October 1, 2013 — Two lucrative dive fisheries get underway in Southeast this month. Divers are expecting good prices for geoduck clams and sea cucumbers, two bottom dwelling sea creatures sold to Asian markets.
Openings for geoduck clams are happening one day a week, with the first one on October 3rd. Fishing time will be shorter this year at least in the early season.
“The geoducks all go to a live market so you can’t flood the market or it drives the price down” said Phil Doherty, executive director of the Southeast Alaska Dive Fisheries Association. That’s an industry group based in Ketchikan with a committee of divers and processors involved in the clam fishery. “Normally our fisheries are on Thursdays, one day a week and normally they’ve been six hours a day. But the geoduck committee has decided to try and reduce our early season harvest so we’re only going to be fishing three hours on the first three weeks of the season, on the Thursdays. So we’ll cut our time in half.”
Doherty says SARDFA is hoping to see a weekly harvest of 25,000-35,000 pounds in the early season, when the bulk of competing product from Washington state and British Columbia is also sent to market.
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