November 28, 2018 — Alaska fishermen haven’t been having an easy time with the changing climate.
The cod population in the Gulf of Alaska is at its lowest level on record. Officials have declared disasters after the failure of multiple Alaska salmon fisheries.
So what’s happening farther north in Alaska might surprise you: Fishermen there have been landing huge catches, in numbers that haven’t been seen in decades.
Seth Kantner is one of them. He was raised in a sod igloo 150 miles from the Northwest Alaska hub town of Kotzebue, and has been commercial fishing for chum salmon in Kotzebue Sound for decades.
He’s also a writer, and in an interview from his pickup truck looking out over the sound, he said he’s a little apprehensive about some of the changes he’s been seeing in the region — particularly in the weather and the seasons.
Some of those changes, Kantner said, have fed into the fishing, which has been booming. In the summer of 2017, he fished to the last day of the season to try to hit 100,000 pounds of salmon for the year, which he said is “far and away the most I’d ever caught.”
This past summer, he added: “I broke 200,000 pounds, which is still — I can’t believe it.”
Just to be clear — Kantner said that two summers ago, he caught more fish than he’d ever caught before. And then this summer, he caught twice that much again.