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The city of King Cove is worried about the future after its seafood processor announced earlier this month that it will cease operations. The plant, formerly owned by Peter Pan Seafood Company, is the economic engine of the community on the Alaska Peninsula. A new owner will take over the processing plant, but it’s unclear when the facility will reopen. Kirsten Dobroth is the Alaska reporter for Undercurrent News, which is a commercial fishing and seafood industry trade magazine. She’s been reporting on what this means just ahead of salmon season.
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The commercial season for Dungeness crab in the North Peninsula District opens May 1, and officials say this year’s harvest trajectory looks good. The individual pot limit for the area this year is 500 per vessel.
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The move is part of a larger restructuring for Silver Bay to take over Peter Pan’s processing and support facilities later this year, which could include the Peter Pan plant in King Cove.
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‘We are all sort of on pins and needles,’ said a local official in King Cove, where fishermen and elected leaders are waiting to learn the fate of Peter Pan Seafoods’ shuttered plant.
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Trident Seafoods, one of the largest seafood processing companies in the country, will finalize sales for three of the four plants it listed for sale late last year. According to a press release on March 8, the Ketchikan, Petersburg, and False Pass plants all have buyers.
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A years-long Alaska seafood battle over a complicated shipping exemption has been settled. Two Bering Sea seafood shipping companies, Alaska Reefer Management LLC and Kloosterboer International Forwarding LLC, settled a lawsuit in January challenging penalties that had been levied by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Alaska Reefer Management is a subsidiary of American Seafoods, one of Alaska’s biggest fishing companies. Together, the companies will pay the federal government $9.5 million after violating federal shipping laws.
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Regional council says it won’t tighten fishing regulations in Bristol Bay red king crab savings areaThe North Pacific Fishery Management Council will not move forward with a request to close the Bristol Bay red king crab savings area to all commercial fishing. At its February meeting, the regulatory council looked at the effectiveness of closing the 4,000-square-nautical-mile section of the eastern Bering Sea to commercial trawl, pot and longline fishing, but decided not to tighten regulations in the area.
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A fire broke out at Sand Point’s Peter Pan Seafood Co. facility Wednesday morning. Edith Mejia, the office manager and a dispatcher for the small Aleutian town’s police department, said the fire likely started between 7 and 8 a.m.
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Gov. Mike Dunleavy introduced a pair of bills last month that would allow electronic monitoring aboard commercial fishing vessels in state fisheries. That electronic monitoring could be used in place of mandatory observers aboard fishing vessels. But some in the fishing industry are wondering why it’s necessary, since only a small number of state-managed fisheries require onboard observation.
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Nearly 100 tribes and communities in western Alaska, including the Association of Village Council Presidents, signed their support for an emergency petition that would set a zero bycatch limit on chinook salmon in the pollock trawl fishery for 180 days, a move Unalaska Mayor Vince Tutiakoff Sr. said would “effectively shut down the entire pollock fishery of the Bering Sea,” and create a “dire situation” for Unalaska.
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The state-water cod fishery for pot gear boats of 58 feet or less in the Dutch Harbor Subdistrict opened Thursday, Feb. 1 at noon. Those harvesters have a limit of 60 pots per vessel and a guideline harvest level of a little more than 44 million pounds. That’s the largest harvest level the fishery has ever seen. Last year’s was the second biggest at just over 38 million pounds.
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The cargo ship that caught fire on Christmas and has moored in Unalaska Bay is moving into port