Preserving Kodiak's Maritime Heritage
Unburied Images:
KMM Photo Acquisition & Preservation Program
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Please contact KMM if you would like to donate or lend your photos for our photo archives.
King of the Catch
Roy Jones, Sr. holds some of the live king crab he caught while fishing in Uyak Bay in the late 1950s. Salmon runs were in decline in the 1950s-1960s so local fishermen rebuilt and refitted their boats to capitalize on Kodiak’s new, lucrative crab fishery. King crab closed to commercial fishing in the early 1980s. Change in ocean temperature, increase in crab larvae predation, and commercial fishing are among the explanations given for the collapse of the crab stocks. (Photo courtesy of Marie and Roy Jones, Sr.)
Iced up in '61
The F/V Richard D, tied up in the Kodiak boat harbor on a frosty winter day in 1961 while fishing for Pacific American Fisheries in Alitak Bay. The photographer, known only as Capt. Jack, wrote on the back of the photograph, "Salt spray ice becoming more and more weight on her deck house. Darn hard on the paint and wood." (Photo courtesy of Rick Metzger)
Skiff Load
Axel Carlson & Walter Stepanoff, Sr. haul a skiff full of salmon in Chignik Lagoon in the 1930’s. (Photo courtesy of Walter Stepanoff, Jr.)
Starboard List
The herring seiner F/V Valencia makes a delivery to the Uganik Bay herring plant in 1947. San Juan Fishing and Packing Co. purchased the plant from Uganik Fisheries in 1945. The plant, called a herring reduction plant, produced oil and fish meal from the thousands of pounds of herring it processed. Herring was a major industry in Kodiak in the 1940s. In 1947 three herring plants in Raspberry Straits on Raspberry Island and one in Zachar Bay also operated. (Photo courtesy of Ivan Fox)
Special Delivery
Campers pile onto the M/V Evangel probably during the summer of 1956, the first year of operation for Camp Woody on Woody Island after three years on Long Island. From 1953-1978, the Evangel was a familiar summer sight on the water. The 40-foot wood boat, which had a buoy tender hull and a tugboat style house, hauled church campers and supplies to the islands where abandoned World War II provided rustic but comfortable places to hold camp programs. (Photo courtesy of the Timothy Smith collection and tanignak.com).
