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SSRAA’s First Ten
Years (1976 – 1986):
(The following speech by
Patricia Roppel was given in commemoration of
SSRAA’s first ten years. Pat is an historian and
author who wrote, among other things, a history of
the first hatcheries in Alaska; “Alaska’s Salmon
Hatcheries, 1891 – 1959” (Alaska University Press).
Pat recently sent us the notes from which she
spoke. We have done our best to reproduce the talk,
and apologies to Pat for any mistakes we might have
made in the process. She now resides in Sitka.)
“Even though I am an historian
and have researched and written a number of things,
including a book on the pre-statehood hatcheries, it
never occurred to me in the 10 years that I have
been with SSRAA that one day someone would ask me to
tell the history of this organization."
The early years were so
emotional – and we were so intense in our fight for
existence that things like dates didn’t stick in my
memory – we lived from crisis to crisis – each one,
it seemed more monumental than the last one. At
least, I had sense enough to keep all the papers
that we members of the Board of directors received,
and when we moved to Sitka a couple of years ago, I
donated them to the museum where they take up an
astonishing amount of shelf space.
How did we get started? And
how did I, a non-fisherman, get involved. This all
started in 1976, two years after a non-profit
aquaculture bill passed the legislature and was
signed into law in 1974. That first law was VERY
ambiguous – it had been lobbied by the fishermen to
prevent ocean ranching – in other words Weyerhouser
and Domsea at Manchester – from coming to Alaska.
In essence the law said, only non-profit
organizations could build hatcheries and raise
salmon. It did not define “non-profit
organizations”.
The seiner, gillnetter and
troll associations in Ketchikan began separately to
consider the potentials for salmon hatcheries. At
that time there was a FRED Hatchery at Beaver Falls
which had produced no returning fish, and the one in
Petersburg (Crystal Lake) which had been in
operation for about 4 years and had no visible
success. Fishermen felt they could do better than
that without all the red tape.
Three men volunteered the time
to try and put something together for the fishermen
to operate under the new ambiguous law. They were
Dick Bishop, a gillnetter, Larry Painter, a seiner,
and Jon Rowley, a troller, and it was really Jon’ s
enthusiasm that got a group of fishermen together
at the seiners association’s office on Water
Street. He advertised in the newspaper that there
would be a meeting of interested people and since I
had been doing research on early hatcheries, I went
to see what was going on.
There proved to be enough
interest that it was decided we should open an
office half days in the Seiner’s office, and I would
man (woman) the office starting April 5, 1976. Our
biggest concern was finding some money to be able to
raise money. It was really a $5,000 donation from
the King Salmon Derby of the Ketchikan Chamber of
Commerce which made it possible to start
functioning. We had John Sund draw up an articles
of incorporation and the by-laws and on May 24,
1976, Southern Southeast Regional Aquaculture
Association (SSRAA) was formally incorporated as a
private non-profit corporation under the Alaskan
laws. The ten original incorporators were: Jake
Jacobson, Jim Bray, Maurie Ingman, Roger Ingman, Joe
Demmert, Larry Painter, Dick Bishop, Larry Dalton,
Jon Rowley, and Pat Roppel.
We had the first directors
meeting on June 26, 1976 and Larry Dalton was
elected president, Larry Painter vice president, Jon
Rowley secretary-vice president, and Pat Roppel
secretary-treasurer. In November of 1976 the board
was increased to include a sports fisherman
representative, processors, chamber of commerce,
municipality, and three at-large positions for a
total of 19 Board positions.
It was assumed that, like the
newly incorporated Prince William Sound Aquaculture
Association in Cordova, that fishermen would
voluntarily assess themselves to pay for the
program, that processors would match the
assessments, and seed monies would be raised by
donations from the Ketchikan community and from the
fishermen or by state grants.
We sent out letters to 1,800
permit holders explaining the program and asking for
their support. A month later, we sent another
letter. 34 fishermen responded and by mid-August
$13,000 was raised.
