Chignik Bay's population used to balloon in the summer to hundreds more people, as cannery workers and fishermen came to tap the sockeye run. But the past few years have been especially tough.
are meant to help fishery participants harmed by the 2018 sockeye crash, improve information used for in-season assessments and to forecast future runs, according to the state. They’ll also go toward developing management approaches that mitigate the impacts of future fishery disasters.
That means Trident Seafoods will be the only processor for the fishery, and those who fished for OBI will have to find another market.“Fish is everything for that region,” he said. “And without it, things just started going away.”Gene Carlson, a fisherman from Chignik Bay, said certain parts of the community have been slowly shrinking for years. About 90 people live there now. And there’s just one store. It’s owned by Trident and operated seasonally.
Across town and up a steep hill, the July sun streamed through the large windows of Chignik Bay’s city office last summer. The only person there was Mayor Robert Carpenter, sitting at a desk. Carpenter came to Chignik in 1992 as a processor with Aleutian Dragon Fisheries and has witnessed the area’s fishing industry decline over the past four years.Now, he said, the city is still struggling to pay its bills.
The population used to balloon in the summer to hundreds more people, as cannery workers and fishermen came to tap the sockeye run. But the past few years have been especially tough. Now, the coalition is working with the Ivanof Bay Tribe to interview people in each community through a tribal resiliency grant from the Bureau of Indian Affairs.