On a summer fishing trip in the Bering Sea, the captain of a factory trawler faces growing pressure to keep chum salmon bound for Western Alaska rivers out of its nets.
Deckhand Martin Vasquez walks through a pile of fish as they are transferred from the net into holds below deck on the Northern Hawk factory trawler, Aug. 6, 2023 in the Bering Sea.
Once pulled on board, the tail end of the net bulged with more than 220,000 pounds of tightly packed pollock. A crewman unstitched a seam. Raised by a powerful winch, the net spewed a silver avalanche of fish into below-deck holding tanks to await processing in a plant primed to operate 24 hours a day.Egaas was in hurry-up mode. Even before the last of this catch was shaken from the webbing, he called for crew members to unfurl a second net from a giant reel.
Their growing clout in the North Pacific fishing industry comes at a time of increased scrutiny of trawling’s impacts in a Bering Sea rocked in past years by marine heat waves. National Marine Fisheries Service scientists have linked the warmer waters to theA federal lawsuit filed this year by two Alaska tribal organizations — the Association of Village Council Presidents and Tanana Chiefs Conference — seeks a court order to force federal regulators to reassess pollock harvest levels.
Yukon-Kuskokwim tribal leaders also have pushed for more action to sharply restrict the trawl take of Western Alaska chum from the, composed of federal, state and industry officials who help set harvest rules. This would be coupled with a federal rule already in place that limits the pollock fleets’ take of chinook.the council backed a motion to study a range of options to limit the pollock fleet’s chum catch.
“The status quo is failing Alaskans. I do not believe industrial trawling is sustainable, especially during such low ocean productivity,” she declared in aThe tribes also have drawn support from crabbers battered by depressed snow and red king crab stocks that scuttled harvest seasons, as well environmentalists and some other Alaska commercial and sport fishers, along with ocean conservation organizations that have ramped up criticism of the trawl fleets.
“I have never never caught an orca, and I was kind of surprised that the flatfish guys did,” Egaas said.Salmon is a key food source for Western Alaska communities, critical to Indigenous cultures and village economies.
A state biologist, Katie Howard, says the trawl fleet’s chum bycatch is believed to have a low impact on returns to Western Alaska drainages. She estimated it would have reduced run sizes by well under 10% but said an updated analysis needs to be done. The number of Kuskokwim chum that made it past an in-river sonar jumped more than ninefold this year compared with 2021. Communities that fish also benefited from a big sockeye run. But on the Yukon River, subsistence harvests for summer chum remained low, and the fall run was too weak to allow any targeted catch.Deck boss Nam Tran, right, gestures to a deckhand as they try to untangle a net aboard the factory trawler Northern Hawk.
The Alaska Ocean factory trawler moves through the Bering Sea north of St. Paul Island on Aug. 6 in a view from the Northern Hawk factory trawler. The 376-foot Alaska Ocean is the largest catcher/processor vessel in the U.S. fleet. The salmon often can be found at the same depth and locations as pollock, and appear to be more numerous in years when bottom temperatures are warmer. Sometimes, when he moves away from chum, Egaas drops a net in an area where he catches even more, or finds a scarcity of pollock.
In 2021, despite Egaas’ best efforts to steer clear of salmon, the Northern Hawk caught more than 7,800 chum. In 2022, his efforts were more successful, and the vessel’s chum take plummeted to fewer than 320 fish, according to a report compiled by a factory trawler cooperative. “None of us want to catch them. We understand the pressure that the board members are getting from the guys in the village that aren’t able to fish,” Egaas said. “We proved we can do better, and we need to.”The Northern Hawk factory trawler is docked in Dutch Harbor as it offloads processed Alaska pollock on Aug. 4. At left is the Matson Tacoma container ship.
The crew of the Northern Hawk factory trawler offloads processed Alaska pollock on Aug. 4 in Dutch Harbor. In 2010, Coastal Villages split with American Seafoods. The Alaska nonprofit took the Northern Hawk, along with some pollock quota, as part of the compensation for its ownership stake.Morgen Crow, then the group’s executive director, drew $832,367 in salary and other compensation in 2010. Critics said that payday gave new meaning to the term “pollock provides,” a slogan Coastal Villages long has used to promote the benefits of the trawl fishery to Western Alaska communities.
