Some 400 miles northwest of Dutch Harbor, Bering Sea pollock congregated in spectacular fashion.
In the wheelhouse of this factory trawler, Captain Jim Egaas scanned a sonar displaying a dense red band that represented millions of fish in a school stretching for miles.
He could see the pollock up close on another screen that relayed images from an undersea camera stitched in the mesh of a quarter-mile-long net. The video feed showed swarms of them deep in the funnel-shaped trap.
Once pulled on board, the tail end of the net bulged with more than 220,000 pounds of tightly packed pollock. A crew member unstitched a seam. Raised by a powerful winch, the net spewed a silver avalanche of fish into below-deck holding tanks to await processing in a plant primed to operate 24 hours a day.
Egaas was in hurry-up mode. Even before the last of this catch was shaken from the webbing, he called for crew members to unfurl a second net from a giant reel.
“I like what we are seeing. We’re on the stock,” Egaas said.
The Northern Hawk is owned by Coastal Villages Region Fund, which uses revenue generated from this formidable trawl operation to help support 20 largely Yup’ik communities in the Kuskokwim River region of southwest Alaska, where subsistence is a mainstay of the culture.
Coastal Villages is one of six western Alaska nonprofits forged by a series of federal actions — initially launched 32 years ago — that wrested control of some Bering Sea fishery allocations from largely Seattle-based fleets.
Today, these groups, with boards of directors drawn from the western Alaska villages they serve, collectively control lucrative catch rights to more than 35% of Bering Sea pollock. This gives them a big stake in the largest-volume seafood harvest in North America, which in 2022 yielded more than 2.4 billion pounds of pollock for products that are mainstays of U.S. and international seafood markets, including McDonald’s fish sandwiches.
Their growing clout in the North Pacific fishing industry comes at a time of increased scrutiny of trawling’s impacts in a Bering Sea rocked by marine heat waves. National Marine Fisheries Service scientists have linked the warmer waters to the implosion of snow crab populations and dramatic declines in chum salmon returns to western Alaska.