All Geared Up & No Place to Go

Hello Fishies!

This just in from a wheel house in Dutch Harbor:

The people who own the seafood processing plant in St. Paul decided to raise the lease fee - sky high. The company that leased it said – no thanks, too rich for our blood, we will use the floating processors instead.

Well just as the boys were untying their boats to head out to the crab grounds they got some bad news. Yep, you guessed it. The Stellar Sea had been en route to process the northern shares of the opilio catch when she caught fire.

So there they sit, still tied to the dock in Dutch. There are some boats that are fishing the southern shares, and some that are cod fishing. At least they have something to do!

Wouldn’t it be nice if they were allowed to deliver their catch where they wanted to? Again, thanks a lot for the processor allocation Sen. Stevens…..

From Trident Seafoods website:

Trident's impressive St. Paul operation is the largest crab production facility in the world. St. Paul is one of two Pribilof Islands which sit in the middle of the Bering Sea, approximately 600 miles southwest of Anchorage. The St. Paul plant concentrates production on a variety of Alaska crab species including king crab, snow crab and hair crab. Its capacity is a half-million pounds of crab per day. The plant also processes halibut, cod, and other available species. Generally the facility remains open for four months out of the year and employs between 20 and 400 people.

From the Anchorage Daily News:

With the Stellar Sea sidelined, the Bering Sea seafood industry faces an uncertain season -- particularly in the opilio crab harvest.

"If they can turn it around in two weeks, I don't think it's going to have any major impact," seafood analyst John Sackton said. "But if it's out for longer than that, that will have an impact, and there will have to be some adjustment."

The vessel is under contract with Seattle-based processor Peter Pan Seafoods Inc. and was supposed to process most of the crab from the northern area of the fishery this year. Seattle-based Trident Seafoods Corp. has a floating processor working in the Bering Sea, but that vessel is currently processing cod.

Stay tuned!

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