Sesson Ness Longline Halibut Crew
Clausen Museum Collection
Pulling up halibut
Clausen Museum Collection
Peter Buschmann stacked glacial ice to keep his first catch fresh, but ice was only half of it. Someone had to go out and bring the fish in. From the start, Petersburg’s fortunes rode on its boats and on the people who worked them.
Overlooking Petersburg’s working fleet in the harbor — the Lenor, Gordon-D, Brooklyn, Bravo and Garfield among the wooden boats rafted up below the mountains of Kupreanof Island.
Clausen Museum Collection
The first fleet was small and close to the water: hand trollers, open skiffs, and boats that ran on oar and sail before engines were common. Norwegian fishermen brought more than their nets. They brought boatbuilding skill and a deep familiarity with cold northern seas. Many vessels were built or repaired right here, in the same town they fished from.
Halibut made Petersburg’s reputation. Schooners and longliners worked the open grounds for weeks at a time, crews setting gear by hand in weather that gave nothing back. Closer to home, gillnetters fished the Stikine flats and seiners worked the salmon runs. For decades, cannery-owned fish traps took a large share of the salmon harvest, until Alaskans voted them out with statehood and the ban took effect in 1959, handing the catch back to the boats.
Hauling the seine by hand, before the power block changed the work.
Clausen Museum Collection
The seine boat became the backbone of the salmon fleet. For decades, seining was done by hand: a skiff towed the net out around a school of salmon, and the crew hauled it back aboard by hand, foot by heavy, wet foot, with only a hand winch to help. The boats themselves evolved into the Alaska “limit seiner,” a design shaped by an early rule capping seine boats at 58 feet. With high bulwarks, a plumb bow and a broad stern, it became one of the classic fishing boats of the world, built of old-growth fir planking over white oak frames. Then, in 1953, Mario Puratić patented the power block, a hydraulic pulley that hauled the net mechanically. Within a generation, the work in these photographs had passed into history.
Unloading halibut at the dock.
Clausen Museum Collection
Each boat was its own small economy: a skipper, a crew, often a family. Sons fished with fathers, and boats changed hands within the same families across generations. Knowing where the fish ran, when the tides turned, and how the weather built didn’t come from a manual. It got passed down at the dock.
Crew working together to pull up seine by hand.
Clausen Museum Collection
Alaska Jorgenson & Alice Norberg 1919
Clausen Museum Collection
Dot Bardarson after a long night counting fish. She and her husband, Linne, delivered fish for Kayler Dahl aboard the Alma, 1954–1956.
Clausen Museum Collection
The Fisheries
What started with salmon and halibut grew into one of the most diverse fleets in the region. Today Petersburg fishermen work nearly every major commercial fishery available in Southeast Alaska. That range reflects both the richness of these waters and the adaptability of the fleet.
SALMON - ALL FIVE SPECIES:
Troll, Seine, Gillnet · king, sockeye, coho, pink, chum
HALIBUT:
Longline • one of the fleet's primary fisheries
SABLEFISH - blackcod:
Longline • High-value deepwater species
CRAB - THREE SPECIES:
Pot fishing • Dungeness, King and Tanner Crab
HERRING:
Seine, Gillnet & Roe on Kelp
SHRIMP:
Pot fishing & Beam Trawl
SEA CUCUMBER & GEODUCK CLAM:
Dive Harvesting
SALMON TENDERING:
Support fleet collecting fish from remote grounds
The fleet is still a family business in the truest sense. Boats pass from one generation to the next, crews are made of cousins and neighbors, and the knowledge of where the fish run lives on the dock and in the wheelhouse. Petersburg is small, resilient, and fiercely independent, and it knows exactly what keeps it going.