Commercial Fishing

National Maritime Day is May 22. It’s a small but important holiday recognizing the hard work that goes into a career at sea. Alaska is home to thousands of mariners, including fishermen, navigators, maintenance specialists and law enforcement.

With new EU tariffs looming, Alaska seafood leaders look to Trump’s trade deals for support.

The plant was a major economic driver for the community until it closed last year.

Alaska officials say the changes could make fishing less safe and undermine science critical to managing fisheries.

Alaska’s top seafood trade groups say new tariffs could trigger retaliation from key export markets, pushing the struggling industry to the brink.

A federal judge has ruled that the Trump administration’s mass layoffs of thousands of workers were unlawful.

For decades, the Bering Sea herring fishery has provided bait fish for crabbers.

The issue pits a multibillion-dollar industry against Western Alaska subsistence communities struggling with record-low salmon returns — with climate change in the background.

This season, the Bering Sea snow crab fishery opened for the first time in two years, and the first boats began delivering to processors on Jan. 15. But the Trident Seafoods facility in St. Paul — which the company calls the “largest crab processing plant in the world” — isn’t taking any crab.

Silver Bay Seafoods will acquire processing plants in Dillingham and Port Moller, along with fishery support sites in Dillingham and North Naknek. Silver Bay announced the acquisition from Rodger May, the former co-owner of Peter Pan Seafoods, in a press release Wednesday. The Dillingham and Port Moller plants are Silver Bay’s fourth and fifth plant acquisitions this year. It also took over Peter Pan’s plant in Valdez last spring, and Trident Seafoods plants in Ketchikan and False Pass.