Linda Behnken and Natalie Sattler with the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association discuss how the organization’s partnership network has allowed over half-a-million seafood meals to be distributed from the Columbia River to Western Alaska. This year, a subsistence donation program organized in Dillingham has sent 5,000 pounds of sockeye upriver to families of the Yukon and Chignik areas.

The wreck of its processing barge in Bristol Bay two years ago could have been the end of the newly-formed Northline Seafoods, but the Sitka-based operation is planning a comeback – in a big way.

On Wednesday (11-30-22) Northline announced it had received a $40 million dollar food supply chain loan to not only rebuild its floating processor, but also to reinvent the industry in the Bay.

The pictures from the wreck of Northline’s SM-3 processing barge are not pretty. The 150-foot vessel began service in Southeast Alaska as a platform for helicopter logging, with an upper deck originally designed for aircraft.

That superstructure collapsed when the SM-3’s anchor buoy parted in a September gale in 2020, and 80 mile-per-hour winds blew it ashore in Bristol Bay not far from Ekuk.

The six crew aboard escaped unharmed, but the $7-million dollar barge was a crumpled pile of twisted metal – and in the hands of salvagers and insurance agents.

Northline CEO Ben Blakey says the loss of the SM-3 was also a turning point, and a chance to rethink the company’s model, which is to have a floating processor available closer to the fleet, and spare them the long run from the fishing grounds to shore-based processors in Naknek. The SM-3 was innovative, but it wasn’t perfect.

“We had to ship using the traditional methods of freeze containers that increases cost – it’s very inefficient,” Blakey said. “And  there’s there’s snags and snarls along the path from Alaska to Seattle. So this new barge will actually integrate the freezing process: buying fish from fishermen, freezing them, we’ll store them on board, and then tow the entire vessel to the Pacific Northwest, in the winter months where they’ll be distributed. So it’s kind of a way to cut out cold storage, cut out shipping, and take it all in-house and consolidate it.”

With $40 million now in hand from a US Department of Agriculture Food Supply Chain loan, plus another $22 million in financing from a company called Greater Commercial Lending and a Seattle investment banking firm Zachary Scott, Northline is literally doing what President Biden’s infrastructure bill suggests, and “Building Back Better” – or at least, bigger. The new processor, the “Hannah,” will be three times larger than the SM-3. But like its predecessor, the Hannah will also be a repurposed vessel. In this case, a massive container barge.

“It had been shipping containers between I believe Florida and the US Virgin Islands,” said Blakey. “So it’s older, it was built in the late 90s. But it has a lot of life left. And it’s large – it’s 400 feet long by 100 feet wide, which is substantially larger than the last barge that we rebuilt.”

Read more details about Northline’s plans here.

Blakey says that even before the SM-3 was wrecked, Northline was looking for ways to improve its model of flash-freezing fish in the round, and shipping them directly to markets for processing. Initially, the idea was to build another barge for storage and shipping, to tie alongside the SM-3. After the accident, Blakey credits the company’s chief technical officer, Drew Cohen, for coming up with the all-in-one concept behind the Hannah. Northline believes that doing more with less is a winning formula for the industry.

“It’s certainly a question of efficiency,” he said. “So the original platform was designed to operate with a smaller labor footprint, which we did. So we were able to freeze 200,000 pounds a day with a fraction (of the labor) of what you would typically use to freeze 200,000 pounds a day of headed and gutted fish. So we’re incorporating that. But then in addition, this platform is different. Since we’re adding in the shipping component and the storage component, we’re expanding our savings, and hoping to use those savings to both improve the market and quality but also pay fishermen a better price.”

The Hannah is being towed from the Gulf of Mexico to Bellingham, and construction will begin in January. The vessel will house about 75 processors and engineers, but most of its volume – 80-percent – will be cold storage. Once on the grounds, the Hannah will hold 14 million pounds of Bristol Bay sockeye: An awesome tribute for… whoever the real Hannah is.

“It’s not the name of my wife or anyone else’s wife that I’m aware of,” said Blakey. “But its name is important to one of our investors. And also, as I understand it, it was the name of the first ship in the US Navy, commissioned in the late 1700s.”

Although the Hannah will be built in Bellingham, Blakey says that Northline’s offices and “brain trust” will remain in Sitka. The company plans to have the barge ready to enter service for the 2024 fishing season.

