February 10, 2025 — On an early, foggy summer morning, Nick Katelnikoff steered his boat through the treacherous waters off Kodiak Island’s Spruce Cape and chuckled.
“Trust a blind guy through the rock pile?” he asked.
Katelnikoff, 76, is a veteran fisherman — the kind of guy who, friends say, can call his catch into his boat.
He’s made a career chasing the bounty of the North Pacific, building up a storehouse of knowledge about his maritime backyard that allows him, even with failing eyesight, to confidently steer his 38-foot craft away from rocks that have sunk other vessels.
Katelnikoff describes his heritage as Aleut; he’s one of the Indigenous people who have been pulling fish out of these waters for millennia. Their catches helped sustain trading networks long before white people arrived on Kodiak and began setting up fish traps and canneries — businesses that were supplied, in part, by the harvests of Katelnikoff’s more recent ancestors.
When Katelnikoff was still beginning his career in the 1970s, he was one of a dozen or so skippers in Ouzinkie — a small Indigenous village on an island just off Kodiak’s coast.
But today, that tradition is all but dead: Katelnikoff is the last skipper running a commercial fishing boat from Ouzinkie’s harbor.