sockeye

Like king salmon, the first sockeyes of the season usually come from Copper River and hit fish counters mid-May through mid-June.

Moria grew up in Vancouver where he split his time between American Football and hockey before deciding to focus on a hockey career that began with second-tier junior side Richmond Sockeyes.

Only time will tell if the masses of sockeyes in the Fraser in 2010 were a fluke or foreshadow better days ahead for the environment--and for the fish and people in it.

It's the world as it once was, where brown bears and walrus outnumber people, where rivers turn red with spawning sockeyes, where you can see hundreds of while Beluga whales chasing the salmon and pods of Orcas hunting the belugas.

Thousands of bright silvery sockeyes head up Alaska's Brooks River toward spawning grounds in Brooks Lake.

A trip to an impressive river in search of a noble fish - plus where to catch fresh Alaskan sockeyes and kings on Northwest menus

While Gunnar Knapp, director of the Salmon Market Information Service at the University of Alaska, was holding forth on recent trends, Japanese importers ended a six-week standoff in mid-September by making their first major purchases of Bristol Bay sockeyes.

Ranked by color and taste, Alaskan reds, or sockeyes, top the list, followed by silver salmon (cohos), kings, pinks, and chum salmon.

Despite the optimism, no one should expect a return to the "good old days" of the mid-1980s, when sockeyes sold for $2.25 a pound in Bristol Bay, and pinks netted 75 cents a pound, Knapp says.

For one thing, a handful of other sockeyes, cycling back in other years' migrations, do still reach Redfish Lake.

Like sockeyes, cohoes are split and salted as sides, but the Japanese favor smaller sizes (2-4 and 4-6) in cohoes as opposed to sockeyes (6-9).

Biologists had predicted an uneventful year, but the sockeyes flooded back in near-record numbers and the fleet earned $105 million.