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Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute (ASMI) officials hear that processors have mostly cleared out their overflowing inventories of Alaska salmon from the 2022 and 2023 seasons, but the problem remains that Americans don’t buy enough seafood to sustain consistently profitable sales, particularly in years of strong salmon runs. And while last year’s problem was an oversupplied market, which pushed prices paid to fishermen to as low as 20 cents a pound for pink and chum salmon, this year’s harvest may come up short of a robust supply, Greg Smith...
WRANGELL – The borough wants a data center to plug into Wrangell. Better yet, it could even move into the unused formal hospital property. Data centers are large hosting sites for multiple servers that provide computing power and storage for cloud-based service providers. While at Southeast Conference, held in Ketchikan last month, borough representatives spoke with Sam Enoka, founder and CEO of Greensparc — a San Francisco-based technology company that specializes in setting up modular, small-scale data centers for cloud computing. Enoka gre...
Commercial purse seine fishermen in Southeast Alaska this month are preparing for an interesting summer salmon season with no confidence that they will earn a good price for the pink and chum salmon that they catch, and with seafood processing companies Silver Bay Seafoods and E.C. Phillips and Son each starting out their first year of operations in the former Trident Seafoods plants in Ketchikan and Petersburg, respectively. Southeast seine fishery openings will kick off for the 2024 season...
Silver Bay Seafoods will acquire the Peter Pan Seafoods plant in Valdez, and operate Peter Pan plants in Port Moller and Dillingham for the 2024 salmon season, the two companies announced last week. The deal with Peter Pan is the second major acquisition Silver Bay has announced in recent days. The company announced its purchase of Trident Seafood’s Ketchikan processing plant in March. A joint news release by SBS and Peter Pan said, “Shifting operations of the two facilities to SBS is a component of a larger restructuring, still being fin...
Silver Bay Seafoods will acquire the Peter Pan Seafoods plant in Valdez, and operate Peter Pan plants in Port Moller and Dillingham for the 2024 salmon season, the two companies announced today. The deal with Peter Pan is the second major acquisition Silver Bay has announced in recent days. The company announced its purchase of Trident Seafood’s Ketchikan processing plant in March. A joint news release by SBS and Peter Pan said, “Shifting operations of the two facilities to SBS is a component of a larger restructuring, still being fin...
Trident Seafoods reported last Friday it was “entering the final stages of closing deals for three of its Alaska shoreside plants,” including its operations in Ketchikan and Petersburg. On Wednesday, Trident announced that an agreement has been reached “in principle” for Silver Bay Seafoods to acquire the Trident processing plant in Ketchikan. A buyer for Petersburg’s plant has not yet been officially named, but rumors are circulating that an announcement to that effect is expected to happen this Friday. Seattle-based Trident Seafoods...
Dear Friends and Neighbors: Greetings from Juneau! The 2nd session of the 33rd Legislature started this week. It is thrilling to be back, and I hope everyone in House District 2 is enjoying a healthy and prosperous new year. During this year's second regular session of the 33rd legislature I will continue to serve on the Education, Community and Regional Affairs and Fisheries committees. Please watch for updates on the committee work in this columnas the session progresses. Fisheries: Trident -...
In a major hit to Southwest Alaska’s fishing industry, Peter Pan Seafood Co. will keep its huge plant in the village of King Cove shuttered this winter, meaning that the company won’t be processing millions of dollars worth of cod, whitefish and crab. “It’s one of the most difficult days of my life,” Rodger May, one of the company’s owners and a longtime player in the seafood industry, said in a brief interview Thursday. “It’s just a devastating time for the industry.” The closure is the latest sign of the widening turmoil in Alaska seafood ma...
In January The Petersburg Borough Assembly unanimously voted to award the construction contract for the Blind Slough Hydroelectric refurbishment project to McG/Dawson Joint Venture for an amount not to exceed $5,744,000. The Petersburg Borough Assembly unanimously approved an ordinance in its first reading that would rezone a lot located at 10 N. 12th Street for commercial use. The rezoning was requested by the Petersburg Indian Association ahead of their prospective purchase of the lot, which h...
Trident Seafoods issued a press release on Tuesday, Dec. 12 announcing a “comprehensive restructuring initiative” that will put the seafood giant “on a path toward streamlining its Alaska operations.” They announced plans to seek buyers for their shoreside processing plants in four locations: Petersburg, Ketchikan, False Pass, and Kodiak. “Our Kodiak operations are integral to the Gulf of Alaska fisheries,” said Jeff Welbourn, Senior Vice President of Alaska Operations at Trident Seafoods in the company’s press release. “They are highly effi...
The borough’s human resources department provided a progress report about the municipality’s newly implemented safety measures during the Borough Assembly Meeting Nov. 6. In September, Alaska Public Entity Insurance (APEI) representatives presented a safety review of the Petersburg Borough during a regular assembly meeting. Assembly members and human resources staff left that meeting with actionable recommendations to address safety concerns within the borough. Part of that was the establishment of a formal Borough Safety Committee. Becky Reg...
After recent years of record or near-record runs and harvests, Bristol Bay sockeye salmon numbers are expected to return to more average levels next year, according to state biologists. The 2024 Bristol Bay sockeye salmon run is expected to total 39 million fish, with a predicted range between about 25 million and 53 million fish, according to a preliminary forecast released Friday by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. That is 35% lower than the average over the past 10 years but 6% higher than the long-term average for Bristol Bay, the... Full story
After serving 44 years as plant manager, Dave Ohmer retired last Friday. Dave's grandfather, Earl Ohmer, co-founded Alaskan Glacier Seafood Co. in 1916. When Earl died in 1955 Dave's father, Dave P. Ohmer, continued the business, and in 1979 when his father passed away, the responsibility fell to Dave. Though it turned out to be his destiny, it hadn't been his plan. "I wanted to be a teacher," said Dave, when he sat down with the Pilot the day after his retirement. "My dad always wanted me to...
