By Jenny Neyman
Photos by Jenny Neyman, Redoubt Reporter. Zach Oakley, left, and Coy Kirby fillet sockeye salmon at Custom Seafood Processors in Soldotna on Friday. Fish processors report record-setting amounts of sockeye flooding into their plants.
Redoubt Reporter
After a couple 16-hour days in a row trying to keep up with the sea of sockeye salmon pouring into Custom Seafood Processors, in Soldotna, brought by dip-netters and sportfishermen hauling them from the massive runs surging into the Kenai and Kasilof rivers, Coy Kirby said he could fillet fish with his eyes closed.
In a way, he has been.
“You work 16-hour days, then you go to sleep and you dream about filleting fish. You wake up and you’re filleting your girlfriend’s pillow,” said Kirby, 23, of Soldotna.
Next to him on the line Friday, deftly slicking his knife along each side of a salmon spine, peeling red flesh from white bone and silver carcass, was Zach Oakley, 20, of Soldotna. He’s also been feeling the effects of the recent swell of salmon.
“You have some weird dreams,” he said. “I had a dream last night that I was putting all my stuff in bags — my wallet and socks and all my random things — and vacuum sealing it,” Oakley said.
The sea has bestowed an unexpected bounty upon Cook Inlet — a bumper sockeye run to the Kenai and Kasilof rivers — surprising in both the amount of fish and their early arrival. Usually, the Kenai sockeye run hits its peak the last week of July. This year, however, the sockeye counter in the Kenai River clocked a record-breaking 230,643 on July 17, followed by another whopping 177,000-plus on July 18.
That wave of sockeyes has drawn a rising tide of fishing effort, especially as the Alaska Department of Fish and Game has liberalized opportunities — extra openings for commercial drift- and set-netters, 24-hour personal-use dip-netting, and increased bag limits for sport anglers.
But catching the sockeyes is only one part of the fish frenzy. Next it’s up to fish
A holding freezer at Custom is stacked with totes holding customer orders Friday. Custom’s owner, Lisa Hanson, had to go to unusual steps last week to keep up with the influx of fish — exchanging sockeyes and closing to incoming fish for a day in order to get caught up.
processors to deal with the surge of fish.
“All the local companies knew that this would be a decent run, an improved run over last year. So I think, fortunately, we all made plans and some investment to be ready,” said Paul Dale, owner of Snug Harbor Seafoods. “However, the size of the run certainly has exceeded — by a wide margin — those forecasts.”
As of Friday, Snug Harbor’s crews had been combining to work 24 hours a day for nine days straight, and Dale said he had about 100 more people working than he did at this time last year.
“We’ve broken all sorts of records around here. We have purchased more Cook Inlet salmon in the last eight days than we did all of last season,” Dale said.
The increased volume presents increased challenges.
“We’re doing what everyone does — we’re working 24 hours a day. We are hiring additional people, air-freighting in additional supplies and mostly finding other people to help us process our fish,” he said.
Fishermen are pitching in to help unload their catches, vendors have been accommodating in providing additional supplies and workers are keeping the pace up, despite long days with little sleep.
“Fresh salmon don’t tolerate much in the way of excessive delay,” Dale said. “Things have been moving along remarkably timely, given the volumes. We certainly have had some delayed offloads at the docks, but that’s not really a quality issue. The fish are as well off in a boat, and maybe better, than in a tote.”
Getting the fish offloaded and processed is only half the battle. The fish still has to get sent off to market.
“There are any number of problems that can crop up when you ramp up a region to the levels we have to without a lot of notice,” Dale said. “There are impending shortages of freezer vans and refrigerator containers — there’s only X number of fresh trucks that go down the highway and there are only so many freight possibilities on airplanes. Any of that can become a factor in pinching our industry here. It’s a stressful struggle to keep finding routes for everything that we all have to move. Of course, it has to not only move, it has to move on time.”
So far, so good, Dale said, or as good as can be expected for the amount of work required.
“There’s not a lot of sleep going on around here, that’s for sure,” he said. “It won’t last forever and we’re trying to make the best of it.”
Large-scale processors dealing with the commercial catch aren’t the only ones fighting to keep their heads above the flood of fish. Smaller processors, catering to sport anglers and dip-netters, are slammed, as well.
At Custom, owner Lisa Hanson has had to take unusual steps to keep up with the influx of sockeyes.
“We have so much more fish. It’s coming in at three times the rate we’re processing,” Hanson said Friday.
On Thursday she had 216 scheduled pickups — fishermen coming back for the fish they dropped off to be filleted, packaged and frozen — which is up about 30 percent from a more standard third week of July. Add to that the 500 to 800 orders a week that need to be packaged for shipping.
And this isn’t even the peak of the season, Hanson said, when corporate groups of 20 to 30 people come to fish the Kenai, then bring their catch to Custom for processing.
“That would be normal for a week from now — the very last week in July into the first week in August. To have this high of numbers this early in the season is unusual. Right now we’re at our full push without any of our big clients,” she said.
