Saving Seafood

Unalaska fish processing plant reopens after COVID-19 outbreak forces monthlong shutdown

February 3, 2021 — Unalaska’s largest fish processing plant reopened Monday after a COVID-19 outbreak forced it to shut down for almost a month.

UniSea closed its doors Jan. 5 after a handful of workers tested positive for the virus, following a New Year’s gathering in company housing.

Since then, 66 of UniSea’s more than 900 workers tested positive for the virus, according to UniSea President Tom Enlow. Seventeen of those were during their two-week entry quarantine, and 49 were non-travel related cases, he said.

“The virus has not been eliminated just yet,” Enlow said in an email. “We have active cases in isolation that we are monitoring and close contacts in quarantine that we are continuing to test. But we feel very good about our response to the outbreak and containment thus far.”

The reopening is a bright spot for the Bering Sea fishing industry, which has been hampered by COVID-19 outbreaks at multiple boats and onshore plants.

Read the full story at KTOO

COVID-19 outbreaks shutter two of Alaska’s biggest seafood processing plants during winter fishing season

January 21, 2021 — COVID-19 outbreaks at two of Alaska’s largest seafood processing plants, both in the Aleutian Islands, are shutting down operations just as lucrative crab and pollock seasons get underway.

The remote Trident Seafoods plant in the tiny community of Akutan, 35 miles east of Unalaska, is reporting four coronavirus cases — three processing workers and a galley employee — prompting concerns about additional infections that could be hard to contain.

A separate outbreak at the UniSea plant in Unalaska has the facility on lockdown after 55 workers tested positive for the virus since January, about two-thirds of them during travel quarantine, which is intended to catch positive cases. Forty-five workers were still considered infectious as of Tuesday.

The Trident outbreak is the first for the company’s closed-campus plant there, officials say.

Industry observers expected the start of this winter fishing season to bring a whole new set of coronavirus challenges compared to this time last year.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

ALASKA: UniSea’s Unalaska plant locked down after COVID-19 outbreak

January 14, 2021 — Redmond, Washington, U.S.A.-based UniSea has partially locked down its seafood processing facility in Unalaska, Alaska, after seven of its employees tested positive for COVID-19.

The company, which is owned by Nippon Suisan Kaisha (Nissui), is in the process of testing most of the staff at the facility and conducting contract tracing to determine the full scale of the outbreak, according to KUCB.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

ALASKA: UniSea Under Partial Lockdown While City Determines If COVID-19 Positives Indicate Community Spread

January 8, 2021 — UniSea is under partial lockdown and has shut down all non-essential work after four employees of the processing plant tested positive for COVID-19 Tuesday.

Four “non-quarantined” individuals complained of not feeling well and were taken to the Iliuliuk Family and Health Services clinic where they tested positive, according to UniSea President and CEO Tom Enlow.

“This raised our risk level to ‘high’ and we sent everyone to their housing quarters and basically shut down non-essential work,” he told KUCB in a statement Wednesday. “We have restricted movement outside of our campus to only essential travel, such as to the clinic or for supplies.”

The processing plant worked with clinic staff on contact tracing, and identified roughly 50 close contacts who are being tested at the clinic Wednesday, according to Enlow. He said they are working to determine if the virus was contained to a “small group” that gathered to celebrate the New Year or whether the positive cases are indicative of more widespread community transmission. All four of the people who later tested positive attended the New Year gathering.

Read the full story at KUCB

SeaShare, NFI Future Leaders hold national day of giving to fight hunger with seafood

October 15, 2019 — SeaShare – a nonprofit organization devoted to partnering with the seafood industry to get seafood into various foodbanks – and the National Fisheries Institute’s (NFI) Future Leaders program is holding a national day of giving on 16 October.

SeaShare donates seafood through a national network of food banks, known as Feeding America, in order to provide thousands of people struggling with hunger with healthy proteins. Partners throughout the seafood industry provide funding and seafood to give nutritious meals to some of the 41 million Americans that struggle with hunger.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

ALASKA: Part of Bering Sea Pacific cod fishery could move toward quota system

February 20, 2019 — About a year after federal regulators dramatically cut the Pacific Cod quota in the Gulf of Alaska, some fishermen in the Bering Sea say there are too many boats fishing for the declining species.

