Saving Seafood

Nearly all Alaska and West Coast fishermen badly hurt by pandemic, survey indicates

January 19, 2021 — The single biggest hit to fishermen from the COVID-19 virus is lower dock prices, according to Alaska and West Coast harvesters, and 98% said their businesses have been badly bashed by the pandemic.

That’s based on survey results compiled by Ocean Strategies, a public relations firm that focuses on fisheries that helped profile the Pacific region for a larger federal study.

Nearly 400 fishermen responded to the short, confidential survey launched last November, said senior consultant Hannah Heimbuch of Kodiak.

“NOAA uses any information they collect on economics to report to Congress on how the industry is being impacted, the major trends they are seeing, and then that informs the decisions that Congress or other government agencies might make in response to those trends,” she said.

In the survey, 82% said fishing is their primary source of income and 91% said their revenues have decreased by 15% -100% since January of 2020. A whopping 70% said they stopped fishing last year; 65% stopped for three months or less.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

For small boat fishermen in Alaska, the business can be boom or bust

August 23, 2018 — The Alaskan seafood industry is one of the many industries with its eyes on the back-and-forth between the U.S. and China. Seafood was one of the U.S. exports to get slapped with a retaliatory tariff from China, and that’s an issue for Alaska seafood producers because a lot of their seafood exports are sent there.

But in this installment of our on-going series My Economy, we’re looking beyond the news headlines to see how people are actually doing. And there are a variety of things that might be on an Alaskan fisherman’s mind right now, as fisherman Hannah Heimbuch describes from Homer, Alaska.

My name is Hannah Heimbuch. I’m a commercial fisherman from Homer, Alaska. My brother and I are drift gillnetters. We fish for sockeye salmon. We grew up deckhanding with our dad on his boat in a couple different areas in Alaska. And two years ago we decided to invest in our own operation. You know we’re in our early 30s and kind of looked at each other and were like, well, I guess we’re in this together.

Probably our biggest annual investment is our boat payment. That runs about $11,000. We also have permit payments, that’s another $5,000. And then after that you have the basic maintenance. You know we spend a few thousand dollars upgrading. So we have a boat that’s in tip top shape, but we needed to make more than $20,000 to breakeven this year. We did not come close to that.

Read the full story at the Marketplace