Here's the latest NOAA Marine Forecast for what the Cordova gillnet fleet is undergoing late today off the bars of the Copper River Delta:TONIGHT...S WIND 25 KT DIMINISHING TO 15 KT AFTER MIDNIGHT. GUSTS TO
35 KT ALONG THE COAST EAST OF PRINCE WILLIAM SOUND IN THE EVENING.
SEAS 18 FT SUBSIDING TO 12 FT. RAIN SHOWERS.
My first longtime relationship in Alaska was with the Copper River. It is a holy place, one of the most sacred to me in all of Alaska. I prayed this morning for my longtime friends who went out today to risk their lives, catching the first of 2008's Sockeye and Chinook salmon, in the breakers of the largest ocean-facing river delta on the Pacific Ocean.
Some of my friends will burn $15,000.00 of fuel catching fish there this summer. Multiply 550 times $12,000.00 to get the probable low end of the gillnet fleet's fuel bill for this season on the Copper - almost $6,000,000 in fuel. I can remember when that would have fueled all of Cordova for a year.
Yesterday's Seattle Weekly had an interesting article by Brian Miller, called "Caught in the Carbon Net," on the "carbon footprint" of that fishery, where high-lining high-powered gillnetters race to catch this prime food, have it picked up by floatplanes or even helicopters - iced the whole way - and slapped carefully onto jets or even charter planes to be whisked to Seattle, San Francisco or Anchorage.
"The cult of the Copper River salmon is now a conspicuous form of connoisseurship, like drinking the early bottles of Beaujolais nouveau flown over from France. We want the first and the best and the healthiest, and we're willing to pay for that privilege.
"But how green are those precious pink fillets? New awareness of "food miles" and greenhouse-gas emissions means that scientists are starting to measure the carbon footprint from fishing fleets' diesel engines, the factory processing on shore and sea, and—most important in the Copper River case—the air shipping of product from distant fisheries to your Wallingford grocer or Belltown restaurant within 24 hours of harvest."
Miller goes on to say, "while Alaskan fishing fleets run on diesel (along with the shore processors, the barges bringing in aviation fuel, etc.), Ecotrust estimates that carbon impact at about one-sixth that of the production of feed for farm-raised salmon."
It is a thoughtful article about what our food and seafood really costs.
image - my skiff, the Kannah Creek, with other Cordova gillnetters, at Pete's Point, Bering River, June, 1975. The late Tom Parker flying his Otter over us. Watercolor by me.
5 comments:
As a fellow ex-commercial fisherman I have always thought that Alaskan fisheries were an excersize in enforced inefficiency.
The most green, efficient, and socialist er...progressive way to handle these fisheries would be to set the processing plants at the mouth of each river. After allowing the correct escapment each fish would swim directly into the processing plant to be bled, fileted and processed.
Better biology, better fish, less cost, lower carbon footprint...more progressive
Yup; those were called fish traps. But read your history. Sometimes "green/efficient/'progressive'" doesn't make for the best public policy.
Actually fish traps were like permanently anchored seines. I do know my history. They were run by corporations...that's not very progressive. Also, they were then loaded into boats and taken to the canneries. Not much different than seining...a little more efficient than smaller gillnetters but not nearly as good letting them swim right into the processing plant.
This method would have a very small carbon footprint compared to the current restricted capitalist method.
Cordova, even more than Dillingham and Naknek, is a town that has evolved around the glories of the inefficiency of their methods - gillnetting. And purse seining.
When I lived there - 73 to 76, I was fascinated by the balance of the people in the fleet - rednecks, hippies, Alaska Natives, the Old Believer community. They loved to argue, loved to lie about how or where or when they caught their big set.
But, what a community! They built things. I remember when the pipeline construction was starting up in '75, reporters from Seattle, LA and NYC coming to Cordova, to ask how we felt about the pipeline.
One day, I was out in the boat harbor parking lot, working as a volunteer for PWSAC, supervising high school and middle school kids filling sandbags to be taken down to Sawmill Bay, for concrete for the foundation of the first PWSAC hatchery. A Seattle PI reporter came up to us, asking our impressions of what was going on over in Valdez, where the pipe, long stored at the head of the bay there, was being trucked out to assembly sites.
The reporter was underwhelmed when I told him "This is the real story. Right here in this parking lot. This isn't some big corporate mega-project. This is people in a small town, taking control of their own destiny, rebuilding a fishery with their own hands that an earthquake devastated.
"When that pipeline gets built, it will turn Alaska into a welfare state, run by people from Texas and Oklahoma. They'll try to destroy this town and its way of life, one way or another."
I don't agree with you on much Philip...but I agree with this last comment.
But you have to admit, commercial fishing isn't very progressive. It's a messy, wasteful way to catch fish. It would be more progressive to have the state take over the harvest by putting a wier across every river and then controlling which fish excaped and which swam into the freezer.
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