With the impending closure of Sitka’s only boat yard, there’s motivation to build a large boat haul out at the community’s industrial park, but not enough money to do anything about it.

New and returning board members at the Gary Paxton Industrial Park took a walking tour of the site this week (Monday 9-16-19), and spent much of their time on the site of a proposed marine haul-out and boat yard.

Sitka’s lone commercial boat yard has given notice that it will close in around two years. Gary Paxton Industrial Park executive director Garry White would like to make headway toward a publicly-owned yard, and he’s got everything pinpointed but the cash.

Here’s an excerpt of his remarks during the board’s tour.

To do this whole deal — to put in this ramp, to put concrete in it, to put a water treatment facility and a washdown pad, and to put all the utilities across the street (water and sewer), and then put a float out there to help the boats get lined up to come in, and to buy a piece of equipment to haul out the boats — was about $6.8 million bucks. Which we don’t have any. So the board pivoted to look at it in a phased development. Phase 1, the biggest liability to the city is treating the water; Phase 2, how to capture the water; Phase 3 is to get cement down here, so we don’t get people stuck; Phase 4 is to put the utilities up there; Phase 5 is the float; and Phase 6 is the piece of equipment. Once we start moving through these phases — if we can find the capital to do so — we’re hoping that private industry would like to come in and help us participate here to get this thing up and running because I’m sure the board has heard that the existing haul-out has given us a date of about two years before they potentially will no longer be in public operation. 

The existing gravel ramp was constructed by Northline Seafoods to haul out its processing barge on huge, inflated rollers. White said that if Sitka moved ahead with the plans, it would be one of very few locations where someone could haul out a barge and work on it — and meet modern environmental standards for washdown water. There’s also land set aside for working on many other vessels of all sizes in the boat yard.

KCAW confirmed with Halibut Point Marine owner Chris McGraw that he does plan only another two years or so of operation — but he’s set no drop dead date. McGraw also runs Sitka’s only private cruise dock at the same location. He said that closure of his marine service business will be tied to future cruise scheduling.

Halibut Point Marine uses an 88-ton travelift, capable of hauling all but the largest of Sitka’s commercial and recreational fleet. When business ends there, the next-closest haul-out in that range is in Wrangell, which operates travelifts of 300 and 150 tons, as well as a 40-ton trailer. 

The state of Alaska believes the North Pacific Fishery Management Council is overstepping its bounds, by weighing in on the Pebble Mine Project in Bristol Bay.

A proposed comment letter drafted by the Council prompted a strong reaction from the state, during the Council’s June meeting in Sitka.

During its Sitka meeting Wednesday morning (6-5-19), the Council reviewed a letter it planned to send to the Army Corps of Engineers commenting on the draft environmental impact statement — or DEIS — of the Pebble Mine. The letter recommends that the potential impacts of large-scale mining be assessed not only for fish populations, but also “on both the value and reputation of North Pacific Fisheries.”

The state, however, contends that the Council is going too far. Deputy Commissioner of Fish & Game Rachel Baker entered the state’s formal opposition to the letter. Baker said that the state had no problem with the Council’s consulting with the Corps on Essential Fish Habitat, but “additional comments related to the draft EIS are outside the Council’s purview.”

Baker argued that the Council’s sending a letter on Pebble was a distraction from the “large number of fishery management issues on our agenda.”

Commercial fishing interests in the room used public testimony to defend the Council’s decision to comment.

Nic Mink, CEO of Sitka Salmon Shares, said he sold Bristol Bay sockeye to thousands of consumers in the US midwest. He believed the draft environmental impact statement prepared by the Pebble Project was inadequate. He appreciated that the Council was standing up for his suppliers and for his customers.

“For them, as it is for me, it’s critical for the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council to remain engaged in this DEIS process.”

Cheston Clark, a Bering Sea crab fisherman for three decades, said he would rather ride out a storm in the gulf than testify in public, but he supported the Council’s efforts to ensure that the Pebble Environmental Impact Statement covered even the most dire possibilities.

“I am concerned with the proposed Pebble Mine,” said Clark. “We don’t know what the impact would be in the Bering Sea and in Bristol Bay if — or more likely when — a catastrophic mine tailing dam failures.”

