St Paul Island
Last week (alas, 4 weeks ago due to delays in publication…)was my 4th trip to St. Paul Island of the Pribilof Islands. The fox at left was not to pleased with my presence 
but fortunately most everyone else was ok with it. St. Paul is the major island of the Pribilof group unless you ask the St. George Islanders, of course. It has a population of around 250 people and is the major off load place for the crab and fishing boats of the Bering Sea . Think “Deadliest Catch”. I was able to do a little more exploring than usual on this trip as I stayed an extra day on Saturday. Since the clinic was closed on Saturday, I had a few hours to kill before the plane arrived at 3:00 PM. On Fri. night I happen to go to the only restaurant on the island that was the cafeteria of the Trident fish processing facility for their employees. For a reasonable sum of $20 you can have all you can eat of whatever is the meal for that night. This time it was fried chicken, baked cod, mashed potatoes and corn. There is no other place to purchase a cooked meal on the island. While there for the meal I met the plant manager who told me there would be a boat arriving Sat. morning to off load their halibut load for processing. I received permission to come watch. I think he would have allowed me to help if I had the proper gear. I was glad I didn’t after I saw the work involved.
Here the crane is about to dump several hundred lbs into 4′x4′ plastic bends which were then picked up by forklift and moved inside the building for processing. 3-4 guys were in the hold of the boat filling the basket with fish and worked continuously from 7:30 am til at least 11am before they were finished. I saw no one take a break, inside or out and in fact I was not aware of anyone walking around appearing to be a supervisor. Everyone but me were working constantly until the job was complete. Inside there were about 25 people processing the fish in two lines after the heads were cut off. After the guillotine, each fish was hand gutted, washed and individually weighed before being placed back into clean bends and packed in ice. Each of the two scales were continually watched and recorded by 2 people, one from the boat and one from the plant. I was impressed at the efficiency and cleanliness of the process
The man in the foreground below is getting a very short break, waiting for the hopper to be loaded with fish to be dumped into the table in front of him so he can position the fish for the guy who runs the guillotine to cut off the heads.
I was told the boat had about 80,000 lbs of fish. At $6/lb they made a good haul. That is about the highest price for halibut the local fishermen have had for many years and helping them to recover some of their previous losses. There is a controlled allotment for the season that when it is reached, the season is over, so they only have so long to make hay to last til the next one.
As is well known, One of the Aleutian Islands, Attu, was invaded and held for a period of time by the Japanese during WW2. There was great fear at the time they would move further in the chain and even to the Pribilof’s so defenses were build on St. Paul, mostly fox holes. One concrete structure was built that still stands and looks like it will be there for years to come. It is on the south side of the island and is positioned to view the east end where the current airport is. I don’t know if there was an airstrip in the same spot but it does look out over a large beach area. You step inside and can feel the tenseness of the air as it could be imagined at the time….
As it takes me a while to put one of these blogs together, I had to leave this one and am just now getting back (7/23/11) to finish up. The other interesting occurrence ( to me) on this visit was that I was told about and collected some St. Paul “black diamonds”. These are small pebble sized rocks that are found on one particular hill there. They are a crystal like form and are augite. I was told they are not found anywhere else in the world but have no particular value except to the beholder. There is a story that in the first half of last century, one of the native men took some of them to a jeweler is Seattle to see if they were worth anything. He was told no but they could make some pretty red garnets for a small price. He did that and took the replacements back. Some of the native women made them into pendants and other jewelery and these were sold to the wives of the government officials overseers as “highly valuable” St. Paul “black diamonds”. I have a copy of a letter written in 1960 describing all of this. It is a fun story the natives like to pass around. “Civilized” people are not as smart sometimes as they think they are…..