By June Jon, Larry and Dick
realized that fishing season was coming, and I knew
my children who were in grade school would be home
all day and I could no longer donate my time in the
office, so we began to search for an executive
director. Jon advertised in a number of papers in
Seattle, Portland and places like that. One of the
people to apply was Jack Milnes. Jack was willing
to come to Alaska knowing we didn’t have enough to
pay him for more than a month or two. He had a
background in creating management systems and
raising money to put these systems in effect. He
was hired in August of 1976. He lived in Larry
Dalton’s boat for a little while and got deathly
sea-sick when his bedroom went gillnetting at Tree
Point; so we rented an office on the ground floor of
the Marine View. Jack didn’t have much privacy in
those days. We didn’t have enough chairs and
sometimes held executive committee meetings sitting
on his bed.
By this time Larry Dalton was
the president of SSRAA and he was volunteering
nearly full time, trying to get the program off the
ground. And, we faced enormous problems. Money was
always a problem, and under refinements of the
non-profit law made in 1976, we were able to get
some seed money from the legislature. Our attempts
to get voluntary donations continued to be poor,
partly because of the uncertainty around the limited
entry law and whether it would remain in effect. If
you recall, after being declared constitutional, the
issue was brought before the public on November
ballot. We waited for this issue to be resolved.
Fish and Game presented one of
our biggest obstacles. They saw SSRAA as a threat
to their fledgling hatchery program. I will never
forget the night we met at the longshoreman’s hall
in May of 1976. Stan Moberly (FRED Division
Regional Supervisor) dictated to us that we had to
expand our region. The law gives no dictate on
boundaries, so we had set our northern border as
Luck Point – 56 degrees. But Fish and Game had the
power to divide the state into the regional
corporations, a concept which had been added to the
law in 1976. ADF&G decided to divide Southeastern
Alaska into two regions and we had to include all of
ADF&G’s fishing districts 1 through 8, including
Petersburg and Wrangell. We were very upset because
the fishermen in Petersburg and Wrangell really
didn’t want an aquaculture association. Petersburg
had seen the failures at Crystal Lake Hatchery. Our
arguments were to no avail, and we changed our
boundaries and amended the by-laws in November of
1976. And, it took years to gain the cooperation of
the fishermen of these towns.
Then we had to find brood stock
from which to take eggs. Fish and Game didn’t help
much there either. Larry Dalton, Jim Bray and Dick
Bishop coordinated field counts of coho in local
streams. Bill Smoker worked for us in 1977 to
continue these studies. With funding tight board
members donated time, boats, and cash to do the work
that staff does today. Dick Bishop and I went out
to Shelokem Lake once to look at the hot springs and
check the temperature to see if we would utilize the
hot water. Larry, Jake, Jim all did this type of
research.
In the fall of 1977 we had
egg-take crews on several streams where Fish and
Game said we could get eggs, if the runs were big
enough. One stream was in Walker Cove, the other in
Cordova Bay. Our fellows sat out there and watched
three of four fish return; no eggs were collected
and we lost a year’s production.
We put up the small building at
Beaver Falls to incubate the non-existent eggs, the
one we now use for our sockeye program and
fortunately we were able to put eggs in the building
in 1978.
Once limited entry was securely
in place, we proposed a mandatory assessment from
all fishermen, patterned after some apple growers
program Jack knew off. The program passed and the
SSRAA Board certified that election June 10, 1977.
We finally had money to use as security to build a
hatchery. John Sund and Terry Gardiner, who was at
that time a legislator, were able to get a loan fund
in place in 1977 so non-profit hatcheries could
borrow money to build their facilities.
SSRAA’s concept was that we
would have a central incubation facility and bring
eggs to the hatchery and return the fry to remote
locations for release. Planning began in 1977 after
we selected Whitman Lake as the site for the
hatchery. The sites selected for remote releases
were Nakat Bay and Neets Bay, however we listed
Kendrick Bay and Anita Bay as alternatives (SSRAA
has release sites at all these locations today.) We
finally were able to secure, against the seiners and
FRED’s wishes, chum eggs (fall chum) from
Disappearance Creek.
It was about this time that
SSRAA Board members learned the true meaning of
Friday the 13th. It was on such a date in
1977 that we learned we were party to a law suit
that the 3% salmon enhancement tax was illegal.
