Saving Seafood

Seafood Shipping Concerns Rise Amid Coronavirus Outbreaks

March 18, 2020 — There’s no denying that coronavirus, also known as COVID-19, has had a massive impact on the world. Here’s an overview of the ramifications on seafood shipping and related topics.

Demand and customer levels are down

Industry experts say the coronavirus factors into a downward trend related to demand. For example, Alaska’s Sitka Sac Roe Herring Fishery likely won’t happen this year. The department overseeing fish and game in the state reportedly contacted all processors with an assumed interest, and the response was that none intended to purchase herring this year.

Read the full story at Seafood News

ALASKA: There’s a new fight over Bering Sea black cod. Warming water may be to blame.

October 10, 2019 — Fish politics in Alaska usually get serious when there aren’t enough fish to go around. But a new fight is brewing over black cod because there are so many of them – possibly as a result of the ocean’s warming waters.

Record numbers of young black cod, also known as sablefish, are swimming off Alaska’s coast; scientists estimate that this group of fish, which had huge reproductive success in 2014, is twice the size of the next-largest on record, from 1977.

The small-boat fishermen who catch black cod, many of whom live in Southeast Alaska, are eagerly waiting for the young fish to grow larger and commercially valuable. But they’re getting frustrated seeing increasing numbers of black cod caught accidentally, as bycatch, by the Seattle-based trawlers that target lower-value species in the Bering Sea, like the pollock that go into McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish sandwiches.

“This recruitment event is what we’re counting on to keep the fishery going for the next 10 or 15 years,” said Tad Fujioka, a Sitka fisherman who decided to buy black cod fishing rights a few years ago, in part because of the boom in their numbers. “We need to save these fish for years to come.”

Read the full story at Alaska Public Media

Can a tiny town in Southeast Alaska reshape how America eats?

September 18, 2019 — A leading food systems researcher and author has identified seven unlikely cities that are changing the way Americans eat.

Even more unlikely: One of them is in Alaska.

Surprise. The unlikely city in Alaska helping shape the national food scene is Sitka. But Sitkans aren’t riding this wave out of choice, necessarily. Author Mark Winne was in the community last year, and reports that Sitka’s food strategies are the result of several factors — most importantly, the price.

“I’ve seen numbers about the cost of food in Sitka — not just compared to Seattle and Portland — but also compared to places like Anchorage,” said Winne. “It’s very, very expensive here, and people know that.”

Read the full story at Alaska Public Media

North Pacific Fishery Management Council June Newsletter

June 17, 2019 — The following was released by the North Pacific Fishery Management Council: 

The Council met in Sitka AK, from June 3-10. Our digital newsletter is published! For those interested, all the articles on one page to print is available here, and the three meeting outlook here. As always, you can access all other meeting information through the Agenda.

ALASKA: Investors are backing Southeast’s largest oyster farms

February 12, 2019 — The largest ever oyster farms in Southeast Alaska could be coming soon. That’s in line with the state’s Mariculture Task Force that sees the potential for a $100 million industry in Alaska.

Silver Bay Seafoods has been buying and processing salmon and herring at its plant in Sitka for the past decade.

The company says it wants to do something new.

“Alaska waters produce the highest quality seafood products in the country, if not the world,” said Tommy Sheridan, a former state fisheries biologist who now works as a company representative. “There is significant demand for Alaska oysters.”

Silver Bay recently chartered a boat to take a group of local business people, academics and seafood industry boosters to see the site of its oyster venture about 13 miles from Sitka’s harbor.

It’s in a cove near rocky shoreline. Not much to see – yet.

“If this were to go through, what you’d see here would be a series of rafts that we’d use to suspend oysters from,” Sheridan tells the group.

Read the full story at KTOO

Alaska deckhand apprentice program open for applicants

February 11, 2019 — It’s the second year for the Crewmember Apprenticeship program hosted by the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association in Sitka. Over 100 applied last year from all over the country, over half were women, and 13 were placed on local boats.

“It’s very exciting to see so many young people interested in entering the industry,” said Tara Racine, ALFA communications and program development coordinator. “You always hear about the graying of the fleet but it shows that the interest is out there. Young people just need these resources to explore and get involved.”

ALFA received a $70,000 matching grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation to launch the program last year and to help support expansion of similar apprenticeships in Alaska.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

ALASKA: Fleet consolidation and loss of fishing jobs a hot topic at MSA hearing

August 28, 2017 — Timed to coincide with the 25th annual Kenai River Classic invitation-only fishing derby, Senator Dan Sullivan brought his Subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries, and Coast Guard to Soldotna on Wednesday for a hearing on the reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act.

Congress periodically reviews the Act, giving lawmakers a chance to fine-tune or make changes where needed. One theme was addressed by many of the dozen invited experts who testified.

