Sharecroppers of the Sea


Before you feel sorry for anybody in this story, meet Jared Bright. And remember your first impression, because he's eventully going to call himself a serf. For the moment, he's just a guy you're about to get jealous of. That's because he's 38 years old, and industry sources say he's worth about $2 million.

Between his ordinary upbringing in Ketchikan, Alaska, and the day Bright invested in his fishing boat, there was no winning lottery ticket, no trust fund. He's just a fisherman; been one for 21 years. And lucky for him, he happens to be good at it. If he can keep the bearded men in the embroidered shirts out of his game, he's going to be even better.

But before we get into the bearded men, get rid of the image of the Gorton's fisherman. Forget the fish sticks, the wooden captain's wheel, and that wholesome picture of the guy on the yellow box. Instead, put yourself on one side of the Whole Foods fish counter, a chunk of halibut in the middle?price tag: $28 a pound?and think of Bright as the guy on the other side, the guy who's going to get it to you. Think six feet two inches of lean muscle, pierced ears, and an auburn mug and sideburns, dressed in black North Face and talking like 10 cups of coffee while texting on a smartphone.


There's no captain's wheel in this industry. Hasn't been in a while, if there ever really was. The oddball universe that is halibut fishing, a fish that two decades ago cost $3.99 a pound and came in a hideous frozen brick, is more a game of floating Monopoly.

Guys like Jared Bright vie for control of the industry's lower rungs, the only rungs that seem to be left. Simply put, they're renters. They don't own the halibut, not even when it lands in their boats. The fish are instead the property of a generation of wealthy owners, most of whom did nothing more than fish in the right place at the right time to get a stake.

Their ownership rights came courtesy of the federal government. At the time, it was a good idea. In ways, it still is. But it's created what amounts to a feudal system over a natural resource.

It's a system, called catch shares, that the government and environmental groups will tell you is the best thing to happen to fish since catch limits. But fishermen in the halibut and black-cod industry?the first in the country to live with the bizarre realities of these new policies?have weathered its real consequences, outcomes that fly in the face of more official, rosy portrayals. Outcomes like absentee landlords, brokers and bankers, fish quota that costs more than your house, and a new generation of people cluttering their hulls, demanding sandwiches.


Meet America's newest sharecroppers.

Halibut is a tough business. As fishing goes, it's child's play, but it makes the typical 40 hours of desk jockeying look like a spa retreat.

Halibut is mostly caught in that great swath of frigid water east of Canada and in the Gulf of Alaska. Some halibut?the tough-to-find kind?is fished farther west in the Aleutian Islands and north on the Bering Sea, the roughest, meanest place man ever leaned over a rail and vomited.


Blake Painter, a 33-year-old fisherman from Oregon, describes halibut season as a thing he grew up loving and now hates. "I dread long-lining season, just because it's so repetitive," he says. These days he wakes up in the morning with his hands clamped closed and pain screaming up to his elbows, an ailment fishermen refer to as "the claw." He needs surgeries for carpal tunnel syndrome, and his shoulders and back have also fared poorly.


But there are good days in fishing. When the water is calm, the sun is shining, and the fish are biting; when whales aren't cleaning your strings like shish kebabs?this is a good business.

"When fishing is good, you're making money quick. It's not uncommon to make $1,000 a day," says Painter. During a particularly good run two years ago, he earned $50,000 in less than 72 hours.

But there's something even he won't do to get those fish: He won't take walk-ons.

Walk-ons are fish owners who walk onto a boat while other fishermen do the fishing. They're a byproduct of the ownership rights birthed in 1995, when the business of making fish into private property was the government's?and environmental groups'?answer to a lot of things that were going wrong in halibut and black cod. Bright was in high school then, back when anybody could get in on fishing it. He got his start as a crewman at 17, fishing halibut.

"What I always liked about fishing was you could make a bunch of money and then go fuck off," says Bright.


Those owners, the ones who were gifted the shares at the outset of the program's launch, own that fish now?or, more specifically, they own the rights to catch a certain amount each year. The program is designed to make them eventually sell that quota as they get older and stop fishing. And it's intended to land those shares in the hands of young fishermen, as no one is supposed to be able to purchase quota unless they can prove 150 days or more of commercial fishing experience. But the sad truth is that few of those initial quota holders let go of their shares. They're too valuable an asset to sell. And for the next generation?who have to buy quota rather than receive it from the government?catch shares are expensive, an investment on par with buying real estate in a volatile market.


