Facing a sea of uncertainty.

• Author: Ess, Charlie
• Position: Alaska's salmon fishing industry - Industry Overview

Farmed fish and record harvests have driven prices down for Alaska's wild salmon. But the fishers of the Last Frontier, always an independent bunch, are tapping their entrepreneurial spirit to stay in the business.

A friend used to joke about becoming a school teacher because he could earn a decent living and have his three months off. Shortly after landing his first teaching job in Alaska, however, he quit to become a commercial fisherman for the obvious reason that he could make at year's income in a summer and take the other nine months off.

That was 20 years ago, the dawning of the heyday for Alaska's salmon fisheries. The state's limited entry program was a year old; the United States had just outlawed high seas fishing within 200 miles of the coast, and wild salmon enjoyed a wild demand. In the decade to follow, a summer's catch and the prices paid for it spawned barroom certitudes such as, "You should be able to gross the value of your limited entry permit in a single season."

For a number of years that saying would be upheld, despite escalating permit values. When pink salmon ex-vessel prices (the amount processors pay fishers) reached nearly $1 per pound in 1988, the subsequent hype led to a six-fold increase in the cost of a Prince William Sound seine permit, with some selling for around $400,000. Sockeye prices hit $2.25 per pound at Bristol Bay that same year, and the area's drift permits, known by brokers as the benchmark of Alaska's salmon fisheries, stormed up to nearly $300,000.

Global Glut

But that was before the global race in the production of farmed salmon would coincide with banner years in Alaska's wild harvests, leading to glutted markets domestically and in Japan. With annual sockeye salmon catches of the '90s hovering near the 50-million fish mark and pink salmon harvests doubling that amount, ex-vessel prices soon plummeted. In 1992, for instance, a statewide harvest of 59 million sockeye - Alaska's blue-chip crop - paid its fishermen a record $460 million. A year later, the state set a record sockeye catch at 64.6 million, but the crop brought in only $268 million.

The weakening fish markets threw permit values into a tailspin. By 1994, Kodiak seine permits depreciated to one quarter of the $150,000 they had attracted in 1990, and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game reported that about a quarter of the permits weren't even fished that year.

As fishing entered the doldrums, the permit-trading market rebounded...