Like Salmon, an Old Salt Is Hooked on the Alaska Coast

Antoine Mercurio was making ready to go out and get covered with salmon slime when he posed the question.

“How many fishermen do you know who drive a Rolls-Royce?” he asked a visitor casually.

He has a Rolls?

“Several of them.”

The sea has been most bountiful for Mercurio, an Algerian of French-Italian descent who first arrived on the docks of Bristol Bay in 1946. Every year since, he has come up from Monterey, Calif., to fish for red salmon.

Over the years the money from fishing Alaska and other parts of the Pacific has been good, and he made it even better through smart investing, largely in real estate. Word has it in Egegik that he owns half of the Carmel Valley north of Monterey; ask him if it’s true, and he just smiles.

Mercurio, still hale at 78, last year decided he was through with Bristol Bay. He sold his boat, gear and permit to a young fisherman, gave him a brief Egegik tutorial, said his goodbys and went home to California to play golf.

But it wasn’t that simple.

“I quit because I didn’t need the money--I’ve been successful in business,” he said recently. “I was serious about giving it up and attending to my businesses, but I was still thinking about fishing. I was eager to come--I just had to convince my wife.”

This year he was back out jousting with the hundreds of other boats in the mouth of the Egegik River, including those of his brothers Pierre and Jean and other members of his extended family.

Not having his own boat, he worked as a “consultant” to fisherman Pete Gumina. But is clear that he is not the kind of consultant who is content to puff a pipe and offer advice; he still mends and straightens nets, steers through the river’s narrow, shallow channels and tells the crew when to drop the nets into the water.

“I told (Gumina) I could double his catch,” said Mercurio, without a hint of arrogance. “I can teach him about Egegik. I know when to go to the north or the south (fishing boundaries) and where else to go--things it took me 45 years to learn.”

For Gumina, hiring Mercurio’s experience has paid off. After finishing the 1990 season and strike-shortened 1991 season with catches well below average for Nelbro Packing Co.’s Egegik fleet, company figures show that Gumina this year caught more than 100,000 pounds, well above the estimated average of 75,000 pounds.

When Mercurio started learning about Bristol Bay, fishing was done by teams of two in cannery-owned sailboats. It was hard, dangerous work and not the most efficient way to catch salmon, but until 1951 it was the law--a move by the processors in the 1920s to keep fishermen from buying powerboats and thus gaining independence from the cannery fleets.

“In those days you would have to row if there wasn’t any wind--your hands would be just mutilated,” he recalled. Many men and boats were lost to Bristol Bay’s savage winds and pitching seas.

He was there to see the bay’s red salmon harvest increase through the 1950s and ‘60s with the introduction of bigger, faster and better-equipped boats.

He was there when the fishery collapsed in 1973-74, after which the run was gradually rebuilt into a lucrative fishery through a permit system, better management and creation of a 200-mile limit for foreign fishing.

And he was there when canneries bought reds for just pennies a fish in the 1940s and when they went for about $2.50 a pound in 1988, and he rode out the price roller coaster and the strikes in all the years in between.

In the early 1960s, Mercurio was founding president of the Alaska Independent Fishermen’s Marketing Assn., which in years past sought to represent fishermen in price negotiations with processors. Now, it mostly lobbies legislators and promotes the interests of its 600 members.

“He was fair but tough as a negotiator, and probably one of the few who really understood marketing,” said Ivan Fox, Nelbro’s plant manager in Egegik, who bargained with Mercurio. “He’s a good man--I think a lot of him.”

It is clear that other fishermen hold him in high regard as well. He seems to know everyone, young and old, on the Nelbro dock and in the mess hall, and most make time to shake his hand and renew friendships, however fleetingly between fishery openings.

“Don’t believe a single thing he says,” a newcomer is told again and again, jokingly.

Mercurio acknowledged that the camaraderie is a major reason he came back to Bristol Bay. “I made so many friends in so many years--I come back to see them,” he said.

So will you be back in 1993?

“I said last year that it would be my last year, and I have turned down a job for next year,” he said. “I’m going to say it again--this is my last year. But . . . “