An inside look at Alaska fisheries

By Hal Bernton
Seattle Times staff reporter

	This is the first of eight documentaries in the Thorstenson-Sabella Collection on the North Pacific fishing industry.
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When Bob Thorstenson retired as president of Icicle Seafoods, he was filled with restless energy to document the roots of the famed Alaska fisheries.

He tracked down film footage and cornered friends and colleagues who still could recall the days when sailboats fished Bristol Bay's sockeye run, salmon pirates — bristling at the domination of Seattle processors — raided floating fish traps off Ketchikan, and the first longliner schooners left Ballard to chase Alaska halibut.

The industry that emerged from those early days now ranks as a global concern, with annual processing revenues that top more than $2 billion. The 71-year-old Thorstenson helped build that industry in a half-century career that took him from his boyhood home in Point Roberts, Whatcom County, to Southeast Alaska and back to Seattle.

But as he began his research in 1994, he feared that much of the industry history was slipping away as old-timers aged and died.

Thorstenson persuaded John Sabella, a Seattle fisheries consultant, writer and producer, to share his passion. "He started coming around my office on a regular basis, always unannounced," Sabella recalls. "He would have an old newspaper clipping and say, 'You got to look at this. We got to make a video,' " Sabella recalls. "And he just kept coming back."

Free preview tonight The documentary, "Centuries of Fish," will be previewed from 6 to 9 tonight at the Odyssey Maritime Discovery Center at Seattle's Pier 66, 2205 Alaskan Way. A panel discussion on the North Pacific fishing industry will follow. The event is free and open to the public.

Their partnership was launched as Thorstenson battled with Parkinson's disease, which steadily has eroded his ability to speak. But for the past nine years, the partnership has persevered.

The two men tracked down more than 70 fishing-industry pioneers, who offered lengthy interviews recorded on video and transcribed on paper. They searched through old corporate files, attics and maritime museums to retrieve photos and film footage — now preserved on video — that dated back to the 1920s, when a fleet of square-rigged sailing ships ferried fishermen and Chinese processing crews to the Alaska salmon harvests.

The end result of their collaboration is the Thorstenson-Sabella Collection, a series of eight documentaries that collectively offer a vivid history of the fishing industry in the Northwest and Alaska.

The latest documentary, "Centuries of Fish," chronicles the development of the distant-water fleet, including the explosive growth over the past quarter-century, as a new generation of trawlers — and factory trawlers — pushed the foreign fleets out of U.S. waters and claimed a pollock, cod, whiting and flatfish harvest.

The documentaries offer the voices of a regional seafood industry that often is overshadowed in a regional economy increasingly defined by Microsoft, dot-coms, biotech and service industries.

Most of the early documentaries focus on the salmon industry that was the initial launching point for the North Pacific seafood industry. Vintage film footage offers some startling glimpses of the fishermen, who would spend six days on end in small open boats — cooking over kerosene stoves and sleeping in a canvas-covered forecastle — to bring in the Bristol Bay harvest.

The documentaries also explore the prickly relationship between large packing companies that developed the market and the Alaskans whose coastal waters yielded the bounty.

In the early 20th century, the Alaska Packers Association had a monopoly over the harvest, and its successor — Pacific American Fisheries — wielded huge political and economic clout in Alaska. The packers built a series of complex fish traps — some staked out from pilings and some floating in deeper water — that rounded up the salmon into small pens akin to corrals. The construction and operation of these traps is recounted in several of the documentaries.

But many Alaskans came to despise the prowess of the fish traps, and took to plundering them. Indeed, one of the documentaries, "The Days of Salmon Traps & Fish Pirates," explores the theft in great detail.

"It was considered a patriotic duty ... if you fought the canned-salmon industry, you were showing that you were an Alaskan," said Clem Tillion, a former Alaska legislator from Halibut Cove interviewed by Sabella.

"The hatred of the traps was not so much that they were taking too much but that they were owned and operated by people who did not live in the territory."

When Alaska achieved statehood in 1959, the state constitution included a provision banning all fish traps from coastal waters.

Thorstenson had plenty of firsthand experience in the bitter debates over cannery dominance of the fishing ground.

He was born in 1931 in Point Roberts to a family of fishermen turned farmers. He graduated from the University of Washington, sampled life as a fisherman, then worked his way up the Alaska cannery ranks of Pacific American Fisheries. In 1965, as Pacific American withdrew from Alaska, his plant in Petersburg faced closure, a disaster for the local fleet. So he helped a group of local fishermen to found their own processing company.

The group had only $40,000 in capital but was able to obtain a $1 million loan from Seattle-First National Bank to get them through a tough first year. Summer runs were a bust, with a late fall run of chum salmon saving the young operation from financial disaster and spawning what would become Icicle Seafoods.

"Each guy and his wife signed off on that note," Thorstenson recalled. "But I didn't have anything, so I didn't really have anything to lose."

Icicle expanded throughout Alaska, and by the time Thorstenson retired the company had shifted its headquarters to Seattle.

After retiring, Thorstenson raised most of the money to finance the documentaries, hitting up colleagues for donations. He also forged ties with regional maritime museums and foundations to help sponsor the work.

And he aided Sabella with an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the fishing fleet. "It would be nice if he could remember our anniversary. But he can remember when a boat sank, changed a name or whatever — he's great," said his wife, Pam Thorstenson.

Thorstenson continues to write his memoirs and spend time with old friends.

They meet for luncheons sponsored by the Northwest Salmon Canners Association every other Wednesday at the Yankee Diner in Ballard.

But he increasingly struggles with Parkinson's. Thorstenson hoped to be at tonight's premiere. But he is now undergoing a new round of surgery at the Mayo Clinic in Arizona to help steady his walk. "He called me up to say, 'I can't make it,' and 'I'm sorry to let you down, buddy,' " Sabella said.

Thorstenson is expected to remain in Arizona for about six weeks, then return to his home north of Seattle. His back patio is blessed with a sweeping view of Puget Sound. So on clear days, he can grab his binoculars, sweep the horizon and spot the boats heading for the Alaska fishing grounds.

Hal Bernton: 206-464-2581 or hbernton@seattletimes.com

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