Kodiak Island Bears Pitch In for Alaska’s Salmon Season : Fishing: The city of Kodiak is home to the nation’s second-largest commercial fishing port, with 3,000 vessels registered there. And the carnivores do their part.

Like bull-riding cowboys waiting for the chute to bang open, 90 skippers jockey for positions and rein in the engines of their fishing vessels.

At the tick of 9 p.m., an official’s red flare shoots across the Alaska sky, opening the sockeye salmon season.

Pandemonium roils the water. The salmon must be thunderstruck. Throttles roar and clouds of black diesel smoke belch as the big boats maneuver and their attendant skiffs race to circle seine nets around those precious fish, worth about $7 apiece.

This is “no-holds-barred fishing, Kodiak style,” John L. Eliot wrote in National Geographic.

Waves smash into one boat intentionally beached by its skipper, angling to net fish running close to shore.

Nearby, “in the wheelhouse of Jack Christiansen’s Desiree C., I hung on as the stern of the Sea Star--it was easy to read--cut close across Jack’s bow,” Eliot wrote. “He never blinked.”

The frenzied harvest continued for four days, until Alaska Fish and Game authorities called a halt to assess the strength of the salmon run.

Kodiak Island, sitting in the Kodiak archipelago 250 miles southwest of Anchorage, is one of nature’s great treasure houses. On Kodiak, nearly everyone fishes, including the island’s famous huge brown bears.

In a good year, Eliot wrote, more than a million Pacific salmon come plowing up Kodiak’s Ayakulik River: chinook, coho, pink, chum and steelhead, as well as sockeye.

The river teems also with thousands of rainbow and Dolly Varden trout. And the Ayakulik is only one of about 400 rivers and streams on Kodiak. Offshore swim herring and halibut; farther out, pollock and cod.

It’s a land of spellbinding contrasts--from coastal wetlands to ice-sculpted 4,000-foot mountains. Fingers of the sea reach in; nowhere on Kodiak are you more than 15 miles from salt water. Rain drenches the island; days are overcast more than half the year.

Roaming these islands, and ruling them, are some of Earth’s largest carnivores--Kodiak brown bears, perhaps 3,000 of them. Many are protected in a federal wildlife refuge that takes up two-thirds of the island’s 3,620 square miles.

Males tower 10 feet and approach 1,500 pounds. They grow so big simply because Kodiak offers them so much to eat. The refuge has one of the world’s highest bear densities.

Sharing this wilderness with bears and salmon are 16,000 humans. More than half live in the city of Kodiak and on the U.S. Coast Guard base. Many of the island’s 2,200 Alutiiq, also known as Aleuts, live in six villages.

The Desiree C.’s skipper is an Alutiiq living in Old Harbor, population 298. The village itself was all but wiped out in 1964 by tsunamis spawned by an undersea earthquake. The disaster killed 22 people and caused $45 million in damage throughout the archipelago.

Christiansen has recently gained a reputation as a “highliner,” a top-dog fisherman who always makes the big haul.

In May, 1992, he had chugged 32 hours from Old Harbor and weathered a big storm in search of herring. By law he was allowed time enough for only a single set of his seine. Instantly his net was bursting with fish.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Christiansen said. “It took hours--days--before we knew how much we had.” With more than a million fish, he broke the state tonnage record for a single herring set.

Everyone in Old Harbor dips a hook or sets a net, including the Rev. Sergios Gerken. His is the oldest Russian Orthodox community in the Western Hemisphere, dating from 1784. Russians established the first European settlement in Alaska not far from Old Harbor.

Russian control, which ended in 1867 with the U.S. purchase of the territory, left its mark. Many Alutiiq today roll their names with Slavic suffixes.

“But other people downplay their Russian names and emphasize their native names to get government benefits,” the priest said. “Welfare programs are killing this place, because they make it more convenient not to work.”

The city of Kodiak is home to the nation’s second-largest commercial fishing port, as measured by quantity of fish caught. Three thousand vessels are registered there. The salmon harvest brings fishermen more than $40 million a year, the deep-water trawlers’ catch of pollock and cod nearly as much.

But even in a wilderness paradise like Kodiak Island, conflicts simmer, Eliot wrote. The Fish and Wildlife Service is nervous that native landholdings threaten the bears within its refuge. And on Kodiak’s sister island, Afognak, chain saws are ripping down great Sitka spruce forests.

Why do the Alutiiq have a stake in a federal wildlife refuge? The 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, which established native corporations, requires that they select lands in the immediate vicinity of their villages. Some got land rich with oil and gas rights. But for the three native corporations on Kodiak, the requirement meant 330,000 acres within the refuge.

They soon discovered that such land remains subject to the laws and regulations governing use and development of wildlife refuges.

For years Kodiak natives have been willing to sell this land back to the government for perhaps $200 million, Eliot wrote. Now these natives are threatening to develop their lands.

Both sides sense that everyone would profit if the government bought back the land, Eliot wrote. They have looked for money to do so.

Last spring a huge new source appeared. Nearly $1 billion in penalties was levied against the Exxon Corp. after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in March, 1989. A large chunk may go to preserving lands in the Kodiak archipelago to compensate for spill damage.

Most people call that infamous oil spill an environmental disaster. But, Eliot says, it could end up paying significant dividends, if those funds can make Kodiak’s refuge whole again and preserve what’s left of Afognak’s woodlands.