Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
— 48 —
Where Crab is King
I GREW UP ON KING CRAB
. In Seldovia in the late '60s and early '70s king crab was king,
with all the guys shipping out on crabbers like the
Teejin
and the
Amatuli
and the
Frances
E.
and the
Katie K.
and the
Rosie G.
and the
Shishaldin
. As a teenager I earned money for
topics and records by working the blow line at Wakefield Seafoods, where even under the
eagle eye of foreman Dick Green I managed never to let the large claw of a king crab get
by me. Later I got to work in the office for Darlene Kasheverof on a work-study program
through the high school, and I remember writing a check for $100,000 for one of our fish-
ermen, and we still owed him money. King crab fishing was an extremely lucrative busi-
ness, and king crab was so plentiful that I used to take home two-pound coffee cans full of
crab scraps for my cat.
Then in the early '80s king crab stocks crashed and the season shrunk from August 1
st
to
May 31
st
in Kachemak Bay to ten days in the Bering Sea. Seldovia is no longer a crab
town, and those hard-working, hard-drinking days are gone.
But they live on in Kodiak.
The Kodiak archipelago is 252 air miles from Anchorage, has 900 miles of coastline, and
one grizzly bear for every five people. It's my kind of country, a seascape view everywhere
you look, from dockside to the house perched halfway up the mountain, and I definitely
want to come back in August to pick salmonberries.
The city of Kodiak is the second largest commercial fishing port in the nation, with eight
seafood processing plants and 2,884 registered fishing vessels. Kodiak, by my observation,
has the last boat harbor in Alaska that looks like a bonafide working man's boat harbor,
filled with trawlers, crabbers and seiners. There are a few charter boats, but we need not
