The Small Craft Cafe, overlooking the harbor in Sand Point, was busy. Not slammed, but pretty good for a Thursday morning in August.
“We are the only dine-in restaurant in Sand Point at this time,” said Heather Thompson, who owns the cafe with her husband. They only open the small, family-run restaurant during fishing seasons, when the small harbor in the town of about 800 people is alive.
“But the economy and the way the industry is, you know, we would never be able to afford to keep our doors open if we didn't have the fishing,” Thompson said.
The Alaska Board of Fisheries is expected to vote Wednesday on a slew of measures that locals fear could effectively shut down Sand Point’s fishing industry – and local businesses that rely on it
The seven-member board sets regulations for Alaska’s fisheries, including seasons, harvest limits and management plans. Its members are meeting in Anchorage this week to consider new proposals that would restrict fishing in the South Alaska Peninsula, centered around Sand Point near the end of the Alaska Peninsula.
The region, commonly referred to as Area M, has been the center of a decades-long fight over who has the right to catch salmon as they migrate from the ocean to the river where they spawn.
Salmon populations have plummeted in recent years. Returns of chum and Chinook salmon have gotten so bad in parts of Western Alaska that they’ve prompted moratoriums on subsistence fishing on the Yukon River and temporary closures on parts of the Kuskokwim.
Meanwhile, Area M has been open to fishing, prompting outrage in many Y-K communities. Stakeholders on both sides of the debate have shown up to state and federal fishery management meetings for years, calling on regulators to take action.
And on Wednesday, the Board of Fisheries is poised to do just that.
Commercial vs. subsistence
The board heard testimonies on Tuesday from people who said their smokehouses were empty; that elders were starving due to a lack of salmon; and that ageless cultural practices were dying out. They pleaded with the board to restrict how many salmon Area M fishermen must let pass during the busy June fishery before they were allowed to catch them.
“We are changing our tradition and our way of feeding for subsistence,” said Vivian Korthuis, the chief executive of the Association of Village Council Presidents. “Therefore we need maximum protection of all the salmon as they go through Area M.”
The board also heard from Area M fishermen who pointed to studies that showed the minimal effect their fishery actually has on the Y-K; who reminded board members that they voluntarily stand down when there is a lot of chum in the water; and who warned that Sand Point stood to become the next Alaska fishing community at risk of becoming a ghost town by the hollowing out of their industry.
Out on the Smallcraft Cafe’s back deck last summer, Heather Thompson’s husband, Kiley Thompson, was taking a cigarette break from prepping the boat.
He said the way the fight is commonly described, as commercial industry versus traditional subsistence, misses a basic reality about how people live in the Eastern Aleutians and the Alaska Peninsula. He said it’s a false division.
“That’s the confusion, that subsistence and commercial are different,” said Thompson, who is the president of the Area M Seiners Association. “In Sandpoint, in King Cove and in False Pass, they’re not. That’s how we put food on the table. That’s where the food comes from.”
The argument is sharpened by a season that fishermen here describe as punishing even before the board’s decision enters the picture. Thompson said June — normally a financial jump-start that helps pay for fuel and the early costs of the season — didn’t work that way last year.
“We spent more money on fuel,” he said.
‘Using us as pawns’
The Tern is a 58-foot seiner, homeported in the small-boat harbor in Sand Point. Art Holmberg has fished out of it in Sand Point for about 50 years, but he said this might be his last season.
“I'm gonna sell this boat, the family-owned boat for 50 years,” he said as he organized fishing gear on the deck. “I gotta sell it. Don't have a choice.”
For Holmberg, the frustration goes beyond a single year and into an accumulating sense that a fishery built around family-owned boats is being squeezed by costs, politics, and public perception.
“The last probably 20 years, we started getting political bullshit getting into the fisheries,” he said.
In his telling, the economics and the politics reinforce each other: costs rise, revenue feels less reliable, and the sense of being blamed for someone else’s crisis builds resentment.
“We're just trying to survive, just trying to survive and make money, and just, it's getting tough,” Holmberg said. “It’s a political game now, and using us as pawns.”
He said he wanted his grandson to become a fisherman, but now he tells him not to enter the business.
“It's not feasible to pass on a debt to my grandson. So he's goin’ to school this winter. He's goin’ to mechanic school,” he said.
