Commercial Fishing in Alaska (Alaska Geographic) [Paperback]

Joel Gay (Author), Penny Rennick (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 1997 | Series: Alaska Geographic (Book 24)

Alaska Geographic is an award-winning series that presents the people, places, and wonders of Alaska to the world. Over the past 30 years, Alaska Geographic has earned its reputation as the publication for those who love Alaska. The series boasts more than 100 books to date, featuring communities from Barrow to Ketchikan, animals from bears to dinosaurs, history from the Russian explorers to today, and natural phenomena from the aurora to glaciers. Written by leading experts in their fields, these books are illustrated throughout with world-class photography and include colorful maps for reference.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Joel Gay has lived in Homer, Alaska since 1976 and written about Alaska’s commercial fishing industry since 1980 for the Homer News, National Fisherman, Pacific Fishing and other magazines and newspapers. He has fished commercially for salmon and herring, operated a salmon tender and is currently managing editor of the Homer News.

Daryl Binney has lived in Alaska since1987 and is originally from New York state. She has a biological science degree from Syracuse University and a photography degree from Montana State. She was in the Peace Corps in Burkina Faso, Africa.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Salmon

The season was just half an hour old when Mike said, "OK, let’s see what we’ve got."

As he ran the hydraulics and spooled the net onto the reel, his son Louie and I watched excitedly—I more than he. Louie was 16, a veteran of eight seasons in Bristol Bay and already bored. This was my first.

We knew we had fish. As soon as the net stretched out in the water they began to hit, each kicking up a little death-dance geyser like someone had left the lid off a blender of Margaritas. Now we would find out how many.

The first few sockeyes emerged from the olive-green water listless; Mike and Louie wrestled them out of the net and pitched them into the hold. But when a live one came across the stern roller, Mike extracted it carefully—and kissed it. A big smooch right on the lips. Then he held it up to me. "Gotta kiss the first fish," he said, with a smile but dead serious. "It’s good luck." He had fished in Alaska for 20 seasons and it was apparent this was protocol. So I kissed it, too. After a brief, teen-age rebellion summarily quashed by his father, Louie followed suit.

"He’s just gonna get caught by someone else," the son said half-heartedly as the salmon splashed back into the water, got its bearings and disappeared. "Maybe so," replied the father. "Maybe so."

If there is a single fish synonymous with Alaska’s commercial fisheries, it is the salmon. Powerful, beautiful and valuable, salmon epitomize the bounty of nature and the hardy North Pacific. The ways of the world seem embodied in the species’ life history, from the mysterious appearance of the hatchlings out of the river gravel and their downstream journey to the big unknown to their inevitable return a year or more later and ritualistic mating, spawning and death. At once the fish are concrete and magical, temporal and enduring, of the earth and heavenly.

The aboriginal peoples of the Pacific Rim have revered the salmon since the ice receded some 10,000 years ago, and the reverence continues today. Cultures as disparate as the Ainu in northern Japan, the tribes of the Pacific Northwest and commercial fishermen along Alaska’s coast cling to their "first fish" celebrations, welcoming the salmon home again every spring. Urban residents are cleaning up long-abandoned salmon streams in hopes of seeing the miracle of the spawn once again. There is even talk of dynamiting dams in the Pacific Northwest, solely so salmon can reclaim the waters that once were theirs.

Such efforts may seem impractical in a world where hunting has largely given way to cultivation. Chalk it up to the power of salmon, but to many it seems only right given that Homo sapiens is the newcomer to the planet. The first salmon, Eosalmo driftwoodensis, swam prehistoric seas 50 million years ago. By the time fire-using, spear-throwing humans traipsed down the shoreline of North America the modern salmon was more than million years old.

By virtue of its abundance and annual recurrence, the genus Oncorhynchus ("hook-nosed") helped shape civilizations around the North Pacific. Salmon were easily obtained in a few weeks of summer work. High in protein and fat, the nutritional value was not lost in preservation. Dried or smoked, salmon were easy to transport and to save for the winter, and plentiful enough to feed dog teams, which in turn provided winter transportation. Anthropologists believe that salmon gave aboriginal North Americans leisure time that few cultures enjoyed, which they used to develop a rich and artistic lifestyle, particularly in Southeast Alaska and British Columbia.

The Russian fur trader and entrepreneur Gregorii Shelikhov is credited with the first commercial salmon fishing business in Alaska. He started a drying operation on the west side of Kodiak Island in 1785 to feed his promyshlenniki, the Cossack raiders he brought along as fur hunters and managers. By the turn of the 18th century, the Northwest Co. was selling wooden casks of salted salmon at many of its outposts along the coast.

The roots of Alaska’s salmon industry were just as firmly planted in California, however, when Hopgood, Hume Co. started canning salmon on the Sacramento River in 1864. The methods were crude—each can was cut from sheet tin, rolled by hand and fitted with lids, then soldered shut before it could be run through the retort for sterilization. But the product proved immensely popular and within a few years the technology had spread northward to take advantage of the great fisheries on the Columbia River and in Alaska.

American salmon processors pounced on Alaska shortly after the United States bought the territory from Russia in 1867, opening several salteries in Southeast. The first two canneries began operating in 1878. Within a decade processing plants dotted the new territory from Ketchikan to Kodiak and Bristol Bay. By the Great Depression more than 150 plants around Alaska came alive every summer with the sounds of canning machinery—the sounds of money being made.

Product Details

• Paperback: 112 pages
• Publisher: Alaska Geographic Society (September 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1566610389
• ISBN-13: 978-1566610384
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 10.4 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,773,603 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)