Filleting the margins: fuel costs up, salmon returns down for 2008 harvest.

• Author: Resz, Heather A.
• Position: FISHING

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

After 36 consecutive summers operating his family's small fishing operation out of King Cove, Rick Weber wonders whether he'll be in business next season.

"Right now I don't know for sure if I am going to go fishing next year," he said. "I don't look at my future in the fishery as too bright."

It's the exponential increase in the cost of diesel that's sinking him.

"Before this year, I wouldn't have believed you if you told me I'd be paying $5 a gallon for diesel," he said. "But I did this year."

While the price of gas more than doubled, Weber said the price Peter Pan Seafood Inc. paid him for fish went up 4 cents a pound.

The math for lots of small operators like Weber just doesn't pencil out. Consider his case--he fishes about four hours out of King Cove and his boat uses between 9 and 11 gallons an hour. If he travels to the fishing grounds, catches nothing and heads back to the harbor, just that round-trip costs about $400, Weber said.

"We prepare to go fishing without knowing the price of the fish. We put our nets in the water not knowing," he said.

Simple economics forced at least one King Cove fisherman to switch from salmon to cod in mid-season, Weber said.

"If the price of fuel keeps going like it is, I'll be out of business very soon," he said.

Weber was among the King Cove fishermen that stayed on the beach for the first half of June in an effort to get a better price from the processor.

In the end, Peter Pan, paid a base price of 67 cents a pound out of King Cove. Weber said his iced fish drew 72 cents to 74 cents.

In False Pass, the Aleutian Pribilof Island Community Development Association's community development quota (CD Q) ran a small processor that could take 17,000 pounds a day. It paid 95 cents a pound.

Weber said unless something gives, small Alaska salmon-fishing operators will go the way of Arctic dinosaurs. The ripples of the problem reach deep into Alaska's coastal communities, which depend on the revenue from fishing to support hundreds of communities and businesses, he said.

"What's going to happen to Alaska's coastal communities?" Weber asked. "This resource is at their front door and they can't afford to harvest it."

SUSTAINABLE RESOURCE

From Anchorage to Eek it's impossible to find a community in Alaska that doesn't rely on the bounty of the sea to set its tables. And it's been this way in Alaska's for thousands of years.

Laura Fleming, spokesperson for Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute...