It’s not often you get to go fishing with the Chairman of the Board of your company. But we’re a fishermen-owned co-op with a Board of Directors made up of 12 small boat commercial fishermen. And Tad Fujioka is our Board Chairman and he invited me to go out fishing. And what guy says no to going out fishing?
I meet Tad at his home in Sitka, Alaska. Up a gravel road, I steer towards his house. I meet him at the door and we head towards the dock that sits in a cove behind his house. I eat a few gigantic and very delicious summer huckleberries on the dirt path along the way and we scamper over some rocks towards a pulley system that gets us to his boat.
Tad’s 31-foot boat the F/V Sakura is a little smaller than most of the boats in our fleet and his fast outboard motor gives him flexibility to run a little quicker out to the fishing grounds and run back quickly, so he and his wife can trade off parenting duties easily. As Tad notes, with his smaller boat and lifestyle focused around his kids he has a smaller radius than some other fishermen in terms of how far he will go out to fish, but he has the flexibility to live a balanced life. We head out to the Eastern Channel to fish for keta salmon. As the coho salmon are still slow to show up this summer, the keta are closer to town and are somewhat less work to catch because they don’t require heading out to the open ocean with big swells to chase.
Where we are in Sitka’s Eastern Channel we are protected somewhat from the winds by Mount Edgecumbe, a volcano that features prominently on the Sitka skyline. We are in the lee of the wind, yet the volcano blocks some of its effects even though we’re miles away from it. This is the reason many fishermen prefer to go out fishing for keta salmon, as they tend to be in the calmer waters with less wind. On days with big winds and heavy swells, fishing for keta salmon makes a lot of sense since the Eastern Channel is much closer to town than where they would be fishing for king salmon, coho salmon, halibut and sablefish.
We can see Cape Edgecumbe next to the volcano on Kruzof Island, and that is where many fishermen head to fish for king salmon and coho salmon. If you look at Cape Edgecumbe on the map, you can see that it sticks out a bit more into the ocean—it’s a prominent feature. As wild salmon are spinning in the gyre of the North Pacific Ocean in the Gulf of Alaska, Cape Edgecumbe is where five lanes of “traffic” in terms of schools of salmon converge into one lane if we were to look at the salmon’s migration paths like a freeway. That so much marine life converges into a smaller lane makes it a very productive fishing area. The current eddies here attract the bait fish like herring, candlefish and more. Salmon, bait fish and other marine life meet together in the waters off Cape Edgecumbe to feed and continue migrating.
Here in these very productive waters near Sitka, all the different species of Pacific salmon in Alaska meet up from all the different watersheds up and down the west coast. Tad ruminates on all the life that passes through these vibrant waters and the importance of species diversity.
All five species of wild Pacific salmon in Alaska pass by Cape Edgecumbe, in addition to varying species of birds, whales, and other wildlife. Salmon returning to many streams up and down the west coast swim by seeking food. Hook and line salmon fishermen catch these salmon as they are feeding. We call this a mixed-stock fishery because we are catching fish from stocks returning to many streams. Tad talks about how mixed-stock fisheries are sustainable. They are also the most economically consistent because they are “diversified” as we would say in financial parlance. Just like a stock portfolio, you want your fish stocks to be diversified. It’s better to buy a variety of stocks rather than put all your eggs in one basket. If one stock goes down and the others go up, your bets are hedged. That’s also the strength of the mixed-stock fisheries. Wild salmon returning to each different stream have different genetic markers and returning to all the different streams maintain genetic diversity for the species. There are somewhere around 1500 different streams that wild coho salmon return to in southeast Alaska, for example.
When you see in person all the different species of marine wildlife in the waters near Sitka—the puffins, the murrelets, and other birds, and the humpback whales in the distance that signal a school of herring as they are feeding—you can see just how rich these waters are. The late nature author, who lived for years in Sitka, and friend of our co-op Richard Nelson called the waters surrounding Sitka “Seabank, Nature’s Dividend.” See Nels talk about the richness of the southeast Alaska’s ecosystem in this beautiful video made by friend of our co-op Liz McKenzie.
Tad and I troll in the Sitka at about 1-1.5 knots but experiment with speeds. With fishing, you have to balance what you know from experience with what you can experience in the moment. Fishermen take detailed notes in their logs, but also have to rely on instincts to process what is going on in the present. A fisherman might experiment with different lures, different trolling speeds, and depths to see what is going on with the fish in that moment in time.
It's been a while since I’ve been on a commercial fishing boat and I have to remember when controlling the gurdies that pushing the lever out means the line goes out and pushing the lever in means the line comes in. Sounds simple, but my muscle memory takes a while to form again and I work at a pace probably a tenth of Tad’s pace.
We set the gear---4 wires with lures and flashers—and begin the process of “running the gear.” It’s a rhythm that you get into when you are on a commercial fishing boat, fishing with hook and line. We make counts of how many fish per wire and each time we “run the gear” to get a sense of how the day will go and how big Tad’s check will be once we get the fish ticket, indicating pounds of each species caught and dock price for each.
We set some gear and then start into a lunch Tad prepared: leftover grilled king salmon and beach asparagus that he foraged. Later, he serves me a delicious poke made with our albacore tuna, herring roe, dark sesame oil, and again that foraged beach asparagus. All of it is wonderful. Very Southeast Alaska. Like many of our fishermen, Tad eats mostly what he harvests, as groceries in Sitka, on a remote island, are very expensive.
Below are notes I scrawled in my notebook on our scores of fish for each time running the gear through the channel.
30
35
23
25
19
15
We end the day with 147 keta salmon and 7 coho. This is actually a somewhat slow day. We got a slow start and it was mostly an educational experience for me, as I am much slower than Tad at running gear. Fishing for keta salmon is slowing down also for other fishermen on the water.
On the radio we get more positive reports of fishermen catching more and larger coho salmon. Tad tells me he plans on making a combination halibut and coho salmon fishing trip, depending on the weather and swells on the ocean over the next few days.
This is summer on a boat in southeast Alaska.
