This story was produced as part of a collaboration between KRBD and Alaska’s Energy Desk.From a basket hoisted on the back of his trawler, fisherman Freddy Gutmann proudly picks up a giant geoduck clam fresh from the frigid waters off the northwestern Canadian coast. The geoduck committee meets again Thursday, Feb. He said some divers will likely take their boats south to dive for sea urchins.īut for now, all Leighton can do is sit on the beach and hope he can get back to work on the seafloor soon. Leighton said he’s got enough savings to scrape by until next winter if he has to. “To all of a sudden just shut down, everybody’s kind of in shock, you know, not expecting it,” he said, “and they’re just like, ‘okay, well, now what do we do?’”
But he said the scale and open-endedness of this outbreak have divers worried. Leighton said he’s seen the geoduck fishery shut down before - like during the severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak in the early 2000s. “Some guys are broke now, and they want to go to work,” he said.īut he said a majority of divers decided that with prices so low, it just didn’t make sense. Leighton chairs the committee, and he said it was a tough call. So, in January, divers held an emergency meeting of the geoduck committee - that’s a group of 20 undersea fishermen - to talk about what to do next. But with the Chinese market essentially shut down, they’re going for about $1 a pound.
Leighton said he can usually sell his haul for $5 to $10 per pound, sometimes more. “We’re all sitting on the beach, hoping to go to work.” “Well, most of the divers are just uncertain about what’s going to happen,” he said. He sells his catch to buyers on the docks here in Ketchikan. Leighton spends most Wednesdays and Thursdays during the winter racing to fill his boat with up to a thousand pounds of geoduck clams. “You’re only looking at about a four-day window between harvesting the geoduck and wanting them sold,” said dive fisherman Jeremy Leighton. So that means that geoducks can’t exactly be frozen or canned and saved for later. “And that’s where, kind of, the rub comes in.” “The vast majority of seafood markets are closed.” “All of the restaurants, or the vast, vast majority of restaurants are closed,” Doherty said. Though there haven’t been any confirmed cases in Alaska, geoduck clam fishermen are feeling ripple effects. The coronavirus that emerged in late 2019 has infected more than 60,000 people, mostly in China. But Doherty said that with the recent coronavirus outbreak, demand has plummeted. Their phallic shape has given them a reputation as an aphrodisiac. Geoducks are considered a delicacy there. Though geoducks are native to the Western Hemisphere, Doherty said, 95% of the catch gets sent across the Pacific to China. That’s an organization of fishermen who scour the seabed looking for the giant bivalves along the coast of the Pacific Northwest. Doherty helps lead the Southeast Alaska Dive Fisheries Association. “It’s two and a half to three pounds in weight and then the neck on it - it can be up to a three-foot-long neck,” Phil Doherty said. It looks a little like a regular, everyday steamer clam - but much bigger. It’s a weird-looking animal, the geoduck clam.
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