the case of future major technical upgrades or developments, structured and time-bound operational testing involving representative operators and a range of supply-chain configurations.
“The administrative and financial burden on operators, the current technical limitations, and the diverging national implementations must be addressed as soon as possible, including via strengthened interoperability and an increased involvement of the relevant third countries,” Bermúdez said.
In a July 31, 2026 report to the EC, MAC gave an example of the problem using one shipment of Alaska sockeye salmon, using a table and description.
“This is a real-life example of a single export consignment of frozen sockeye salmon, loaded into 22 refrigerated containers, which was not sourced from one vessel or one landing. It represented aggregated product collected through 44 tender vessels from 454 fishing vessels and supported by 2,970 official Alaska fish-ticket records. This illustrates that vessel-by-vessel and ticket-by-ticket data entry at shipment level can become operationally unworkable, even where the underlying fishery is lawful, documented and subject to public oversight,” the report described.
The US seafood industry, particularly in Alaska, has pushed the EC to reconsider parts of the new system to accommodate fisheries that often rely on fleets of hundreds of individual harvester vessels delivering to one of dozens of tender boats that deliver to the shore-based processor. In response, the EC issued an extension from July 10 to November 30 this year, in early July.
Environment/Science
Murkowski and Colleagues Work to Modernize Fisheries Science
Office of US Senator for Alaska Lisa Murkowski - August 6, 2026
Today, U.S. Senators Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) introduced legislation that would help the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) better assess and protect our fisheries.
Federal Register
Pacific Halibut Fisheries of the West Coast; Inseason Action for the 2026 Area 2A Pacific Halibut Directed Commercial Fishery
A Rule by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on 08/06/2026
NMFS announces an inseason action for the 2026 Pacific halibut non-Tribal directed commercial fishery in the International Pacific Halibut Commission's (IPHC) regulatory Area 2A.
Fisheries of the Exclusive Economic Zone Off Alaska; Commercial Salmon Fishing in the Cook Inlet EEZ Area
A Rule by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on 08/06/2026
NMFS is prohibiting commercial fishing for salmon in the Cook Inlet exclusive economic zone (EEZ) Area. This action is necessary to prevent exceeding the 2026 total allowable catch (TAC) of the aggregate coho salmon stock complex in the Cook Inlet EEZ Area.
Fisheries of the Exclusive Economic Zone Off Alaska; Reapportionment of Halibut Prohibited Species Catch Limits in the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands Management Area
A Rule by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on 08/07/2026
NMFS is reapportioning the unused amounts of the Pacific cod Trawl Cooperative (PCTC) Program halibut prohibited species catch (PSC) limit to the Pacific cod trawl limited access catcher vessel sector C season in the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands management area (BSAI).
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