July 23, 2023 — A few times this summer, Jared Danielson, who fishes for salmon on the Alaska Peninsula, found himself fighting back tears in his bunk.
Aboard the F/V Five Star, his boat, Danielson and his deckhand put away as many pounds of fish as they could. They had no breakdowns. But his seafood processor is paying him 70 cents a pound for his salmon — half of last year’s price — which means that instead of his usual six-figure haul for a summer of hard work, he might only break even, or go home to his family in Washington with $10,000, if he’s lucky.
“I’ve done everything right,” Danielson, 36, said in an interview this week. “It’s pretty demoralizing — you take all this risk, all this sacrifice, and you go home essentially without a paycheck.”
He added: “We’re up against something that’s out of our control, and that’s the processors killing us here.”
In the past few weeks, thousands of fishermen across the state have found themselves in a similar predicament: The price they’ll be paid by the processing companies that buy their salmon won’t be enough to cover their costs — or, at least, will make them far less profit than last year.