Thanks for the ice To the Editor: Not that I am a spokesperson, but on behalf of the sports and subsistence fishing fleet I would like to extend a sincere thank you to Coastal Cold Storage and Trident Seafoods for generously providing ice to the town to keep our bounty iced and as fresh as possible and keep our food and beverages cold. I would also like to thank the workers that come from far and wide for their hard work that keeps our industries and businesses running. As long as I’m getting mushy, I would also like to express my a...
Oversupply from bumper harvests last year and inflationary pressures squeezing household food budgets have made it a terrible year for Alaska salmon prices. A near-record pink salmon harvest in Russia isn’t helping by adding more fish to the market. “It’s a challenging year for all Alaska seafood,” said Jeremy Woodrow, executive director of the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute. Pollock prices are down, “we’re seeing impacts on crab too, and other whitefish species,” he said Aug. 10. And now, “salmon is getting the microscope.” Th...
Early in the season, one of my deckhands started the joke, “Pay to Bay,” dreaming of people paying money to fish on a drift boat in Bristol Bay, like people pay to climb Mt. Everest. That joke came around to bite us. We had a breakdown during the peak of the run, then the day we got fishing again Trident posted the 50-cents/lb base price (before quality incentives amounting to another 30 cents or more). The processor we sell to, Silver Bay, seemed sure to follow Trident’s lead. I sent my deckhands home with checks for $5,000 each—not much fo... Full story
A few times this summer, Jared Danielson, who fishes for salmon on the Alaska Peninsula, found himself fighting back tears in his bunk. Aboard the F/V Five Star, his boat, Danielson and his deckhand put away as many pounds of fish as they could. They had no breakdowns. But his seafood processor is paying him 70 cents a pound for his salmon - half of last year's price - which means that instead of his usual six-figure haul for a summer of hard work, he might only break even, or go home to his... Full story
Early Monday morning, passengers in Seattle sat awaiting their flight to Ketchikan where their plane, a Boeing 737 with an enormous salmon painted on the side, would make its final run as Alaska's most well-known flight. The iconic Salmon Thirty Salmon was ready to board passengers for the final flight of its 18-year tenure serving as Alaska's famous flying fish. Kaitlyn Lynch, a software engineer for Alaska Airlines showed up at the gate wearing a sweatshirt featuring a large salmon on it. The... Full story
Petersburg's Sons of Norway Hall was bustling on Sunday afternoon as members readied the hall and prepared the featured courses for the annual Lutefisk and Lefse Dinner - a tradition so old no one can say for certain when it started. The dinner is both a celebration of lutefisk and homemade lefse and an opportunity for members to pass down ancient recipes and skills. Lutefisk is fish (fisk) preserved in lye (lut). This year, for the first time, Wendell Gilbert of Tonka Seafoods took sole...
Last Tuesday Humanity in Progress held the sixth annual Project Connect Resource Fair in Petersburg, an event that takes place in conjunction with the Point in Time Count, a nation-wide survey that happens on the same night each year "...to try and get a community understanding, in a certain point of time, of homelessness and housing insecurity," founding member Ashley Kawashima explains. The data collected from individuals experiencing housing or food insecurity is a vital tool for successful s...
WRANGELL — As the market continues to shift from canned salmon toward more frozen product, “the company wants more frozen pinks,” said Trident Seafoods Southeast regional manager John Scoblic. Which means Trident will freeze pinks along with chums at its Wrangell plant this summer. After a three-year closure due to weak chum returns, Trident plans to reopen its Wrangell plant, buying and freezing salmon in July and August. “We’ll be testing out some new things there,” Jeff Welbourn, Trident’s senior vice president for Alaska operations, s...
Wrangell — After a three-year closure blamed on weak chum returns, Seattle-based Trident Seafoods plans on running its Wrangell processing and cold storage plant this summer. “We’re going to operate in July and August,” focusing on chums and pinks, employing a little over 100 workers for the season, said Shannon Carroll, Trident’s director of public affairs, on Jan. 26. That would be a smaller payroll than in past years, he said. Chum salmon returns to Southeast have improved the past couple of years. In advance of running the processin...
After the heat wave-induced collapse of the Bering Sea snow crab fishery, some fishermen were looking, with hope, at the upcoming tanner crab harvest out of Kodiak. The nearly 6-million-pound quota was the highest in decades. And some people spent more than $100,000 to buy a permit to fish this year, said Kevin Abena, one of the leaders of the Kodiak Crab Alliance Cooperative. But fishermen’s hopes for a banner season are now in limbo, as the 130 boats in the Kodiak tanner crab fleet are on strike — holding out for higher prices from the sea... Full story
A joint House-Senate committee of the Alaska Legislature voted against accepting $20 million in federal aid to seafood processors, with lawmakers saying that a new state law prevents them from accepting that much money outside the normal state budget process. The 3-4 vote came Wednesday during a meeting of the Legislative Budget and Audit Committee, which makes financial decisions on behalf of the Legislature when lawmakers are not in session. The failed vote means seafood processing companies in Alaska will wait several more months to receive... Full story
David Juel Marifern, age 30, of Shoreline Washington passed away unexpectedly Sunday, September 25, 2022 not far from Ballard, where he started his life. David was born in Ballard, Washington on April 27, 1992 to Barbara and Bruce Marifern, brother to his sister Samantha Marifern. He grew up and attended Petersburg High School where he swam competitively. Raised in a fishing family, he took pride in participating in different fisheries throughout his young years. David has always had a heart... Full story