The rent used to be about 50 percent of the value of the fish, worth up to $7.14 a pound at the docks in 2011, to the owner. The deal has earned the owners nicknames like "slipper skippers" and "mailbox fishermen." Greedy as the practice can be, it's permissible, the government's way of making the new program look and act like the old one, in which seasoned fishermen traditionally hired skippers to helm their boats as they aged out.

Yet as the quota era of fishing has taken hold, the stealthier and more opportunistic practice of walking on has become a trend that stalks a fine line of legality. Those who bought quota after January 1995 aren't allowed to lease. They are supposed to sell as they retire instead, encouraged to do so by a "boots on deck" rule that says they have to be on the boat while their quota is fished, unless they own the boat, or at least 20 percent of it. The idea was to transition the fishery away from leasing over time. But while the goal of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council?one of eight regional councils the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration uses to implement fish management?was that quota owners actively participate in fishing their quota, they set no requirement that those owners actually lay their hands on fishing gear. That loophole let a leasing culture sink deep hooks into the halibut fishery.

There are a few exceptions. Some walk-ons still fish alongside their skippers and crew. Others are young crewmen who buy quota as a guarantee of finding work, or bought a little but can't afford a boat. And some are fishing widows. But the remainder are visitors, industry retirees, tourists, or investors. They don't fish. They simply walk on the boat, climb below deck, and entertain themselves while others do the work.

"This last fella that I leased, he was in his 80s," says Painter. "He would come on board, read four or five books and watch movies, and that was about it. He doesn't come outside."

But the lure of catching someone else's quota hasn't been enough for Painter to stay in the walk-on business. "When I'm catching somebody's fish for, say 40 percent, and we've got a fairly good-sized, comfortable boat, good equipment, good food . . . it's hard for them to stay with me at 40," he says, because other skippers are constantly offering to catch fish at lower rates. The pressure of a declining cut caused Painter to concentrate on gray cod, only fishing his father's quota, and leaving the business of walk-ons to guys like Jared Bright.

Bright makes the bulk of his money in other fisheries?a diehard who rarely takes time off, he participates in six of them?but he fishes halibut and black cod between shorter seasons for favorites like salmon and gray cod, where fishing is still a sport, there's no landlord, and being good at it is directly tied to his earnings.

"Halibut and black-cod fishing is sharecropping," he says, explaining why it's only a sideshow in his fishing repertoire. When he does fish halibut and black cod, he fishes walk-ons.

"If you talk to enough people, you're going to run into a lot of stories about guys laying in their bunk doing absolutely nothing. And that's just, I mean, it's just the way it is. This guy owns quota, he comes out, he lays in his bunk. You're out there working, and he opens the galley door and says, 'Hey, will you come in and make me a sandwich?' " Bright says. "It is frustrating, I guess, if you let it get to you."



You can see them Sundays, beautifully adorned in garments stitched by matriarchs. The women wear long dresses. Men don't shave their beards. When those men take to the seas, though, they do it in the same no-nonsense rain gear that dominates the decks of the gulf. And lately, they've become a powerful force in the long-lining industry.



"At first the idea was to try to live a subsistence type of life," says Yakunin, who notes Old Believers came to Alaska for the isolation, finding their traditions were too quickly eroded in Brazil. Instead, he says, they found it difficult to raise crops, or even dairy cows. The men tried the canneries and construction for work, and a few landed in a boat-building shop in Homer. They learned the trade, and since then, Old Believers' signature boats have dominated the Homer fleet.



The result? Old Believers pay rents as high as 75 percent to quota owners. They're still able to make money, sometimes inching up profits by involving sons and nephews, brothers and cousins?crew that can work for less.

"There's some degree of prejudice against them because they can pay their son less than the boat that's parked next door that is not a family operation and actually has to hire someone," says Doug Bowen, who brokers quota and permits at Alaska Boats & Permits in Homer.

Yakunin, who typically pays about 65 percent rent to quota owners, says sometimes the rates are so competitive that even he can't compete, given his smallest boat is about 18 feet longer than many. "If you provide the product for less money, people will go there," he calmly reasons.


"Why are the Russians fishing for 25 percent? Why would you do that?" wonders Bright. In 21 years of fishing, his business was built on hard work and handshakes, on a reputation for catching fish, for coming home safe, and for never having burned anybody along the way. This race to the bottom in pricing negates that. He's bothered by the undercutting, greed, and calls to his walk-ons from other skippers, offering to do more for less. It hurts everyone, he says. He doesn't believe the argument that quota owners would catch fish for themselves if they can't find someone to catch it cheap.