Fleet consolidation is a predictable outcome of limited access privilege fisheries, or LAPs in the acronym-filled parlance of the Magnuson-Stevens Act, or MSA. A limited access fishery is one that has been privatized in some way. For example, in the Bering Sea, the crab fishery was rationalized more than 10 years ago, resulting in a fleet today that is just a fraction the size it was before privatization. That’s because when the owners of boats also became the owners of crab quota, they could buy or lease that quota, and one boat could do the fishing of many. Some put the loss of crewman and skipper jobs from the year before rationalization to the next at over 900.

“In Alaska, the problem is now too few fishermen, not too few fish,” Linda Behnken of Sitka said. Behnken testified on behalf of the Halibut Coalition and the Longline Fishermen’s Association.

Read the full story at Alaska Public Media

Sitka Tribe of Alaska’s Traditional Foods Program nourishes families

August 18, 2017 — It’s a cloudy Tuesday in July. At 4 a.m., it’s already light out, and Jeff Feldpausch and Mike Smith are preparing for a trip up to Sitkoh Bay to harvest sockeye salmon and halibut. It’s just another day in the office for them: a boat trip to a remote area of Southeast Alaska to harvest food for the Sitka Tribe of Alaska’s (STA) Traditional Foods Program.

Every year, about 300 households receive food provided by their work, with food being distributed first to elders and then the rest of the community. In order to be eligible to receive food, one must be a resident of Sitka, Alaska, and a citizen of the Sitka Tribe of Alaska.

The program

Feldpausch, the Resource Protection Department Director, and Smith, the Traditional Foods Specialist, work together throughout the year to ensure that tribal members who may not have the resources to gather, hunt, or fish themselves have freezers and pantries stocked. While it varies per year, Feldpausch said that, on average, STA distributes between 12,000 and 20,000 pounds of food per year to the community.

The season starts off with a big herring egg harvest and then moves to salmon, with sockeye being the primary goal. There are sockeye salmon runs in several places on Baranof and Chichagof islands and STA makes it a priority to harvest sockeye sustainably by harvesting in multiple locations.

“You name it, we go there,” Feldpausch said. “We go as far north as Klag [Bay] for sockeye, as far south as Redfish for sockeye…if we’re out and about, we always try to throw a skate into the water to make the program as efficient as possible. We try to harvest away from town. A lot of folks who are private citizens who have boats may not have as big of boats so they harvest closer to town, so we try to harvest away from town. We try to stay further away from town so that we don’t impact those subsistence users.”

Read the full story at the Juneau Empire

ALASKA: SE legislators seek inclusion in pink salmon disaster request

October 26th, 2016 — A pair of Southeast legislators is asking the governor to include Southeast fishermen in Alaska’s request for federal disaster relief under the Magnuson-Stevens Act.

Sitka representative Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins and Ketchikan representative Dan Ortiz made the appeal in a letter to Governor Bill Walker on October 21, on behalf of Southeast fishermen affected by this season’s weak pink salmon return.

Under the Magnuson-Stevens Act, fishermen are eligible for automatic disaster relief if the value of a fishery drops more than 80-percent below its five-year average.

Staffers for Kreiss-Tomkins and Ortiz calculated this season’s loss at 55-percent, which qualifies the Southeast pink salmon fishery for “further evaluation” for disaster relief.

Governor Walker in September applied for disaster relief for the pink salmon fisheries in Prince William Sound, Kodiak, Lower Cook Inlet, and in Chignik.

In Southeast, pink salmon are targeted primarily by seiners. In their letter, Kreiss-Tomkins and Ortiz argue that Southeast fishing families are facing huge losses through no fault of their own, and there is no reason to bar them from the same support requested for Southcentral fishermen.

Read the full story at KCAW

For Alaska fisheries, reason to celebrate 40 years of Magnuson-Stevens Act

April 12, 2016 — April 13, 2016, marks the 40th anniversary of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, a law that took U.S. fisheries management in federal waters from being virtually non-existent to becoming a global model of sustainability.

Nowhere is this truer than in Alaska, where our fisheries have an international reputation as being among the most sustainable and valuable fisheries on the planet, largely thanks to the collaborative and inclusive management process set up under the Magnuson-Stevens Act. One of the MSA’s authors, our very own Sen. Ted Stevens, had an extraordinary vision for our nation’s fisheries, especially for those in his home state of Alaska. Many elements of the State of Alaska’s fishery management are woven into the fabric of the MSA.

The results? Our state produces 60 percent of all seafood harvested from U.S. waters. The Alaska seafood industry is the number one private employer in the State of Alaska, contributing an estimated $5.9 billion to the Alaska economy, and producing more than $4.2 billion first wholesale value of wild, sustainable seafood annually. For nearly 20 consecutive years, Dutch Harbor has been the top U.S. fishing port in volume of seafood landed. In 2014, Alaska ports took the top three spots in the nation in volume of seafood landed (Dutch Harbor, Kodiak, and Aleutian Islands). Other Alaska fishing ports — Alaska Peninsula, Naknek, Sitka, Ketchikan, Cordova, and Petersburg — ranked in our nation’s top 20 ports by volume.

Read the full opinion piece at the Alaska Dispatch News