Alaska’s response to the Council’s draft letter on the Pebble EIS

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

The State of Alaska is concerned that the comments in this letter go beyond the scope of the Council’s roles and responsibilities. While it is appropriate for the Council to encourage the Army Corps of Engineers to work with NMFS on the Essential Fish Habitat consultation for the Pebble mine prospect, consistent with MSA section 305(b)(3)(a), it is the state’s position that additional comments related to the draft EIS are outside the Council’s purview. The state is concerned about the precedent these comments could establish for the Council to engage on future proposed resource development projects within the state of Alaska and the impacts this could have on other priority fishery management actions in front of the Council.

The Council has an established process to address non-fishing actions that may affect habitat and essential fish habitat for fishery resources under its authority: the Council relies on NMFS to engage in consultation with federal action agencies and NMFS reports back to the Council on the outcome of these consultations. I do not think it is appropriate for the Council to use its valuable time and resources to engage further in these types of issues because it lessens our ability to address the large number of fishery management issues on our agenda.

With that said, it is clear from the comments around the table that other Council members support the comment letter as written. Therefore, I will note for the record that the State of Alaska does not support the letter and recommends the Council maintains focus on priority management issues for fisheries in the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands and the Gulf of Alaska.

Rachel Baker, Deputy Commissioner ADF&G

Bristol Bay is 800 miles west of Sitka, but the sockeye run is of major importance statewide. A new Sitka processor — Northline Seafoods — has spent the last two years building a floating processing plant at Sitka’s industrial park, and sent it to Bristol Bay late last month.

Molly Blakey and her husband Ben are partners in the project with another Sitkan, Pat Glaab. She told the Council that the stakes could not be higher for her business, and for other startups in Alaska’s fisheries.

“I have read draft letter to the Army Corps of Engineers, and I hope that you send this draft,” Blakey said. “It is hard to put into words how our entire livelihood right now is wrapped up in this fishery. Our livelihood is processing Bristol Bay sockeye salmon.”

The Council took no immediate action on the letter. In an email to KCAW, Council director David Witherell said that staff may be tasked with additional edits to the letter near the end of this week-long Sitka meeting. But even the state concedes that the Council will not reverse course. “It’s clear from the comments around the table,” wrote deputy ADF&G commissioner Rachel Baker, “that other Council members support the comment letter as written.”

The North Pacific Fishery Management Council meets through June 10 in Sitka.

Northline co-founders Ben Blakey (l.) and Pat Glaab aboard their helicopter logging barge-turned-floating-fish-processor at Sitka’s Gary Paxton Industrial Park. The company was one of nine businesses around the world to be recognized by Fish 2.0 Innovation Forum for its plan improve the quality of Bristol Bay sockeye. (KCAW photo/Robert Woolsey)

A Sitka-based seafood processor has won an innovation award — although it hasn’t processed much fish yet.

Northline Seafoods was one of nine international organizations recognized by Fish 2.0, at its Innovation Forum at Stanford University earlier this month.

The award has a cash component, but Northline’s co-founder hopes the big prize is new investment in what his company considers a higher-quality product.

Downloadable audio.

See a complete list of the other 8 prizewinners. Learn more about the Fish 2.0 Innovation Forum.

Northline Seafoods has converted a former helicopter logging barge into a floating processor over the past year in Sitka’s industrial park.

The company plans to station the barge in western Bristol Bay during next summer’s sockeye run, to significantly reduce delivery times for fishermen working at a distance from the region’s shore-based processors, and then resupply them with ice during the lightning-fast season.

Blakey’s business partner, Pat Glaab, stands on the haul-out ramp that Northline is building at the Gary Paxton Industrial Park in Sitka. The barge will be towed ashore on huge air bags designed for launching ships. Behind him is Northline’s floating processor. (KCAW photo/Robert Woolsey)

Northline co-founder Ben Blakely has long been one of those fishermen. He applied to Fish 2.0 back in February, and spent four months providing the forum with information and interviews about the Northline operation.

Winning recognition is only part of the payback.

“The goal is essentially to get investor focus, and to make people aware on the financing side of what’s happening in the world’s oceans, and make them aware of the businesses who are trying to change things — change them for the better.”

