Alaska's fishing industry: the universal relevance of a multi-billion dollar industry.

• Author: Dobbyn, Paula
• Position: FISHERIES

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Tele Aadsen started out in Wasilla, spending her first few years in the strip mall town north of Anchorage later made famous by a certain former Alaska governor. But the Sitka troller and writer didn't remain in Mat-Su for long. When Aadsen was a second grader, her parents, Ken and Val, built a sailboat in their Wasilla backyard, a construction project that eventually morphed into a job and a lifestyle for their daughter.

"My fishing career started in 1984 when I was seven," Aadsen says. "After my parents finished the boat, they sailed it from Anchorage across the Gulf of Alaska without any clear idea of what was going to happen next."

As it turned out, the Aadsens found themselves in Sitka, one of Alaska's busiest fishing ports located on the outer coast of Southeast's scenic Inside Passage, surrounded by the lush Tongass National Forest. As the family moored their sailboat, Sitka's docks were crawling with people off loading fish and others looking for deckhand jobs. The family instantly got caught up in the summer fishing frenzy that defines many coastal Alaska communities.

They decided to rig up the sailboat as a hand troller and try their hand at salmon fishing.

"After a couple of years it became obvious we weren't going to earn a living that way," Aadsen says.

In the fall of 1986, the Aadsens decided to get serious. They traveled to Port Townsend, Wash., and found a fiberglass hull. They traded a piece of land they owned in Petersburg for the hull, and went to work transforming it into a power troller. The family lived in "a broken-down motor home outside the boat barn," and, later, in the Port Townsend boat yard, working 18-hour days to get the Willie Lee II built in time to fish the upcoming season.

"They didn't know it was impossible for a couple to build a boat in nine months, so that's what they did," Aadsen says. "We fished the Willie Lee II that July and sold the sailboat."

They fished together as a family for a few more years. But the bottom fell out of the Alaska wild salmon market in 1989 following the Exxon Valdez spill, and Ken decided to get out of the business. Val, however, saw a future in commercial fishing in Southeast Alaska and kept the boat. The couple split.

At the time, according to Aadsen, Val was one of the few female skippers in Southeast Alaska, and her only crewman was her daughter. They fished for nearly a decade together until a few years of poor returns, low prices and equipment costs took a financial toll. Her mother ended up selling their boat.

Aadsen took a break from fishing, got a master's degree and did social work in Seattle for seven years. But, like many fishermen who get hooked on the lifestyle, Aadsen's heart was on the water. She traded her social work job for a full-time career as a troller and a longliner in Southeast Alaska and hasn't looked back since.

"I'm paying off my student loans with my fishing business," says Aadsen, who...