How Covid-19 Is Threatening Alaska’s Wild Salmon Fishing Season

ANCHORAGE — For Christopher Nicolson, each June brings happy anticipation of his family’s trip to the tiny Alaska fishing town of Naknek, 3,700 miles from his home in East Flatbush, Brooklyn.

Naknek, set into the grassy bluffs above Bristol Bay, is as bygone as New York City is modern. Cellphones barely work. Bears bang around in the trash at night. You can go from your fishing boat to your truck to the store and back again without missing a word of news on the single AM station.

Mr. Nicolson, 45, spends much of the year working at Red Hook Winery in Brooklyn, where he is the managing winemaker, but his main income is drawn from Iliamna Fish Company. The business, which he and two cousins own, sells Alaska red salmon directly to thousands of shareholders, most of them in New York and Portland, Ore., as well as to a few high-end restaurants and stores, including the Park Slope Food Co-op in Brooklyn.

“The winemaking, which I love, is something I support by fishing,” he said. “I could not afford to live in Brooklyn with my winemaker’s salary.”

For close to a century, Mr. Nicolson’s big extended family has fished each summer in Bristol Bay, home to the largest red-salmon fishery on the planet. His grandmother, who is Athabascan, was born in the region. His brother used to joke that the family were like fish themselves, drawn by instinct to the mouth of the granite-colored Kvichak River, year after year.

But suddenly Mr. Nicolson feels like an outsider, one who may be looked on with suspicion even by his Alaskan relatives, because he could be carrying a deadly virus.

“I have never felt more reluctant to leave New York,” he said on June 14, his flight to Alaska just a few days away. “I’m not as concerned about my own family as much as my extended family and the community I’m coming into. I can’t be cavalier, but I need to balance that with the necessity to keep my family eating, paying the mortgage, you know?”

His worst nightmare is that despite diligent efforts, he and his wife and children might unwittingly spread the coronavirus in Bristol Bay, causing a disaster in a place he deeply loves. A century ago, the Spanish flu pandemic orphaned many of his grandmother’s contemporaries. Alaskans still tell stories of rescuers arriving in villages where only small children survived, and the corpses of the adults had been eaten by dogs.

In the months leading up to the fishing season, Mr. Nicolson has been torn by the signature dilemma of the pandemic era: weighing what he is willing to risk against what he is willing to sacrifice, never knowing if he has the best information to make the call.

He decided to fish, but a number of fishermen he respects have elected to skip the season at a high cost.

“I’m fearful that I will lose my relationship with them due to my choice,” he wrote in an email. “Memories of foolishness or poor judgment are cherished and remembered in rural Alaska.”

Isolated at home, he worked through detailed arrangements to provision his fish camp and travel cross-country, to be followed a week later by his wife, Emily; his sons, William, 14, and Ezra, 12; and a family friend, Finley Acker, 15.

Last Tuesday, Mr. Nicolson arrived in Anchorage, having tested negative for Covid-19 just before he left New York. He was tested again on Friday, to be sure he wasn’t exposed during travel. (He will only be notified if there is a positive result.) As required by an Alaskan state mandate, he began taking his temperature twice a day.

As that order also requires, he will remain isolated, with crew members, at his fishing cabin for 14 days, then wear a face mask whenever he ventures off the property. The rest of his family will come only if they all test negative for the virus in New York.

On Wednesday, Mr. Nicolson arrived at the airport in King Salmon, a town next to Naknek. He was used to seeing people wearing masks in Brooklyn, but it felt jarring to see familiar faces in masks as he made his way through town, evidence of how the virus had crept into a place that had always felt so safely removed from the larger world.

People were friendly, he said, but serious about the rules.

“It’s really liminal. It feels like that weird space between two movements,” he said, noting “that is often the feeling of the fishing season anyway. So much anticipation. It’s emotional.”

Alaska has so far managed to keep its number of Covid-19 cases among the lowest in the nation, helped by its isolation, social-distancing measures and quarantine for arriving travelers. Cruise cancellations, while devastating to the state’s economy, have also shut out a million visitors, reducing a potential source of infection.

In May, as new cases slowed to a trickle, Gov. Mike Dunleavy eased restrictions on bars, restaurants, hairdressers, nail salons, gyms and gatherings. The number of confirmed cases soon began to climb, rising past its previous peak by the second week of June. The state now has more than 859 reported cases.

