Silence of reclusive Alaska Ranger owner could come to an end

The reclusive owner of a fishing boat that sank in the Bering Sea last week, killing the skipper and four other crew members, has not spoken publicly since the ship went down.

Her silence could soon come to an end if she's subpoenaed to testify in an inquiry that began on Friday and continued over the weekend in Dutch Harbor, Alaska.

The Fishing Company of Alaska, which Karena Adler co-founded in the mid-1980s, has been represented at the inquiry by attorneys and company officials. Adler has not appeared, The Seattle Times reported Sunday.

Associates, past employees and industry officials describe Adler as a tough, savvy businesswoman _ a maverick who often clashes with the government and, like many in the industry, is frequently sued over injuries and accidents aboard her vessels.

Friends say she's a warm, caring person who has been devastated by the loss of the Alaska Ranger and five of its crew.

"Karena Adler, she's blaming herself," Mike Szymanski, a former Alaska state senator who is FCA's lobbyist, told The Times. "She can't figure out what she could have done differently. She's beating herself up over it."

Adler bought the Alaska Ranger at an auction in Anchorage 16 years ago, paying $4.5 million. Sweeping in wearing snakeskin boots and a fur coat, she paid the same price for a second ship. Both would become workhorses of her Seattle-based company, known as FCA.

The boats helped Adler become one of the most powerful women in Alaska's male-dominated fishing world. Her fleet of seven boats and Alaskan fishing rights are valued at many millions of dollars.

While shrewdly building her fleet, Adler, 55, has remained enigmatic, a stranger whom some competitors call "the Howard Hughes of fishing."

"This is the most reclusive woman worth ... millions that you never heard of," said Chris Kuebler, a Michigan attorney who has frequently sued FCA on behalf of injured seamen.

Those who know her say Adler rarely appears in her company's offices. She runs the business by phone and fax from the confines of her gated waterfront home on Mercer Island east of Seattle.

Last week, a woman who answered the call box at the home would not say whether Adler was home and told the reporter to go away.

The Alaska Ranger sank about 120 miles west of Dutch Harbor on March 22. A harrowing rescue by the Coast Guard and the Ranger's sister ship saved the lives of 42 crew members.

Adler's fleet of ships _ five trawlers counting the Ranger and two long-liners _ are part of the "head and guts," or H&G, fishery, which drags the ocean floor for yellowfin sole, rockfish, cod, mackerel and other species.

The H&G catch is immediately cleaned of the heads, fins and guts, then frozen and shipped to worldwide markets, often Japan.

Under new fisheries rules aimed at reducing the accidental catch of prohibited halibut and crab, most of the H&G fleet formed a cooperative to divvy up the catch. But FCA has refused to join. It has sued fisheries managers, alleging excessive regulation.

In 2006, the federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) fined FCA $254,000 for 34 separate violations, including illegally keeping a tank of king crab and halibut, and for not reporting two Northern fur seals killed after being caught in the nets.

The company was also accused of tampering with the records of federal observers, who travel aboard fishing vessels to ensure compliance with fisheries laws. It has appealed the fine, and the case is pending.

Adler's entry into the fishing industry two decades ago came as the Alaska fleet was rapidly expanding, thanks to federal efforts to limit foreign ownership. She became a genius fish broker, George Anderson, a former FCA port captain.

"Karena knew the markets, backwards, forwards and sideways," said Anderson.

Adler has won the loyalty of many of her longtime crew through her generosity, said Rosie Szymanski, Mike Szymanski's sister and one of FCA's first employees.

In the 1990s, Szymanski said, Adler donated about $250,000 to upgrade the medical clinic at Dutch Harbor. She has sent roses every year to the widow of an employee who was killed at sea. At Christmas, she's been known to send her crews at sea stockings stuffed with Playboy magazines and candy.

Fishing can be brutal on workers, with 18-hour days and no days off, in dangerous stormy seas, for about $4,000 a month.

Rick Weaver, an Oregon man who worked in Alaska for FCA last summer and has sued the company for injuries he says he sustained when crates of frozen fish fell on him. He alleges the company kept him aboard the processing ship for three weeks despite injuries that left him bedridden and in pain.

As a privately held company, FCA's financial records are closed, but its portion of the annual H&G catch is estimated at more than $30 million a year at wholesale prices, based on figures from the North Pacific Fishery Management Council. Other ships in other fisheries bring in more revenue.

FCA holds valuable harvest rights issued by the government that are potentially worth tens of millions of dollars. The Alaska Ranger alone was estimated at being worth up to $27 million before it sank.

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Information from: The Seattle Times, http://www.seattletimes.com