Fortunately the state stepped in to help us fight
this suit. During the time of the suit, this tax
was taken out of the fishermen’s gross earnings but
not distributed to us. After the tax was declared
illegal, many fishermen answered our pleas and
donated their tax to us. All of these men received
a SSRAA hat in return. So if you ever see anyone
with a SSRAA hat, you know that that person really
supported us in our hour of need.
With a great deal of lobbying
effort, a law was passed which made it possible for
the fisherman to be mandatorily taxed 3% by the
state, with the funds returned to the associations.
In January of 1981 the fishermen again approved the
salmon enhancement tax by a 3 to 2 ratio. It’s
through this tax we have been able to secure our
state loans, using it as collateral.
It was a proud day for us when
we dedicated Whitman Lake Hatchery on August 17,
1979. By this time we had a larger staff and had
moved from Jack’s bedroom to an office on Creek
Street, and then later to Mill Street above Jimbo’s
Restaurant, and finally to a house at the old Sunny
Point Cannery.
We were doing other things
now. Many of the fishermen did not want to see
SSRAA involved in building concrete monuments and we
began to look at lake fertilization. Dr. Stocker
from the Canadian lake fertilization program came to
talk to us and told us of the wonders of their
Central Lake Program. In August 1979 we began
pre-lake fertilization studies on a number of the
sockeye systems in our area and it was determined to
work with Hugh Smith Lake and eventually McDonald
Lake. After we lobbied the legislature for money,
actual fertilization began in the spring of 1980.
Part of the revised non-profit
hatchery act mandated that fishermen and ADF&G
jointly plan for the orderly development of the
hatchery program in southeast Alaska. So we hired
someone to do our planning, this was Rich Harris,
one of our current board members. Phase I of this
plan was completed in spring of 1980.
In 1979, Jack felt we needed to
have some long range plans of our own, as we hired
Leonard Lane Associates to help us develop goals and
objectives and we put together a SSRAA Long Range
Plan, something the corporation continues to update
yearly in October.
Our egg takes continued to
increase; our survival rates became better and
better. By spring of 1981 we were releasing 19
million fry. Only 4 years earlier we couldn’t find
a chum salmon to spawn for eggs. We were now
producing coho salmon too and eventually were able
to secure king salmon eggs from the Unuk River.
Some of our staff had interesting adventures
sitting on the banks waiting for the king salmon
runs. Sitting there competing with those big brown
bears.
We had to expand Whitman Lake
and when we got to that fateful number 13, we named
the raceway number 14. For a number of years we
were so superstitious we never met on Friday the 13th.
And one other 13th date produced a disaster for
SSRAA, on February 13, 1982, the water system at
Whitman Lake malfunctioned after an exceedingly dry
spell and the ice collapsed on the lake after we had
nearly drained it, and in so doing it fell on the
intake pipe. We lost 13% of the fish that morning,
and I remember Frank Jaynes and Jake, Jim and I and
several other board members at the hatchery, moving
eggs and fry and trying to save as many fry as we
could.
When coho and chum salmon began
to return to Neets, the board started to look at a
permanent hatchery and after much discussion and
plans, we began to construct the Neets Bay Hatchery
in 1983. By this time Jack had decided to
revolutionize the maple syrup industry in Maine and
we had hired a board member, Ron Wendte, to be our
executive director. Not many of you were around
when Jack was here, but without his dogged
determination, his imperiousness to the insults of
Fish and Game, his 100 percent 24-hour dedication to
the corporation, we would not be here today.
In 1984, Neets Bay was
completed. Those board members who went out to
Neets the day they turned on the water for the first
time in the fish ladder will never forget the
feelings of seeing all those chum salmon, pushing,
shoving, clamoring to get up the ladder, even when
there was only an inch or two of water. It made all
our personal sacrifices of time and effort and
emotions worth it.
Another thing that really
pleases me, especially since I have considered
myself the most stingy of all the board members when
it comes to committed money, is that in 1985, for
the first time SSRAA went into the black. No longer
is it necessary to borrow money to operate. With
Don Amend as executive director, leading a very
loyal staff, we have tightened our belts, refined
our systems and are providing a tangible benefit to
the fishermen. It makes me very proud to have been
a part of this organization. I can’t believe it has
been ten years, but what we have built in that time
give s me great pride.
Pat Roppel
Speech given on March 16, 1986
at the 10th Anniversary of SSRAA.
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