The Bristol Bay sockeye season is one of Alaska’s most valuable salmon fisheries, and it’s over in a matter of weeks. Millions of pounds of salmon are landed by gillnetters and seiners, and frozen whole for secondary processing elsewhere later.

So much fish coming in so fast can affect quality. By cutting the distance between processing and the fleet, Blakey believes that Northline can guarantee a higher-quality product.

Still, it’s a whole sockeye in the round — and it’s sold on a different market than other Alaskan salmon.

“We want to find customers who can use it. Who want to use the heads, who have the ability to get value out of the roe. It’s a novel use of fish in the sense that we’re not shipping headed and gutted product.”

Almost all of the fish delivered in the Bristol Bay Sockeye fishery is frozen whole for processing elsewhere. But Northline believes that locating a floating processor closer to the fleet will result in a higher-quality frozen product. (Northline image)

Last summer Northline processed pink and chum salmon landed in Sitka, filling several shipping containers. The barge produced about 10 tons of ice a day. This winter, the processor will be hauled ashore for final work on the hull, and the installation of more compressor “horsepower.” Next summer in Bristol Bay, the barge should be capable of freezing 300-thousand pounds of fish a day, and producing 90-tons of ice a day.

All from somewhere near Clark’s Point on the Nushagak River.

Northline won $5,000 in cash from Fish 2.0, and Blakely traveled to Palo Alto to give an acceptance speech on the campus of Stanford University.

He says he went on a little too long.

“Well, there’s no music. You get a big red light and an X across the throat. It’s pretty straightforward. But it was a great experience. I met a lot of really cool people. I’m hoping we can get our business on the map a little bit, and let people know that we’re building some cool stuff in Sitka.”

Blakey says the Northline floating processor will be ready to move to Bristol Bay in early May.

Pat Glaab (r.), Ben Blakey, and Roger aboard their processor at Sitka’s Gary Paxton Industrial Park. Their staking around $2 million on the idea that fish buyers will pay a premium for Bristol Bay sockeye that’s been chilled down immediately after harvest. (KCAW photo/Robert Woolsey)

Alaska’s Bristol Bay sockeye fishery is intense, lucrative — and also remote. Much of the fish landed there is frozen whole and shipped long distances for secondary processing.

Although the product is famous, there are some who think the quality could be improved. In Sitka, a pair of entrepreneurs is betting $2 million that they can deliver a better Bristol Bay sockeye. Meet Northline Seafoods.

Downloadable audio.

Fast and the Furious: “All right team, listen up. The game has changed now…”

Forget The Fast and the Furious. Vin Diesel is strolling through the park compared to the Bristol Bay sockeye fishery, which explodes into action in early summer.

Sound: explosion.

All right. That’s a bit of an exaggeration. But the relentless pace of sockeye fishing can’t be overstated: two openings a day, four hours between openings, with harvests topping 13 million pounds a day during the peak of the season in June.

12 processors buy fish in Bristol Bay. And next year there will be a thirteenth: Northline.

“They’ll go under the deck. There’ll be three more of these ice machines here…”

Formerly a heli-logging operation from Dall Island, the Northline barge gets a retrofit in Sitka. The topmost structure — once a helipad — will be used for net storage. (KCAW photo/Robert Woolsey)

This is Pat Glaab, who with his partner, Ben Blakey, has bought a 150-foot former helicopter logging barge and is converting it into a floating fish processor.

When it’s done this facility will be able to freeze up to 300,000 pounds of whole sockeye a day — while tied to the banks of the Ugashik River, about 85 miles south of Naknek, where the nearest processors are located.

But right now these guys are over 800 miles away from Bristol Bay, in a makeshift office aboard the barge moored at Sitka’s industrial park.

Roger – Barks.
Blakey – Roger! Sit!

Not many people get out this way, according to Blakey’s dog Roger. Any other year, both Blakey and Glaab would be fishing in Bristol Bay now, instead of building a seafood plant. Blakey has leased out his boat for the summer.

Blakey — I spent pretty much every summer in Bristol Bay since I was a kid — that’s actually where I met Pat.
Glaab — We were fishing partners, when we both started fishing in the bay many years ago. He being in college at the time. Me being just after Leader Creek, building a plant there, getting a little bit into the fishing end of things. So we partnered for a few years, and we’ve kept close since.

