The commercial fishing season for chum salmon in Kotzebue Sound opened on Monday, with one less seafood buyer this year. Despite strong numbers last summer, Seattle-based E&E Foods has quietly closed operations in Kotzebue Sound.
The company did not announce that it was pulling out, but KOTZ followed up on the story after E&E Foods sought to sell its equipment on this radio station. E&E Foods did not respond to requests for comment before airtime.
E&E’s departure from Kotzebue’s chum or keta fishery leaves just two registered buyers in the market: Anchorage-based Copper River Seafoods and the smaller, local Arctic Circle Wild Seafood. That’s for buying from a fleet of about two dozen commercial fishing vessels harvesting in a unique fishery.
“Kotzebue is the only commercial salmon fishery that actually happens above the Arctic Circle in American waters,” said Kevin Clark, manager for Alaska Department of Fish and Game, Northern Region. “Sans maybe Russia having some kind of commercial fishery, it is the furthest north commercial salmon fishery in the world.”
Clark said the fishery began in 1914, operated for four years before closing for nearly four decades, and started up again in 1962. Several canneries and buyers have opened and closed shop in Kotzebue since then.
While Kotzebue Sound’s harvest is relatively small compared to larger fisheries for red salmon in Bristol Bay and pink salmon in Southeast, Clark said that for Western Alaska, the Sound’s commercial chum haul is remarkable.
“The whole Western Alaska has been in a downward trend for chum salmon,” Clark said. “And then last year, Kotzebue was the one shining place in western Alaska where the chum salmon were doing really well.”
For the past several years, commercial fisheries along the Yukon River have closed or crashed. Clark said that farther north, in Norton Sound, fisheries have had lackluster, below-average harvests.
But last year Kotzebue had its eighth-largest year ever, with 425,000 chum harvested.
“Last year was kind of a surprise for everyone,” Clark said.
Despite that big year, salmon buyer E&E will not return.
Transportation is a barrier in the remote Arctic fishery, and weather can be challenging for moving fish out to markets further south. While in the past fish could be sent down on processing boats, like the ones that E&E operated, this year all fish will be transported via planes with limited holding capacity.
“It's much more expensive to fly fish out, like we do in Kotzebue versus being able to just throw them on a tender and run them across the bay to the cannery,” Clark said.
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game initially forecast that this year’s chum harvest would be between 300,000 to 400,000 thousand fish. But Clark said those numbers were based on E&E operating, and now he expects the numbers to be lower. In addition to shipping fish by plane, the company also operated an “at sea” processing plant — another method to send fish out of the region.
"One consequence is that if that is a strong run, there's only so much they can process,” Clark said. “So that would be a potential impact of the one buyer pulling out."
Clark said E&E’s pullout came as a surprise to Fish & Game, too.
Arctic Circle Wild Seafood is one of the two remaining buyers. Mike Scott, one of the owners of the Kotzebue-based company, said E&E’s departure would have little effect on their market.
Scott said that for years, Arctic Circle was the number one buyer for the region. Now, overshadowed by the larger Copper River Seafood, Scott says his company is shifting to offer “value-added” products.
“We run ours a little different,” Scott said. “But you know, it really comes down to at the end of the day, how much the fishermen are being paid for their product.”
Scott said Arctic Circle is opening at 63 cents a pound gutted, with bonuses if delivered in a brailer bag and after 2,500 pounds. That’s compared to just 28 cents per pound whole offered by Copper River.
Although heading and gutting the fish takes more effort than selling whole, Scott said Copper River’s price is still low.
“We hope that, given our price, that gets a lot of fishermen in the water and that everybody has a safe and successful year.”
Last year the average Kotzebue Sound chum was a little over 7 pounds, which would add up to around 2 dollars per fish for those selling to Copper River.
Copper River Seafood’s corporate office did not respond to a request for comments for this story.
