Here's the latest NOAA Marine Forecast for what the Cordova gillnet fleet is undergoing late today off the bars of the Copper River Delta:TONIGHT...S WIND 25 KT DIMINISHING TO 15 KT AFTER MIDNIGHT. GUSTS TO
35 KT ALONG THE COAST EAST OF PRINCE WILLIAM SOUND IN THE EVENING.
SEAS 18 FT SUBSIDING TO 12 FT. RAIN SHOWERS.
My first longtime relationship in Alaska was with the Copper River. It is a holy place, one of the most sacred to me in all of Alaska. I prayed this morning for my longtime friends who went out today to risk their lives, catching the first of 2008's Sockeye and Chinook salmon, in the breakers of the largest ocean-facing river delta on the Pacific Ocean.
Some of my friends will burn $15,000.00 of fuel catching fish there this summer. Multiply 550 times $12,000.00 to get the probable low end of the gillnet fleet's fuel bill for this season on the Copper - almost $6,000,000 in fuel. I can remember when that would have fueled all of Cordova for a year.
Yesterday's Seattle Weekly had an interesting article by Brian Miller, called "Caught in the Carbon Net," on the "carbon footprint" of that fishery, where high-lining high-powered gillnetters race to catch this prime food, have it picked up by floatplanes or even helicopters - iced the whole way - and slapped carefully onto jets or even charter planes to be whisked to Seattle, San Francisco or Anchorage.
"The cult of the Copper River salmon is now a conspicuous form of connoisseurship, like drinking the early bottles of Beaujolais nouveau flown over from France. We want the first and the best and the healthiest, and we're willing to pay for that privilege.
"But how green are those precious pink fillets? New awareness of "food miles" and greenhouse-gas emissions means that scientists are starting to measure the carbon footprint from fishing fleets' diesel engines, the factory processing on shore and sea, and—most important in the Copper River case—the air shipping of product from distant fisheries to your Wallingford grocer or Belltown restaurant within 24 hours of harvest."
Miller goes on to say, "while Alaskan fishing fleets run on diesel (along with the shore processors, the barges bringing in aviation fuel, etc.), Ecotrust estimates that carbon impact at about one-sixth that of the production of feed for farm-raised salmon."
It is a thoughtful article about what our food and seafood really costs.
image - my skiff, the Kannah Creek, with other Cordova gillnetters, at Pete's Point, Bering River, June, 1975. The late Tom Parker flying his Otter over us. Watercolor by me.