The North Pacific Fishery Management Council is looking into the problem, but potential solutions are likely to be controversial.

Since Pacific cod stocks crashed in the Gulf of Alaska in recent years, members of the fishing industry say fishermen are focusing their efforts farther west.

Tom Enlow is the president of UniSea, which operates a large shore-side processor in Unalaska. He said more vessels — especially trawlers — are crowding the fishing grounds. He also said there are more offshore processors competing for their cod.

“You’re seeing people who have historically not participated in these fisheries – as a processor standpoint – now coming into the fishery,” Enlow explained. “So there’s a lot of excess capacity now and pressure on this resource.”

Read the full story at Alaska Public Media

Only way is up for pollock prices in 2019

November 20, 2018 — The prices for all forms of pollock look set to continue to increase next year, sources in the US, Russia, China and Europe told Undercurrent News.

Prices for pin-bone out (PBO) blocks, double-frozen fillet blocks, and the headed and gutted (H&G) raw material the latter is based on, all look set for higher levels in 2019, having already firmed in 2018, the sources said.

During the China Fisheries & Seafood Expo, held Nov. 7-9 in a venue close to Qingdao, ex-warehouse prices of around $3,500 per-metric-ton were being discussed for PBO blocks for A season. Prices for B season of 2018 were done around $3,350/t. Also, double frozen fillet block prices of around $3,200/t are also being discussed for next year.

“We see the price of $3,500/t reached and confirmed and we will take it up from there,” Fedor Kirsanov, CEO of Russian Fishery Company (RFC), told Undercurrent at the show, of the situation with PBO. US suppliers and also a large European buyer confirmed this level.

The level in the A season of 2018 was around $3,000/t (see image below and use the Undercurrent prices portal for interactive data), a leap from the very low level of around $2,350/t hit in the B season of 2017, as the price bottomed out. The pace of the increase has shocked buyers, but producers have been quick to point out this is only a return to a historical norm.

“We felt the fall was pretty quick. Now, it’s going more back to normal. It’s also not like pollock has gone off the charts. It’s back to a level where everyone can make money. It’s going back to a level where producers can make investments,” Tom Enlow, CEO of UniSea — a pollock, cod and crab processing plant in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, which is owned by Japan’s Nippon Suisan Kaisha (Nissui) — told Undercurrent.

The speed of the price increase has been driven by new markets taking the fish, he said.

“When the prices were very low, the producers looked at new markets. There has been more focus on deepskin for Asia and also surimi. Demand for surimi has been very strong, due to the shortfall in warmwater surimi,” the Nissui executive said. “The shortage in warmwater is the reason Thailand is so hot at the moment for surimi. Also, Japan is stable, but they take almost half of the surimi the US produces.”

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

 

Alaska: Unalaska Holds Firm, Demanding Congress Restrict Fishermen’s Finest Trawler

March 1, 2018 — The Unalaska City Council is standing by its request that Congress place restrictions on a troubled factory trawler commissioned by Fishermen’s Finest.

The company urged councilors earlier this month to rescind a letter they sent to Alaska’s Congressional delegation.

But councilors stood firm on Tuesday, arguing that sideboards must be imposed on the catcher-processor America’s Finest.

Without restrictions, Vice Mayor Dennis Robinson said the vessel could stay offshore and swipe profitable cod deliveries that should go to Unalaska’s shoreside processing plants.

“The shore sector is the lifeblood of this community,” said Robinson. “Without them, we wouldn’t be building a library. We wouldn’t be doing the stuff that we’re able to do.”

The rest of the council agreed after an hour of testimony dominated by representatives from shoreside fish processors.

UniSea President Tom Enlow said he’s sympathetic to the situation in Anacortes, Washington, where America’s Finest sits unfinished in a shipyard. The vessel can’t get in the water until Congress waives a construction mistake that broke federal law.

Read the full story at KUCB