Sitka Harbor Guide

Pat Glaab: Everybody Wins

During the 1980s, in the spring of each year, halibut fishing in Sitka resembled a combat zone. Massed on the fishing docks and back decks of longline fishing vessels were (mostly) men – deckhands and skippers surrounded by endless buckets of stainless steel circle hooks connected to miles-long poly-line, gearing and baiting-up to hunt the (up to) 400-lb. flat fish.

In those days the catch quotas were filled by any fishermen who wanted to fish and it was known as a “derby” fishery. The fishery would open by regulation just two times a year – for fishing for 24 or maybe 48 hours, depending on when the allocated pounds were caught.

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Sandy on Sandy: Raising the Bar

You’ll definitely see “a bird with attitude” when you look at the cover of this year’s Sitka Harbor Guide.

So says artist Sandy Greba, who is lighting up a Harbor Guide cover for the second time in five years – this time with her watercolor painting, “Hooded Merganser.”

Sandy has a knack with color, light and water – you can see this both in “Hooded Merganser” and in her earlier cover art, “No Vacancy,” whose sea lions-atop-a-buoy-in-water graced the cover of the 2013 Harbor Guide.

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Harbor Notes 2018

The next major project slated for the Sitka Harbor Dept. is the re-building of Crescent Harbor, located in the center of downtown. A matching state grant has been applied for, to implement the project.

If the State of Alaska is unable to fund 50% of the project, bonding will have to occur.

According Harbormaster Stan Eliason, the harbor dept. now receives 100% of the fisheries tax. Fisheries tax collected for the 2016 season was $953,323.80. There is money already appropriated for the Crescent Harbor design phase, although more is still needed for construction.

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