One fast-growing source of infection are the nonresidents who arrive every summer to fish and work in seafood processing plants. In a normal year, more than 10,000 of them head to Bristol Bay to bring in and pack most of the wild-caught American salmon that winds up on the country’s dinner plates.

The seasonal influx always eclipses the year-round population by many thousands. The region has only one small hospital, in the hub of Dillingham, that is not equipped to care for more than a few seriously ill coronavirus patients.

In recent months, regional public health officials and some local governments and tribes became so concerned about the virus overtaking the hospital that they asked the governor to consider shutting down the fishery. The state instead imposed the 14-day quarantine order and strict health mandates for fishermen and processing companies. Samaritan’s Purse, the evangelical Christian organization that had set up a field hospital in Central Park, flew supplies for a similar hospital to an old military base outside Naknek.

By mid-June, as the fishing season began, there were more than a dozen cases in the region, almost all of them among people who had come from out of state. As Mr. Nicolson packed his patched-up waders and rubber boots in Brooklyn, 900 or so Naknek residents braced for the weeks to come.

The Fisherman’s Bar sat unusually quiet. In front yards and on boats, small yellow-and-black flags began to appear, signaling that whoever lived there had arrived from somewhere else and was under quarantine.

“There’s still a bit of socialization here and there that I see in the boatyard, but it’s nothing like what it was,” said Nels Ure, a fisherman. “It almost feels a little ominous.”

The work of fishing is sleepless and bone-tiring. Operators net the fish from boats, or, like Mr. Nicolson, they string nets into the current from the shore, which is called set-netting. The salmon hit hard for a few peak weeks. Fishermen work around the clock, following a state-managed schedule of openings and closings dictated by the tides.

Once nets are full, fishermen must shake or untangle each fish from the net. Even without the virus, a host of things can go wrong: broken motors, tangled gear, bad weather, injuries, problems with a crew.

For all the work and risk, the payoffs can be huge. Last year, one of the best on record, brought a catch of more than 235 million pounds, worth just under $700 million. In an average year, between selling fish to shareholders and a commercial processor, Mr. Nicolson estimates he makes $100,000 after taxes.

This year’s salmon markets are going to be weak, a significant departure from last year, said Garrett Evridge, a fisheries economist with McDowell Group in Anchorage. Sales to restaurants are expected to be down because of closings across the country, he said. Retail demand may be steady, though high unemployment could force consumers to seek out a less expensive protein, Mr. Evridge said.

Susie Jenkins-Brito is a fisherwoman and a nurse at the hospital in Dillingham. Even for locals, she said, the decision to fish isn’t easy.

She bought a new boat and had been hoping to captain it this summer, but bringing up a crew from outside of Bristol Bay felt too risky, she said. Her husband, Bronson Brito, also a nurse, decided he would fish. Mr. Brito has been a captain for 16 seasons, she said.

“He was like, ‘I don’t know who I am if I’m not a fisherman,’” she said. “He said, ‘I’ll do my very best to be as safe as possible.’”

Norman Van Vactor, chief executive of the Bristol Bay Economic Development Corporation, a seafood company that owns and manages investments in the Bering Sea, has worked in fishing in the region for decades. He expects the number of fishermen will be down this year.

“If I was going to Vegas today, I’d put it at 15 percent, maybe as high as 20 percent,” he said.

One major concern for the industry is the processing plants, Mr. Van Vactor said. Thousands of workers will be living four or eight to a room, eating in cramped cafeterias, working double shifts, every day of the week.

“You think about what the meatpacking industry has gone through — the seafood industry up here has those same issues, but in spades,” he said.

There are a number of safeguards in place to identify and isolate fishermen and processors carrying the virus before they spread it, Mr. Van Vactor said. But the season is so short and intense, he added, that an outbreak that closes a processor even for a day or two could create a costly ripple for fishermen, who might then not have a place to sell their fish.

Mr. Nicolson’s family-business model gives him some security because he and his relatives will deliver some of the fish to a small processor, who will package and freeze it for direct sales. The rest of the catch will be sold to a large processor.

Mr. Nicolson planned to begin fishing within the next week or so.

On Wednesday, if the others have tested negative and made the trip, he’ll fetch them at the airport, and in a few days, the fish will come in. Then, soon, they’ll be hauling in the nets and filling up their skiff, as they have so many summers before.