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Gourmet's Barry Estabrook investigated why this season's most sought-after catch is suddenly scarce. The following is an excerpt of his findings published on Gourmet.com.
Life is not good here. The fish are not running. And things are going from bad to worse. Due to the extremely low king return, fishing anything is entirely and wholly out of the question."
That dispatch was sent early this week from Jack Schultheis, operations director of Kwik'pak Fisheries, a processor of salmon caught out of the lower Yukon River in remote western Alaska, to Jon Rowley, who handles communications for the small, Eskimo-owned company. (Rowley is also a Gourmet contributing editor.)
In the last year or so, Yukon River kings have become the "new" Copper River salmon, the most sought-after catch-of-the-day at top-end seafood restaurants because of their unusually high oil content. For a while, it looked like everyone was winning. The salmon were moist, tasty, and healthful. Exports to the Lower 48 provided vital income (sometimes the only income) for struggling native Yup'ik fishing families that use earnings from the fishery to purchase gasoline (currently $7.60 a gallon up there) for necessary subsistence activities such as hunting moose and gathering berries. And, better yet, the stocks were sustainably managed.
Then disaster struck. So few king salmon returned to the Yukon River this month that fishery managers ordered drastic cuts to subsistence fishing. There will be no commercial harvest.
The story continues at Gourmet.com: Politics of the Plate: Tough Times for the King of Kings
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6-25-2008 @5:42PM totoro said... weird, wasn't there a story about this tribe in Saveur last month-how successful the venture was going? That is really sad if things have taken a bad turn. :(
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6-26-2008 @11:56AM Estabrook said... As Jon Rowley says, things were going great--attention from major food magazines being just one example. The native fishermen hoped to build on that momentum this summer. The few thousand dollars each made from the fish was vital to the community, which has almost no other sources of income. A friend of mine, the well-known Las Vegas seafood chef Rick Moonan, just got back from a trip up there. He told me that the people--some of the nicest he's ever met anywhere--were devastated. Let's hope that the fishery revives--and that those responsible for salmon management up there do something to assure that it does.
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6-26-2008 @5:17PM Silver_Potato said... It's been like that all over the West Coast, there isn't enough plankton for the Salmon to eat once they reach the ocean.
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