Hanson has hired more staff to try to keep up. Last year at the peak of the sockeye run she had 38 employees. This year she’s already got 52.
“Just yesterday I took three people off the street that just happened to come in, to fortify the packing crew,” Hanson said Friday.
Most of her “kids,” as she calls them — “They’re all my kids, since mine are
Custom Seafood Processors owner, Lisa Hanson, tells her crew to go eat the midafternoon meal her cook prepared for them in a brief moment of respite from work Friday.
grown,” she said — are 17 into their early 20s, looking to earn money for college or whatever else their lives bring after high school. They’re energetic and eager for the overtime pay, but there’s only so much even youth-fueled productivity can accomplish in a 16-hour shift, even with the meals and ever-present snacks Hanson’s cook provides for the crew.
“These kids are amazing. I’ve never had such a good crew,” Hanson said. “I literally have got my crew working as much as it is healthy to work and it’s right on the verge of that. People can only go so hard, even if they’re willing and they want to.”
On Thursday night, her crew worked until 2 a.m. and was back at it Friday morning at 8.
“To them it’s just a sea coming that never ends. It can be very defeating. At the
Workers slog through a glut of sockeye salmon at Custom Seafood Processors on Friday.
end of the day you turn around and there’s as much following it as what greeted you in the morning. And there’s no sign of it changing in the next two weeks,” she said.
Workforce is one challenge, but space is an even bigger one. Hanson built and moved the business into a new facility on the Kenai Spur Highway in 2006 that is four times the capacity of the hodgepodge of buildings Custom used to operate out of a few blocks down the highway, in the area around the Superstructures building.
Even with the expanded space, more efficient layout and updated technology, there simply was no room for the influx of fish.
“I never could have fathomed that we would truly max the capacity of this building,” Hanson said. “It was coming in so fast I had my holding bay plumb overflowing just trying to get fish into the cooler. And we have to keep that cooler constantly rotating of incoming fish and outgoing dates. You can’t just keep pushing it in and pulling it out without that very careful circulating system we use, or fish would sit in the cooler and rot in the back.”
Hanson cried uncle last week and employed some unusual measures to avoid putting the quality of the fish in jeopardy. At 8 p.m. July 19 she posted signs and added a message to the phone line saying Custom was going to an exchange program for sockeyes, meaning anglers bringing in their catch would get the same poundage of fish back, inspected to meet strict quality standards, just not the fish they actually caught and brought in.
“I never thought I’d see the day again. When I left (the old space) I thought, ‘Never again will I have to exchange fish,’” Hanson said. “We’re still doing custom orders for other fish. Kings are a little different, they’re a real trophy. People are emotionally attached to their kings, as they have a right to be. People have a right to be attached to their reds, too. I just knew if I didn’t do something to take steps to move quicker we were going to have fish in danger of spoiling. We were just dancing on that line.”
Space and supplies are the biggest constraints. Hanson has a complex organizational system to get orders processed and ready to go when customers need them. Fish is inspected and weighed in and immediately put in a refrigeration unit; then processed, bagged and vacuum-sealed; then loaded into a blast freezer, then moved to a holding freezer marked with the customer’s pickup or ship-out date. Keeping orders separate means having a separate tote for each order, and since one fisherman can bring in orders from multiple days of fishing, that can mean multiple totes for one fisherman all moving through the process and having to be consolidated and kept in cold storage.
Hanson said she ordered 500 more totes at the start of the season but still just
Teddie Purdy, left, and Sarah Evenson bag sockeye fillets at Custom Seafood Processors on Friday.
plain ran out of them last week. Even after going to an exchange for sockeyes July 19, Hanson said she still was strapped for totes and cold-storage space. That meant fish would have to sit out and wait until space and totes freed up, which Hanson wouldn’t allow. On Thursday she went to an even more dire measure and stopped accepting incoming fish for a day — from 6 p.m. Thursday until Saturday morning.
Most customers have been disappointed but understanding, she said. Some have offered encouragement — even sending pizzas for the processing crew. A few have given Hanson grief over the decision, but she said she’d rather face frustration now than risk damaging the quality of the fish.
“We had to have a catchup day. I couldn’t stand out there and commit to people that, ‘Yes, everything’s fine,’” she said. “We’re stressed, we are bulging but I don’t let that bulge go to the point that will sacrifice the quality of the fish. When they get home a week from now or a month from now and pull their fish out of the freezer and thaw it out all excited to have their first dinner and kind of catch an off smell — I’m not going to deal with that kind of unpopularity. I’ll risk any bad-mouthing over my decision far before I’m going to have that kind of thing happen. It’s not so much about the people as the product.”
As the sockeye run continues and fishermen continue their harvest, processors continue to do what they can to surf the tide, bumpy ride though it may be at times.
“I am out of tricks,” Hanson said. “We’re going to go as fast as we can, the best we can, as efficient as we can and try to get back up on step as quickly as possible and hopefully be able to stay there.”
