The U.S. Department of Commerce is giving the Aleutian Islands community of King Cove $888,789 for a new boat hoist, an action it says will support the region's fishing industry.

Alaska pollock’s “A” season opened saturday. That’s when the pollock trawlers set out into the Bering Sea to scoop up the whitefish that keeps Unalaska’s lights on.

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.

A cargo ship carrying lithium-ion batteries reported a cargo fire Thursday morning, and is currently sitting outside of Unalaska Bay while the Coast Guard works to stabilize the vessel. As of Friday afternoon, the fire was contained but still burning.

The company announced their facilities in False Pass, Petersburg, and Ketchikan are for sale as well. The company will also either sell or retire the historic Diamond NN Cannery in Naknek and its support facilities in Chignik.

The total amount of pollock allowed to be scooped up by trawlers in the Bering Sea will stay the same in 2024. In its Dec. 9 meeting in Anchorage, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council moved to keep the total allowable catch for pollock at its current level of 1.3 million metric tons, a move that has generated criticism from conservationists, tribes, and the trawling industry alike.

The majority of Alaska’s Bristol Bay commercial red king crab have been caught for the season. This year’s quota was rather low, coming in at about 2.1 million pounds for the entire fleet. To compare, that’s less than half the total allowable catch, or TAC, for the 2018/2019 season. Ethan Nichols is the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s area management biologist for groundfish and shellfish in the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands region. He said even just a couple million pounds was a welcome amount for harvesters during historic lows in the state’s commercial crab industry.

On this episode of "Island Interviews," KUHB's Ethan Candyfire chats with Unalaska fisherman Scott Lorenzen about his experiences working on a small fishing boat, and how he shares his stories with audiences across the nation on social media.

When scientists estimated that more than 10 billion snow crab had disappeared from the Eastern Bering Sea between 2018 and 2021, industry stakeholders and fisheries scientists had several ideas about where they’d gone. Some thought bycatch, disease, cannibalism, or crab fishing, while others believed it could be predation from other sea animals like Pacific cod. But now, scientists say they’ve distinguished the most likely cause for the disappearance. The culprit is a marine heatwave between 2018 and 2019, according to a new study authored by a group of scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game has reopened the Bristol Bay red king crab fishery, following a two-year closure.ADF&G announced Friday morning that the lucrative crab fishery will open Oct. 15, following analysis of survey data by the North Pacific Fishery Management Council.