Kodiak, Alaska – my first stop on the eastern side of the Pacific

▲ After our seven day Pacific crossing from Yokohama in Japan we finally made landfall in Kodiak, an island off the south coast of the state of Alaska and at the eastern end of the long string of Aleutian Islands. I’ve been to Kodiak Island once before, back in 2009 when I came here with a Lonely Planet/National Geographic film crew and spent several days on Camp Island and around Karluk Lake looking for brown bears, also known as grizzly bears. Kodiak Island is the brown bear capital with three times as many as all the USA outside of Alaska. I even had my own personal one-to-one bear encounter on that trip.

▲ This time my visit was strictly one day and all in the town of Kodiak. I walked across the bridge to Near Island to get this view looking back over the town, past the blue domes of the very Russian-looking Holy Resurrection Orthodox Cathedral with my cruise ship Westerdam in the background and mountains on the island further beyond.

▲ I’d stopped in to the St Herman Orthodox Seminary

▲ and also passed by the Tropic Lanes Bowling Alley, just to prove how this is a well-equipped small town.

▲ I had a look around the fascinating Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge Visitor Center where I bumped into Stacy Studebaker (great name) promoting her rather delightful children’s books (I should have bought one) and talking about the superb gray whale skeleton hanging across the centre. It’s really her whale, she found it washed up on the beach about 40miles from Kodiak, organized to have it buried on the beach for four years to decompose and just leave the skeleton and then for the skeleton to be cleaned, re-assembled and installed in the centre which is really built around it. It’s a great story.

▲ A harbour full of fishing boats illustrated what this town is all about, pulling things out of the sea.

▲ Walking between the Westerdam’s docking point and the town centre I passed huge collections of crab pots.

▲ While an exhibit in the Wells Fargo Bank branch showed the variety of the crabs caught here.

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◄ Me on the left, Toby of Kodiak Harbour Walking Tours on the right

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I signed up for a Harbour Walking Tour which turned out to be completely fascinating. The tour was led by Toby Sullivan who spent his working life fishing out of Kodiak – well king crabs as well as salmon, halibut and whatever else the sea can offer. He clearly knew his stuff and had a story and an opinion on everything. The real surprise, for me came at the end when I said how impressed I’d been by his knowledge and how much I enjoyed the tour, at which point we discovered that he’d travelled around South-East Asia in the late-70s and at that time I’d been his guide with my Lonely Planet’s South-East Asia on a Shoestring. In fact we’d actually met in Wewak in Papua New Guinea in 1978. Talk about a small world!

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So I found out about the Kodiak history, how the canning industry and salmon fishing came together to create a lot of wealthy Americans, just 10 years too late for the Russians who might have hung on to their uneconomic province (they’d pretty much wiped out the sea otters – nice fur – and the indigenous population at the same time) if only the science of canning had arrived a little earlier. Instead US$7.2 million changed hands and Alaska became US territory in 1867.

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Then there are other seafood tales of thoughtless over-exploitation – those giant king crabs were pretty much wiped out as well – fortunately salmon numbers seem to be handled much better. Plus government and business involvement, alternately making fortunes for everybody from the deckhands up, or instantly disemploying countless fisherfolk when the rules of the game are changed. Toby has lots of fishing tales – around here killer whales matching wits with fishermen and often coming out on top, or elsewhere, dolphins losing out big time as a by-catch in the tuna business. I’d seen the ‘dolphin friendly tuna’ logo countless times, but never thought about the back story. I did like the killer whales and their longline-sushi-train skills.

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Then there are fishing tragedies mingled in with a few lucky escapes. We finish at the memorial to Kodiak fishing deaths where Toby tells the tale of the fishing boat that went out with 10-inexperienced and poorly trained young men on a badly-equipped fishing boat. It got into trouble and the EPIRB (Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon, I’ve blogged about them in a Pacific Island context a few years ago) ain’t working. So nobody knows where they are when they abandon ship. Oops, they have a life raft, but nobody roped it to the ship, so when it’s pushed into the sea it just floats away, its lights flashing. So the last resort is they have to abandon ship in their survival suits, but oops again there are 10 of them and only eight suits. The two suitless fishermen are dead within 20 minutes. In a well-kept survival suit even in Alaskan waters you can survive for a day, perhaps even two days, but nobody knows where they went down. When rescue finally comes there’s one survivor out of 10 young men.

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There is the odd young fisherwomen amongst all the fishermen on that memorial and walking the harbour on one boat I note a very racy looking young fisherwoman, like a pin-up vision of a sexy fish-catcher babe. The safety story has been hugely improved, 10 or 15 deaths a year has become just the odd unhappy story, this is still a very hard and dangerous business. Today not just the captain or owner have to ensure the crew are trained and the equipment is all there and in good condition, every crewman has to sign off on it.

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◄  We walk past the former waterfront canning businesses and passed examples of the town’s bins decorated with reproductions of old tinned salmon cans.

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There’s also a vivid description of the 1964 Good Friday Kodiak tsunami which didn’t smoothly unzip along its 250mile length, but was more like a sticky zip stopping and starting for all of five minutes. As a result in Kodiak itself the sea level dropped, leaving assorted fishing boats stuck in the harbour bottom mud. Then the tsunami waters hiccupped its way back slowly enough that you had time to climb away from it, but eventually the waters were 30 feet higher than before, wiping out all the harbourside buildings.

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Kodiak’s electricity is 100% renewable, 80 to 85% from hydro-power, 15 to 20% from five big wind turbines which overlook the town. Last Kodiak visit I noted that despite all the ‘independent, look after yourself, keep government out of my hair, Sarah Palin (she was the big name at the time)’ story this was the state most dependent on government money. Today here they are being real Greens when it comes to renewables.

▲ Our visit to Kodiak was strictly one day and as we departed in the late afternoon the harbour pilot made a graceful leap from the Westerdam to the pilot ship and we headed further south and east, next stop Sitka.