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New Alaska reality show 'Hook, Line & Sisters' focused on salmon fishingJust when you thought there couldn't possibly be another Alaska-based reality show on television, guess what? There's another Alaska-based reality show, “Hook, Line & Sisters”, premiering this week, featuring a Breckenridge, Colo., family's annual journey north to fish. Interestingly, the Anderson family underlines what is both best and worst about Alaska’s limited-entry salmon fisheries implemented in 1973. The best is that by eliminating cutthroat capitalism, limited entry enabled a select group of commercial salmon fishermen to build viable, self-sustaining businesses around fishing seasons that last only a few months. The worst is that a large number of those businesses did so well that the fishermen running them decided they could afford to live anywhere they wanted. A fair number packed up, moved out of state, and now only return as visiting businesses for the fishing season. The Andersons are among them. "Susan met her husband Dean, the boat captain, in Alaska in 1978, and the couple married in 1982, raising three of their four young kids in Alaska until they moved to Seattle in 1989, then Summit County in 1996,'' reports The Summit Daily. "Dean spent winters crab and cod fishing and summers salmon fishing. Susan often took the kids on up to three-month trips to Africa, Asia and Australia while Dean fished in the winters, then brought them on the boat during summers." One of their daughters, Sierra, according to the Summit Daily story, "began documenting her family's fishing experiences after college as a way of communicating her experiences living what she considered a dual life. She and her sister grew up figure skating and ski racing, yet they both live at least a quarter of their lives in a male-dominated (fishing) world where sexual harassment is a huge problem and men don't see women as equal so (women) have to work twice as hard for the same amount of respect." Out of this came "Hook, Line & Sisters", even though the Andersons don't fish with hooks. Dean made his money skippering seiners. Some in Alaska will remember him as the seiner who went to court when the Alaska Board of Fisheries in 2002 tried to take limited entry to its next logical step and turn the Chignik Lagoon salmon fishery into a collective. With salmon prices low at the time, the idea was to make the fishery more economically efficient. Instead of about 100 seiners competing for fish, only about a quarter of the fleet would fish. The fishermen who fished would be reimbursed for costs, and then the profits from the season would be split among all the permit holders. Dean and fellow fisherman Michael Grunert, a couple of the highliners in the traditional fishery, sued to stop the program. They argued it wasn't fair to set up a socialist system that gave the worst fishermen as big a chunk of the earnings as the best fishermen. They lost in Superior Court, and the fishery went forward in 2002. Though only 23 boats fished, most of the permit holders got checks for $20,000 or more. Some in the Alaska fishing business thought Chignik might then become a model for other Alaska fisheries in the future. Three years later, though, the state Supreme Court struck down the Chignik co-op as a violation of the Alaska Constitution, and commercial fishermen in Alaska went back to sometimes banging gunwales in an all-out competition for fish. Such action now appears to be one of the selling points of “Sisters” on TLC, the network that brought America "Sarah Palin's Alaska'' and is rumored to be in discussion about SPA-2. "Sisters" is billed by TLC as "an inside look into a little explored territory -- the wild, unpredictable and competitive world of deep-sea commercial fishing. Patriarch Dean Anderson is a grizzled sea dog known for his aggressive fishing as much as his salmon hauls. As captain of the Memry Anne, he squares off against rival fisherman, hungry sharks and his own hardworking family.''
You've got to be KIDDING ME!!!! How stupoid for anyone in Alaska to support this... fishing in Alaska and taking your money outside to spend elsewhere!!!! I know alot of people do it... but doesn't make it right. Stay where you are and let us profit for our own States sake. Those of us who truely love Alaska are true Alaskans. These folks are no better than Ketchikan fence slime and as deserving of attention as the Palin troglodytes… Always nice to see the Lords and Nobles go by with their resource grants that force our kids South. Boring!!! So now that it's a "reality show" that lends fair chase to Medreds methodology in stalking commercial fishermen and their families. How sporting Craig! Never ceases to amaze me how you're able to weave the slime of politics into EVERY piece you write, though interesting it does cause one to gag all too often on much of what you produce. I appreciate your enthusiasm for kicking in doors and throwing the furniture into the street but maybe not during dinner and while occupants are on the couch?? Great article that exposes the Anderson’s true comment to Alaska, and an inside look into just a small portion of Alaska’s commercial fishing industry. This gets me wondering if a limited entry fishery like the Sitka herring fishery, 49 permits total I hear, should not be offered to Alaskan’s residing in those very communities first? Maybe it already has. Any opportunity to keep that money in Alaska, supporting the Alaskan economy through local residents, should not be missed. I would like to hear more about these federal farm subsidies for salmon fishing? How does that work? As Craig writes… TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN should be the next new Alaska reality series. Good article Mr. Medred. Keep em honest. So you would prefer to live in a state where the government could tell you where you can live and how you can make a living ? Get a life! If memory serves, when limited entry legislation was being developed, one proposal was sale of permits would be to the State only. I never had all the details, but think that at least Alaska residency may have objective. Initial limited entry permits have always been awarded of some measure of prior participation in the fishery before it became limited. After that, the permits became private property. For salmon, the permits are a use-privilege, modifiable by the legislature without compensation, and with leasing and use as loan collateral prohibited, according to Wiki. (I recall nosing around CFAF http://www.cfabalaska.com/ long ago and seeing that entry permits could be used for collateral.) The State Supreme Court decision torpedoing the co-op idea is inline with the intent of limit entry as a use-privilege, not an absolute transfer of the fish. It squares with the ban on permit leasing. You can’t just sit in Colorado and let the permit do your fishing. A "reality" television show uncovering the "reality" of the national fishery manipulated by elected officials in collusion with wealthy owners for the sole benefit of the same owners. This article is just a smidgeon of the behind-the-scenes criminal "reality" of the same structure found in the rest of the pyramids of greed controlling the economic life of the nation. All programs for the benefit of the maximum number of working people are found to be "illegal" by a judiciary falsely interpreting individual rights to really mean individual "Corporate" rights under the pyramid structures set up for the benefit of the few at the top from the efforts of the many below. Questions: Does the film industry tax credit drive this and other reality shows? Do they get to include for tax credit purposes the costs associated with fishing? |
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