The long-lining season starts in March, a time of year that typically begins with checking lines and hooks in preparation for the tedious job of baiting. But in the past few years, it's also had another opener: the brightly colored fliers that solicit quota owners to walk on, advertising big-screen TVs, massive DVD collections, quality grub, staterooms, showers, saunas, and hot tubs.

Thanks to an online list of quota-share owners, finding them isn't tough. Nearly 80 percent have addresses in Alaska, while the remainder dwell around the U.S.?a substantial chunk of those from Washington state.

Vern Crane, a 38-year-old boat owner from Yakutat, Alaska, says amenities are a lure in hooking such owners, "especially with older people that don't want to sleep in the bunks with a bunch of 21-year-old boys. I try to keep the boat as nice as I can. And that's really all I've got, because I can't beat the Russians' rate."


In Yakutat Bay, it's a business model that works. The bay is sidled up against the town of Yakutat, a former fur-trading and mining outpost inaccessible by road and surrounded by parks and preserves, including Glacier Bay National Park. Nearly a third of Yakutat's 656 current residents have commercial fishing permits. More important to walk-ons, the town also has daily jet service.

That convenience combines with the bay's supremely easy fishing to make Crane's business a high-end, boutique version of long-lining. He can take walk-ons out in a day and get their fish caught by the next.


"I have a few that have bought quota just because they have money, and they are absolutely not fishermen. These guys don't even know how to tie a bowline," says Crane. "I've had a guy tell me, 'Look, I've got a tee time on Wednesday, and I don't want to miss it at the country club, so we need to hurry up and get these fish caught so I can get on the jet and get down there because my golf game starts.' It's really hard to go catch fish and be back exactly when the guy says, with no leeway. It can be tough. And the guys that don't fish for a living are especially a pain about that."

Alexus Kwachka calls these the "downstream effects of baron lordships." His cynicism is hard-earned. A commercial fisherman from Kodiak, Kwachka serves on the advisory panel for the North Pacific Fishery Management Council and has watched lease rates climb steadily in a similar program for crab, where the vast majority of wealth has shifted to absentee owners.

"The real story is that you see the inheritors of a public resource that are extracting the rents from the resource. It's unbelievable," he says. While the ownership programs were supposed to make the fishery better, and have in some ways, "What we've done is we've created these barons that are just sitting back, getting these returns on something that they were given," he adds.




Ecotrust, a nonprofit foundation in Oregon that marries environmental goals with social equity and economic well-being, is among a few agencies urging more attention to the social fallout that follows catch-share programs. "Catch shares have some serious issues that are hard to deal with, but are important to deal with," says Ed Backus, the organization's vice president of fisheries.


Backus says he's been branded a catch-share opponent for urging reforms. Seth Macinko, a former commercial fisherman and now a researcher and assistant professor in the Department of Marine Affairs at the University of Rhode Island, has studied catch shares for 20 years. He has been similarly criticized for suggesting a rather obvious but unpopular solution: that the government lease fishing rights in federal fisheries, not give them away. "I'm very disappointed that the American environmental movement is either supporting, or just ignoring, the privatization of public resources. I don't think you'd be seeing this if we were talking about privatizing the public parks." The fact that the federal fisheries are supposed to belong to Americans has been lost in catch-share designs, says Kwachka, who adds: "Why the hell did we do this?"

Eighteen years ago, there were several good reasons.


"It got so crazy," he recalls. "There were so many people doing it and so much gear in the water and so much wastage and so much lost gear. And top of the issue was lost lives. I have many friends that didn't survive those openings over the years. Mostly because when you have a 24-hour opening, you're obligated to go if you wanted to pay for your investment, and guys took a lot of risk."


The outcome of such a season was similarly hellish. Millions of pounds of fish would land on the dock all at once, piling in totes while processors worked furiously to keep up. The condition of such fish was mostly unappetizing, many poorly preserved by boats that hadn't carried ice, opting to maximize space for catch instead.

"It ended up putting a lot of pretty poor quality product on the market," says Pillen. Halibut hit the stores in frozen and annual spurts, a bottom-barrel fish compared to today's juicy halibut steaks. Fishermen, for their risk, were paid up to 80 cents a pound for it.

Since 1995, the season has been lengthened to more than eight months, allowing fishermen to only go fishing when it's safe. They have time to take better care of the product, boosting the entire industry's value from $150 million in 1995 to $245 million in 2008, the last time anybody checked.