Coastal Villages invested more than $3 million in an electric winch system and new equipment for surimi, a fish paste used to make products such as imitation crab. Other improvements include Starlink satellite Wi-Fi that offers the crew the opportunity to video chat with family or even stream movies in their bunks.
Last year, Coastal Villages and Norton Sound, in another joint venture with Maruha, acquired nine more pollock boats delivering to a shore-side processor. Coastal Villages also acquired a 17,100-square-foot Seattle operations hub on a nearly 7-acre tract along Lake Union. Factory workers inspect and portion fillets of Alaska pollock aboard the factory trawler Northern Hawk. Many are immigrants. Their home countries include more than a dozen African nations as well as the Philippines, Mexico and Vietnam.
He lives in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City with his wife and two daughters. He is an observant Muslim, so he uses his early morning break to spread out a yellow rug and pray, and sometimes has had to fast during the day to observe Ramadan while at sea. Some who have worked on other vessels prefer the Northern Hawk, where they say the crew is more close-knit and you don’t have to worry about your cellphone or other gear getting stolen.Maria McKenzie, one of nine women who crewed aboard the Northern Hawk this summer, works the day shift watchdogging the quality of the surimi production.
Through the years, Coastal Villages management has made repeated efforts to recruit Kuskokwim villagers to work aboard the Northern Hawk and other Bering Sea vessels owned by the group. The deck crew push fish into a hold aboard the factory trawler Northern Hawk on Aug. 9 in the Bering Sea. “We did push it for a long time that we were trying to get people from our villages to work out there. It didn’t work out too well. And then during COVID, we dropped it, talking about doing that again,” said Richard Jung, a Coastal Villages board member.“I’d love to see everybody on the boat come from our region, you know, all the way from the captain down to the lowest person on the boat. .
In these derbies, some operators, to maximize their profits, sometimes just keep the roe, which fetched the highest prices in Asia. They didn’t want to spend the time salvaging lower-value fillets from pollock. So they jettisoned carcasses filled with flesh, which floated in long, decaying slicks behind the vessels.
“The concept is shall the living resource of the sea have a chance to survive,” Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens said in a speech to the Senate. “The pollock is the basic food chain for the Bering Sea and the North Pacific.” Then in 1998, Stevens and his Republican colleague Washington Sen. Slade Gorton helped forge a congressional compromise. This legislation limited the size of the fleet and ushered in a new era of slower-paced fishing where quotas are assigned to each vessel and catch information is freely shared through cooperatives, with harvests and bycatch tracked by federally contracted observers.
For crabbers, the unseen impacts of the footropes on sea bottom life are a source of consternation. They fear that pollock trawling may impede the recovery of snow and king crab populations and the rebound of commercial harvests. They are frustrated that federal regulators have not restricted the trawl fleet’s winter-spring access to a nearly 4,000-square-mile zone where red king crab can be found.
As temperatures climbed, the pollock were on the move, migrating north as well as west toward the maritime boundary with Russia, according to federal surveys. More recently, amid cooler Bering Sea temperatures, Alaska trawlers have once again found pollock — in big concentrations — farther south. Second mate Spencer Zoch takes the wheel for the night shift aboard the factory trawler Northern Hawk on Tuesday, Aug. 8, 2023 in the Bering Sea.
“They have a lot of boats,” Egaas said. “They have some brand-new fancy ones too. They are right on the line.”He liked to keep the chum salmon count to a half dozen, or fewer, coming up with each tow of the net. SeaShare executive director Jim Harmon told the Anchorage Daily News that the organization welcomes both chinook and chum.
“We did have it moving back and forth — and doing the things we want. There are still some things to be worked on,” said Rose, who estimates the net device — developed with federal funds — could be ready as early as next year.
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