 When Crab Was King:
The Rise and Fall of the Kodiak King Crab Fishery
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Recent Episodes CRAB 5 It was an evolving thing Runs June 28 thru July 3 06-29-2009 Award Winning segment with Jim Pearson detailing changes in crab fishing (More Details)
Duration: 2:59
CRAB 4 They stay alive if you take care of them Runs June 22 thru 28 06-21-2009 Crab must be kept alive until they are processed. You can't freeze them until they've been cooked. Back in the early decades of crabbing fishermen didn't have water recirculating tanks to hold the crab, like they do now. (More Details)
Duration: 2:59
CRAB 3 We decided to process crab June 15 to 21 06-14-2009 Emil Norton talks about how he helped his cannery convert from the long-time staple, canned salmon, to the new product--canned crab (More Details)
Duration: 3:00
CRAB No 2 Cash flowed and town grew (Runs June 8 thru 14) 06-08-2009 Crabbers had lots of money to spend and town grew (More Details)
Duration: 2:59
Crab 1 You could see them from the plane June 1 thru 8 05-31-2009 This week we begin the series over. Thanks to our listeners and radio stations for thier support. (More Details)
Duration: 3:00
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A Year-long radio project of the Kodiak Maritime Museum
No one is sure why massive amounts of King Crab suddenly appeared in the waters off Kodiak Island, Alaska waters 1940s and 1950s. And no one is sure why they suddenly disappeared in the early 1980s. Natural ecosystem cycling and overfishing have both been implicated. One thing is sure however- the resulting Kodiak King Crab fishery was legendary. Each year for more than twenty-five years, millions of pounds of the huge crab, some of them six feet across, were harvested in the stormy waters of the Gulf of Alaska. Thousands of people came to Kodiak to catch and process the crabs, and hundreds of vessels were converted from other fisheries or built new as crab fishing boats.
The impact on the town of Kodiak was immediate and profound. In a few years, Kodiak grew from a sleepy fishing town to one of the biggest, busiest fishing ports in the United States. People poured into Kodiak. The boat harbor overflowed with boats and the waterfront was transformed with dozens of new processing plants. Housing got tight, hardware and grocery businesses boomed, and bars were jammed with fishermen as king crab money washed through the town.
And then suddenly, after two decades of abundance, the king crab stocks around Kodiak began to disappear. Each year fishermen found fewer and fewer crab in their pots and had to look harder to find them. From annual season harvests of 100 million pounds in the 1960s, the catches diminished until, after one last king crab season in the fall of 1982, the fishery was shut down.
The memory of those years remains strong in Kodiak however, and many of the people who participated in the king crab boom still live there. In an effort to preserve that memory, the Kodiak Maritime Museum, with a grant from the Alaska Humanities Forum, will talk with dozens of fishermen, processors, and others who lived through the rise and fall of Kodiak's King Crab fishery. Those taped interviews will constitute an extensive series of 52 short radio programs detailing the King Crab boom.
The 3 minute radio programs will air once a week and be available free to any radio station for broadcast. The programs will also be posted on the Kodiak Maritime Museum's website.
The project begins in May 2008, the 50th anniversary of the Kodiak King Crab Festival, and will run until May 2009. The May festival originally took place in early May after the crab season had closed and fishermen were back in town. The Crab Festival is now held on Memorial Day weekend.
For more information on the project, or if you have a King Crab memory to share, contact the Kodiak Maritime Museum at (907) 486-0384 or contact us at info@kodiakmaritimemuseum.org.
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