Enclosed is a picture of my boat and house in Halibut Cove taken in the 1970's
to go along with the enclosed article.
After fishing king crab 22 years my total catch was over three million pounds of
king crab, three-million pounds of tanners and many thousands of tons of herring
and a couple million pounds of salmon. Now we are starving trying to earn a
living fishing.


Henry Kroll
513 Peninsula Avenue
Kenai, Alaska 99611 (907) 283-1456

Homer News

To all residents of Alaska:
In the 1970's I lived in Halibut Cove in a house that I had built
with my own hands. I had a wife that love me, four good children who learned how
to fish. I worked my way up from nothing. I owned a 72' boat outright that I had
rebuilt to catch king crab and tanners to provide for my family. I ran the old
Mary M south to Seattle twice to change the engine and do hull repairs. I had
worked extremely had to reach that point in my life. I created work for three
desk hands and was earning close to two hundred thousand dollars a year. That
was back in the 1970's when the dollar was worth something.
Every year we had a 3.5 million pound to 4.5 million pound king crab
quota for the outer district from Cape Douglass, Barren Islands. Kachemak Bay
had an additional 3.5 million pound quota. After that in November 15 we had a
tanner season for another 3-million pound quota. All that crab and shrimp
amounted to from 30 to 60-million dollars that went directly into the private
sector. This also helped municipalities, grocery stores, fuel distributors and
everyone benefited.
The crab because fewer and fewer and Alaska Department of Fish and
Game extended the quotas and allowed too many crab pots. It appeared they were
trying to wipe out the fishery. Then the Alaska Department of Fish and Game
allowed large shrimp draggers to come into the upper Kachemak bay and virtually
wipe out the shrimp population. Kachemak Bay had written up in several fishing
magazines to as the most productive bay in the world. Now there is no commercial
fishing.
In order to survive I had to fish the Kodiak king crab and tanner
fisheries. Crab became harder and harder to find in Kodiak. I installed a
single sideband marine radio in our house so that I could talk to my wife. When
I would get home after three months of fishing with little to show for it my
wife would unload all her problems on me. This went on for two years until she
eventually took up with one of my employees.
Eventually I was running 24 hours south of Kodiak Island to fish out
of Nakawalak Bay near Chignik. I set up headquarters in Port Wrangle which had
no facilities. This is a long story--too long for this short article. I also out
of fished King Cove and False Pass for three years.
My boat was too small and too old to compete in the Baring Sea
fishery. I couldn't get a loan to buy a bigger boat because the politicians in
Seattle determine who gets loan guarantees from National Marine Fisheries. If
you were from Alaska your chances of getting a boat loan were next to nothing.

Unbeknownst to me, the oil and contaminated drilling mud from 23 oil
wells in the upper Cook Inlet were leaking into the lower inlet polluting the
waters and killing plankton, shrimp and crab spat.
Additionally the State of Alaska allowed the oil tankers to pump
billions o gallons of oily ballast water into Cook Inlet for more than twenty
years. When the tankers entered the mouth of Cook Inlet by the Barren Islands
they started pumping hundreds of millions of oily ballast water from such
harbors as Hong Cong, Los Angeles, Anacortes, Honolulu and San Francisco. Each
tanker was dumping up to 5 to 10-million gallons. Multiply this by a hundred or
more tankers a year and the polluted ballast water totals billions.
By the time the tankers reached Drift River Terminal in Nikiski
their ballast water tanks were empty and ready to take on oil. According to
biologists the tremendous amount of contaminated ballast water from Japanese and
other foreign harbors introduced nematodes--microorganisms that bore inside the
crab and shrimp eggs and eat them from the inside out.
In 1984 the ballast water treatment plant went on line but it was
broke down half the time and the tankers didn't want to use it because it caused
them down time waiting for the ballast water to be removed. It also made the
ships draw more water on the run up Cook slowing them down and burning more
fuel.
The point of this article is the state wanted to get rid of all
commercial crab and shrimp fishing in lower Cook Inlet to punish the people of
Homer from stopping the State and Feds from putting oil wells all over Cook
Inlet. The state had visions of grandeur to rake in billions of dollars from the
oil companies and make lower Cook Inlet look like the Gulf of Mexico with a
hundred oil rigs. It never happened. Nobody would bid on the leases.
The result of this government greed was the cities of Homer and
Seldovia lost an annual income of 30-million to 60-million dollars a year from
the fisheries that went directly into the pockets of the townspeople. This money
helped the grocery stores, bars, construction of new businesses, houses, fuel
distributors, increased jobs and increased taxes to municipalities.
The reason the Bearing Sea still has a fishery is there are no oil
tankers plying the waters dumping oily ballast water---yet.
Nobody seems to understand this. You would think that if you had no
job that you would be more cognoscente of the harvest of resources which is
driving force of any economy. State greed and avarice is the cause. Our dividend
checks can never compensate us or what we have lost.
Some of us lost our wives, our boats, our income, our
self-sustaining lifestyle and had our children turn against us because they
don't understand what their parents were going through.
Our present economic situation is due to a greedy, money-hungry,
bureaucracy that has no respect for economic and culture values of the people it
is supposed to protect.

Sincerely,
Henry Kroll "Thanks for opening your heart."--Bob Shadelson Attorney,
Cook Inlet Keeper