October in Alaska is beautiful. As the angle of the sun changes, it shines with an amber glow when the sun finally breaks through the cloud cover. Big southerly storms often bring plenty of wind, rain, and heavy seas, and fishing becomes a game of finding the right weather window between storms.
For the hook-and-line troll fleet, there’s usually a brief lull after a busy summer. For most of the fleet, summer trolling ends in mid-September, and then there’s about a full month without fishing until the winter kings open in mid-October. Salmon gillnetters are busy harvesting the last of the fall cohos, trying to stay ahead of the nasty weather and add a few more good days to their seasons.
For many in the Southeast Alaska fleet, October is a time to change gears. Those who had a prosperous summer season start thinking about where they’ll vacation and spend time with their families after being away for months. For fleet members who didn’t do as well — or who have big boat payments — October often means switching gears and entering a different fishery.
One of the coolest small-boat fisheries around Sitka and Southeast Alaska is diving for sea cucumbers. These funny-shaped, colorful invertebrates lie all over the shallow ocean floor. Divers cruise the bottom, stuffing their dive sacks as they work toward their daily limit of 2,000 pounds for their area. Many fishermen say it’s their favorite fishery because they get to see so many cool creatures while they’re underwater — from cuttlefish and octopus to colonies of migrating king crab.
It’s fun, but it’s also physically exhausting — spending around eight hours in the water, hustling to find cucumbers. Typically, the fishery runs one day per week per area, giving fishermen time to rest and recover after taxing themselves in the cold.
The sea cucumber market is strongest in Asia, where they’re dried, then rehydrated and eaten whole. You can scrape out the meat along the body, but the actual edible meat is only about 10–15% of the animal’s weight, and it’s too wasteful and expensive to offer in our shares. The meat itself is sweet and delicious — somewhere between a dungeness crab and calamari.
Speaking of crab, many salmon fishermen switch gears in October and begin the fall/winter dungeness crab fishery. Dungeness crab populations are highly variable, and we’re currently in a two-year downturn. This summer’s season was slow, so to help preserve more crab for future years, this season is only open one month instead of the usual 3–4 months.
Most of the dungeness harvest in Southeast Alaska takes place in protected waters, where fall storms can’t whip up the big seas. That makes it possible for smaller boats to catch these delicious crustaceans.
When it comes to braving the weather, longliners that still have black cod quota, have to manage shorter days and smaller windows to fish. Catch rates and prices have been strong, so most of the quota is caught — leaving more fishing grounds for those still in the area and improving catch rates for the rest. They fish offshore in roughly 1,500–3,000 feet of water, where storms with 20–30 foot seas can happen weekly. That means they have to time their fishing carefully to finish the season safely. It’s not for the faint of heart, but we’re thankful for their hard work!
I also wanted to share one more part of October in Sitka: how we store and process our food. It’s the time of year when you hope you had enough subsistence harvest to fill your freezers with plenty of fish and berries to last until spring. After all the work it takes to harvest, fillet, and freeze with care, it’s important to make sure your freezer is set as cold as possible.
I recently bought a chest freezer that goes to ~-11°F, and I always keep it as cold as it will go. Fish degrades faster than other proteins, so if you want your fish to stay as fresh as possible, keep it as cold as you can. If you store fish in a freezer above your refrigerator — and it’s packed full of other items — it likely won’t stay much colder than about 0°F. At that temperature, it can degrade in a matter of weeks and months.
See the chart below:
This chart from Alaska Sea Grant shows how different fish degrade over time at different temperatures. It illustrates the difference between 0°F and ~-20°F, but far more damage happens when temperatures go above 0°F—or fluctuate warmer. That’s one more reason to store fish in a chest freezer you know can hold at least ~-10°F. It’s worth the effort to honor—and enjoy—our catch in the best shape possible.
Thanks for reading and for being part of what we do!
Your fisherman,
Marsh.
Marsh Skeele
Marsh is our original fisherman and helped start Sitka Seafood Market over a decade ago. He grew up fishing with his family outside of Sitka and began his own fishing journey captaining the F/V Loon in 2011. Shortly thereafter at a dinner party sharing his catch, he met friends that figured out how to get his fish to the Midwest and Sitka Seafood Market was born. He loves finding the highest quality ingredients and sharing the stories of their harvest over a dinner party. You can find him fishing with his family in Sitka and searching for the next delicious piece of seafood to share with you.