But Bright is unusual in that he aggressively invested in a boat and gear to capitalize on the most profitable fisheries. His combined income lets him afford a house in Petersburg, Alaska, and a condo in Seattle. He's also an investor in a shipyard?Piston and Rudder Service, Inc., in Petersburg?and in Silver Bay Seafoods, a fishermen-owned seafood processor with facilities in three Alaskan ports. He'll likely inherit quota in the next rationalized fishery: He has an extensive fishing history in gray cod, which is all it will take to earn quota if catch shares ever take hold. And maybe when he's older, he says, he'll live in Arizona and become a walk-on.



"The reason the council insisted on that is they didn't want landlord tenants, a feudal system," says Gharrett. "They wanted the people who had the quota to materially participate in the fishery. That was the basic intent. They either want the individuals on board, or they want the companies to maintain some kind of capital investment and risk."


"We've had letters and testimony from people who are not only no longer active fishermen, but they have decided that they would use the IFQ program as an investment vehicle for all their other funds," says Hull. "And this person wanted to be able to continue to invest other funds and use the hired-skipper privileges. It was a better deal than being in the stock market."

He anticipates those types of investors will scatter as the general economy recovers, and stock options look good again. Meanwhile, those issues have combined with the rising value of the fishery to make it hard for new entrants to buy into long-lining fisheries. Another challenge: Though catch shares are supposed to better the fish stock, halibut hasn't fared well so far, causing the value of each quota unit to drop annually for years, making it a very unstable buy for anyone who has to borrow money to get it.

Nick Versteeg took out a loan to buy quota in 2008, only to watch his quota drop in value every year since. Still, his ownership share helps him land crew jobs, which he needs to make his payments. For crewmen who don't own boats or shares but opt to spend their careers on deck, the current wealth of the industry masks an otherwise declining trend in wages. First mate Kit Durnil says he doesn't want the financial risks of boat ownership or the headaches of operating a vessel, but he's worried that the wage trend is being ignored.

"When the wages started going down, the price of fish has trended on going up," he says. "Even though their wages might be going down and the pie is sliced in a different direction and somebody else has their fingers in it, it doesn't get as noticed, and that's why it gets accepted."

Jared Caulfield was 8 years old when the halibut and black-cod catch share took hold. Raised in Klamath Falls, Oregon, he was hours from the nearest fishing town in a landscape known more for its geothermal reserves than for surface water. He doesn't remember a time when the pie was sliced any differently than it was in 2010. That's the year when, after introducing himself to Blake Painter, he got an offer to work a halibut and black-cod season in Alaska. It was a saving grace for the then-23-year-old, who at the time was staring down a layoff as a wildfire fighter and a $25,000 debt for a teaching degree that bought him no job prospects.

His first season paid for his college bills, and he's since made an average wage of $60,000 a year. And while Caulfield is aware that someone else owns the quota he's fishing, he says he doesn't quite know how they got it, or how the numbers shake out.

"I am thankful that I actually have that job, and am able to have a cut of that," he says.

That mind-set, one in which crewmen can't envision the top of an industry they won't climb, worries quota owners like Rhonda Hubbard, who sees crews making just enough money to be content with a deck job, but not enough to invest in quota or a boat, particularly as lease fees take a larger and larger chunk.

"This is a conundrum for me too," she says. She grew up fishing. Met her husband that way. They have a direct-market fishing operation based in Seward, Alaska, a boat with a processor on board, and work hard to treat their crews fairly. When it comes time to divest, she'd like to do it in ways that don't make deep pockets deeper. But finding a buyer will be tough.

"I'm not about taking this to the grave," she says. "For us to sell our portfolio, we'd have to sell it to a high-financed group of people. I'd like to see somebody grow into the profession."

Hubbard is among a few quota owners who have lobbied to close the loopholes in hiring skippers. And neither she nor her husband charges a lease fee for quota that's already paid for, something a minority of quota owners?including a sizable fleet from Seattle?have chosen to do to counteract the industry's increasing greed.

Hubbard says many quota owners aren't tuned in to serious questions about how young people will get into the industry when it comes time for them to take over. There is only one small union to represent this new generation, she says, and it's in Seattle, too far to represent the mostly Alaskan crews. There are no standards to resolve disputes or wage claims, either. Many crewmen simply aren't aware of how their options for entry?and pay?have changed.

"This is what they do, this is what they know, and there is no expanding them beyond their cubicle on the deck," says Hubbard. "What is our succession plan for the industry?"


Lacking interest from the young, however, the tough job of revising the program will be up to the industry's current owners. They'll have to reverse course to realize the once-lauded vision that made them inheritors of a public resource. The one in which they were good stewards. Where there was wealth for everybody. And where things turned out well for both fish and people.

InvestigateWest ( is a donor- supported investigative newsroom in Seattle.

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