Waters Not Calm for Young Fishermen: SEA OF GRAY: New Generation Faces Big Cost to Join Industry.
By Wesley Loy, Anchorage Daily News, Alaska
Jan. 27–Lindsey Bloom is so enthused about her budding career as a commercial fisherman that she’s got the “Made in Alaska” emblem and two leaping sockeye salmon tattooed on the small of her back.
Raleigh Eager, who found himself living in a tent on Kodiak Island after a friend back home in New York City told him he could get rich fishing in Alaska, is hoping to diversify his small cod-fishing operation — if he can find the dollars to do it.
Mike Jones, who abandoned a job fishing for crab on the perilous Bering Sea after the once-lucrative paychecks dried up, now is a deckhand on a halibut boat and hopes to captain his own vessel someday.
The trio represents the reinforcements for an old Alaska industry, a new generation looking to take the wheel from the graybeards who now dominate the tough trade of commercial fishing.
The transition won’t be easy, say industry players and advisers. With more than a 100-year heritage in Alaska, commercial fishing is a profession that used to be fairly wide open and free of regulation.
Today, the open range of the sea is increasingly fenced, regulations are dense and new players need tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy government permits or fishing rights, known as quotas, to catch salmon, herring, halibut, sablefish, crab and other species. Then there’s the cost of modern fishing boats, gear, diesel fuel and bait.
The costs have many young fishermen worried. And veteran fishermen — some of whom got their fishing permits and quotas for free as original recipients — likewise fret about whether anyone will be able to afford to buy them out once they retire.
According to state fishery regulators and others, the graying of the fleet is advancing significantly. The average age of people holding state permits to catch salmon and other types of fish in 2005 was 48, up from 41 two decades earlier. People holding federal permits and lucrative individual fishing quotas, or IFQs, for halibut and sablefish also are pushing toward retirement age, industry observers say.
The new generation of fishermen just coming into the business face major hurdles, and not just financially, said Arne Fuglvog, a former commercial fisherman from Petersburg who last year went to Washington, D.C., as an aide to U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska.
“You’ve got to be an accountant, a lawyer and a businessman to be a fisherman these days. And for good measure, you gotta be a biologist too,” he said.
But a two-day seminar this week at Anchorage’s Hotel Captain Cook attracted plenty of up-and-comers.
Nearly 70 people, nearly all under the age of 40, took part in the Alaska Young Fishermen’s Summit. The Alaska Sea Grant Marine Advisory Program, part of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, sponsored the event as a way to cast a net for “future fishing leaders.”
The seminar was a crash course on the business, the rules and the feisty politics of Alaska’s commercial fishing industry, which employs thousands of people and produces more than half the U.S. seafood catch.
After the lectures and PowerPoint presentations were over, Bloom, Eager, Jones and other attendees had a chance to mingle with some old salts of the business, people like former commercial fisherman and legislator Clem Tillion of Halibut Cove and Norm Van Vactor, a manager for Seattle-based fish processor Peter Pan Seafoods Inc.
Bloom is a tiny-statured 26-year-old from Juneau who nets salmon at Bristol Bay. She owns her own permit and captains her own boat, the 32-foot Erika Leigh. Her dad is a longtime commercial fisherman.
For Bloom, the fishing life is the best kind of life, offering the freedom of working for yourself on the open water plus regular shots of adrenaline.
Once, she said, fishing had just begun in the bay’s notoriously combative Egegik district when her boat motor quit. All around, boats had nets in the water catching lucrative sockeye while she sat with air in the fuel system. But not for long.
“I had no idea I could bleed my valves, get my engine running and get back fishing,” she said. “It’s just so empowering. You don’t have a choice. You just suck it up.”
Bloom said she hoped to pick up some helpful tips from the young fishermen’s summit. Her boat is old and slow and she’d like to upgrade to a newer model capable of refrigerating or icing the fish, which improves freshness and the dockside price. But she reckons the upgrade could cost as much as $300,000.
Brooklyn-born Eager, 35, who came to Alaska in 1992, also has his own boat, a 35-footer he uses to jig for cod. It’s a small-scale style of fishing, one that young fishermen can afford. To advance his career, Eager believes he needs to diversify — buy a permit to also fish for salmon and invest in halibut IFQs that can easily run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
He’s frustrated that too many established halibut fishermen seem to be paying less and less to deckhands — jobs Eager and many others do to generate the cash necessary to buy quota and build their own operations.
Christopher “Kit” Durnil, a Seward deckhand, said the best thing about the young fishermen’s summit was “just seeing the number of people in our same situation.” That is, trying to make the climb in fishing.
Tillion, 81, agreed that getting into Alaska fishing these days is costly. And complicated. But Alaska fish remain abundant, and the startup cost in some fisheries is a bargain.
“The opportunities are unbelievable. You gotta pick the right thing, you gotta take some risks,” he said. “People talk about the good old days. They weren’t worth anything.”
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Copyright (c) 2007, Anchorage Daily News, Alaska
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.
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