A run that started slowly, floundered and finally flopped has left one of Alaska's premier king salmon fisheries shuttered for the first time in more than a decade.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game has ended all fishing -- even catch and release -- for king salmon across the broad Nushagak-Mulchatna drainage in Southwest Alaska, one of the state's most prolific king fisheries.

The bad run has dozens of guides, outfitters and lodges on the river and nearby reeling.

The historic rich run of kings has made the upper river a sportfishing mecca, with camps and lodges -- some of them high-end -- dotting the region for the prime June and July season. But now when it comes to kings, there's no catching and no catch-and-release.

"This run should have never, ever been small," said Randy Triplett, owner of Nushagak Outfitters, who has operated on the river for 24 years. "If half the fish that were caught commercially had gotten through, we would have had a strong run."

Steve Hieb, general manager of HRM Sports LTD, a Vancouver, Wash.-based company that brings clients to the Nushagak, told The Associated Press that two clients who flew in Wednesday without knowing of the closure want to catch the first plane out of camp.

"They called and they want to leave today," Hieb said. "It is very frustrating for everyone."

Hieb had only two other clients in camp and he's taken 10 cancellations so far, resulting in about a $30,000 loss, he said. HRM guests pay $2,000 to $4,000 a trip, depending on the length of stay.

NO SHOWS

The Nushagak River rises in the Nushagak Hills and flows 275 miles to Nushagak Bay, claiming such major tributaries as the Mulchatna and Nuyakuk rivers. Few waterways attract more kings.

Five years ago, a sonar counter on the river recorded a whopping 166,700 kings en route to spawning beds upstream; last year, more than 78,000 swam by. By contrast, the best Kenai River king run over the past decade saw about 67,000 kings upriver in 2004. The mighty Yukon River saw 122,474 kings last year.

But this year it's different on the Nushagak: just 31,419 kings had passed the river's sonar by Tuesday, and biologists say the run is 75 percent complete.

"The forecast was for 117,000, and they just didn't show up," said Matt Miller, regional management biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

Many of those that did, according to Triplett, bore signs of encounters with commercial nets.

"The quality of fish getting up the river is lousy; they're beat up," he said.

Down at the river's mouth, where the commercial fleet works, the catch of kings has been average, "as of right now," Jason Dye, a Fish and Game biologist in Dillingham, said Thursday.

"The catch isn't significantly higher than in past years. The bottom line is that the total run is down -- way under forecast," he said.

A final tally of the number of kings that wind up in commercial nets won't be known until later this year. Dye estimated that number at 30,000.

Tim Sands, the state biologist who is Dye's colleague on the commercial side of Fish and Game in Dillingham, said 19,000 kings have been taken by commercial fishermen so far -- including 1,100 in three June openings when commercial fishermen target kings.

In managing the Nushagak-Mulchatna fisheries, state biologists are guided by a plan that was adopted in 1992 and amended three times since, most recently seven years ago. This management plan seeks to get 75,000 kings past the in-river sonar and up river. Among those fish, the goal is 65,000 kings for spawning. The rest are intended for subsistence and sport catches, with a sport harvest goal of 5,000 kings.

The last Nushagak closure came in 1999, Dye said. That year, it eventually was reopened when more fish arrived.

Many guides like Triplett would have preferred a move to catch-and-release fishing instead of a closure.

"I can keep my fishermen in camp until they close it," he said. "They're happy to catch and release. I don't care if Nushagak is No. 1 king salmon fishery in world, if it's closed, it's closed."

Triplett said catch-and-release restrictions would keep anglers fishing, guides working and lodges humming -- while killing fewer than 1,000 salmon.

"The department is saying our 1,000 fish will save the run?" he asked. "I don't think so."

IS THE RUN LATE?

Late-arriving king salmon in several other Alaska rivers bailed out fisheries managers earlier this year.

In just a few weeks, the Kenai River went from being shut down to having more kings swim past the in-river sonar than biologists consider ideal for ensuring strong future runs. Similarly, the Deshka River in Mat-Su went from the brink of a shutdown to exceeding its minimum escapement goal for the first time in three years. The Ayakulik River on Kodiak reopened to anglers this week after meeting its minimum escapement goal.

"Given what we had been seeing on the Kenai and even the Ayakulik, we thought we might see this late bump of fish," Miller said.

But by the last week of June, Dye said, "we started falling behind significantly and suspected there may be a problem."