The distances in Bristol Bay can make a difference in fish quality. Last year, Glaab says, a lot of seining took place in the southern part of the bay, a 2-day run from Naknek.

Their idea is simple: ice, where it’s needed. The length of time a Bristol Bay sockeye spends in the hold of a gillnetter or seiner until it’s delivered to a tender or processor is highly variable. The distances between the river systems in the bay are huge. Some fishing boats are equipped to refrigerate seawater to cool down their catch; most are not.

Blakey and Glaab want to close that gap.

“There’s a real need in the bay for chilled fish. There’s nobody in the world who wouldn’t say that there isn’t a portion of that fleet that hasn’t the ability to take care of this fish properly. We feel this thing will fill that need.”

Fill that need, and perhaps more. Pat Glaab is a self-taught engineer, and one of Alaska’s most prolific seafood plant builders. He met Blakey after he built the Leader Creek plant. He also built the Silver Bay Seafoods plant in Naknek — and its plant across the harbor here in Sitka. This barge is actually his 11th processor.

And Blakey thinks the completely self-contained, floating plant may be one of Glaab’s best ideas. Technically a tender, this barge will operate with around 20 people, as opposed to the 200 or so needed to run a processor on shore.

“There are a lot of communities in Alaska that can’t support a full-time cannery or a processor with that many people, because they don’t have enough volume. If an outfit like this can get by with less overhead, lower labor costs, they might be able to park it in front of an isolated area and process the fish at a more effective cost.”

Much of the main deck is being converted to freezer space, per Glaab’s design. Another barge, with refrigerated containers, will be moored alongside the processing barge in Ugashik to store the catch for later shipping. (KCAW photo/Robert Woolsey)

The barge has four levels. Topmost is the former helipad, which will be used for net storage. Below that are the offices and crew quarters. On deck, Glaab’s crew is installing evaporators for the huge freezers, and there is a large area with cranes for offloading fish. Below decks is a massive compressor — one of three planned — and holding tanks for fish and frozen slush.

Glaab will test the barge’s processing capability right here later this summer on pink salmon — around 90,000 pounds a day. In the fall, he’ll haul out the barge on a ramp that the industrial park has authorized him to build on his leased land, and prep the hull for its voyage to Bristol Bay next spring.

The labor on the barge will be devoted to sorting the fish by quality — and that’s where Glaab hopes to find a premium price.

“We’re going to dump ‘em out, take a good look at them. Even pull three fish out. And check them, to see if they test out. And if they don’t test out, we’ll cull them aside. And it’s not a punishment to the fisherman: It’s feedback for our fishermen, and not punishing the market, who will get those randomly if I just dump them in, as they’re doing now.”

Below decks Glaab has installed one of three planned compressors. He hopes to test his idea by processing around 90,000 pounds a day of pink salmon later this summer. (KCAW photo/Robert Woolsey)

This is what Glaab thinks will be the game-changer for Bristol Bay: accurate grading, more high-quality fish, a longer-lasting product, and community-oriented employment in some of the more remote corners of the region.

It’s a forward-thinking vision for this old logging barge, which is slowly becoming a high-tech processing platform. Glaab builds with the future in mind. He introduces me to his son-in-law, and I look around and notice that except for Glaab, there’s no one over thirty at work on this project.

“I often ended up with 15 or 20 people in their twenties who were just coming into the work world in their lives, looking for a career instead of a way to keep their hands busy. And looking for a place that more than just showing up to a job, make some money, and go away and have no commitment. And I’ve very much enjoyed that interaction: to live with people whose lives are expanding.”

With eleven seafood plants to his credit, Glaab is far from being a fringe player in the Alaska seafood industry. But a social consciousness underlies his work: The people — mostly young — he recruits have an exceptional opportunity to thrive in a business that has become expensive to enter. “Having young people be able to move into a place — not where they get these things for free, but they’ve earned them — that, to my mind is a comfortable place to live.” (KCAW photo/Robert Woolsey)

And expanding is what Glaab hopes for. If this pilot project is successful, he and Blakey plan to build at least three more processing barges — brand new from scratch — in Sitka’s industrial park. Each will cost around $5 million, and the pace of work? Fast and furious.

The Fast and the Furious — “No one’s ready for this…”

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