August 17, 2018 — The majority of processing seafood companies in Bristol Bay are small Mom and Pop shops who are essentially the roadside farm stands of the Bristol Bay sockeye fishery selling sockeye directly to customers. But these businesses only sell a fraction of the sockeye caught in the region.
Standing in a shipping container that’s been converted into essentially a salmon butchery. Sandy Alvarez is filleting a sockeye. People regularly admire her technique but she said the secret behind it is practice.
“Well you know people who comment they wish they could do that I usually laughingly tell them. ‘Try doing 1,500 fish for 10 years you probably can!’”
Almost a decade ago Alvarez and her husband, a commercial fisherman, set up a little processing plant near their summer home in Naknek. Alvarez’s husband fishes for sockeye and drops off a bit of his catch to his wife who then processes it. Then he sells the rest of his salmon to a larger seafood company. That is pretty typical for small seafood processors in the region.