Alaskan salmon keep boats and Business afloat: sustainability and commercial fishing.

• Author: Solberg, Dustin
• Position: FISHERIES

As the summer's commercial salmon fishing season begins in earnest, there are happenings in communities all throughout the state of Alaska that demonstrate how fishing means business.

"The boat yard gets busy. And we start to see new faces," says Fritz Johnson, a Bristol Bay commercial salmon fisherman from Dillingham.

Boats return to the water. Crews mend nets. In the hardware stores, the net lofts, the harbors, and the streets there's an undeniably quicker pace. And most people you meet have a singular mission: to get ready.

"Where streets were empty before, now they start bustling. And excitement for the season opener builds almost daily. It's just electric," says Kim Ryals, who directs the Copper River/ Prince William Sound Marketing Association in Cordova.

The bustle is the norm in fishing ports like these on Alaska coasts, and for good reason. Alaska's commercial salmon fishing fleet produces 95 percent of the nation's wild Pacific salmon catch.

And those fish enter a marketplace that eagerly awaits their appearance. The Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute (ASMI) reports that its 2012 polling confirmed that consumers hold Alaska salmon in very high regard. Specifically, 43 percent of respondents said they were more likely to recommend "Alaska salmon" than any other protein source in the marketplace. (Only the more inclusive "Alaska seafood" ranked higher, at 45 percent. USDA prime sirloin came in third, at 38 percent.)

In order to maintain this favorable position in the marketplace, industry observers insist Alaska's fishing fleet will need to improve on the significant gains it has already made in ensuring the salmon it delivers are of the highest quality. Secondarily, astute marketing campaigns to targeted consumer groups help to build demand.

Five Salmon Species Targeted

The state's salmon fisheries produced a catch valued at $657 million in ex-vessel prices in 2011. That's nearly a third of the state's seafood ex-vessel value. These salmon fleets target five species of Pacific salmon across a far-flung geography and a diversity of gear types. Alaska salmon fisheries stretch along a remarkable extent of the state's coastline and generate a widely distributed surge of economic activity each year.

Beginning in the Tongass of Southeast Alaska, the commercial salmon fisheries extend northward as far as Kotzebue and as far west as Unimak Island beyond the Alaska Peninsula.

ASMI reports salmon fisheries directly employed 38,300 workers in...