His wife, Emily, and her cousin join him on the 22-foot open skiff. His two sons, aged 13 and 11, often tag along as well.
Working With Family
Nicolson’s grandparents had packed up everything they had to move up to Alaska to fish on an old, double-ended wooden sailboat. It stuck. Seventy years later, it is still the family business.It’s not just Nicolson, it’s his cousins, siblings, aunts, and uncles.
“It’s as much joy and as much challenge, working with a family, as you can imagine,” Nicolson said. Of course, it begets the kind of familiarity where your cousins nag you over quirks and habits the way only family can. But it is also a tremendous blessing to work with family, Nicolson said.
Which is why when wholesale prices of salmon were at an all-time low in the 1990s, Nicolson, then in college, and his cousins put their heads together to save the family business.
“That was the crest of farmed fish,” Nicolson said. “The U.S. bought gigantic numbers of farmed salmon and there was no stigma associated with it then.”
As a result, it became impossible for Nicolson and other fishermen to make a living wage.
“We love doing this, it’s what we’ve grown up with, it’s our family work, heritage, vocation. We want to give it to our kids. How can we keep fishing in some way? How can we make this a sustainable business?”
Living Off the Ocean
Fishing season is short, but it is by no means easy work.“It’s a very short season, agriculturally,” Nicolson said. “It’s the middle of June to the end of July, so it’s super intense and really busy. You kind of work around the clock; you pack five months of work in the six weeks.”
There’s no such thing as a typical day: it all depends on the tides. The biologists of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game calculate and monitor and project, making sure an appropriate number of salmon make it back to the watershed to spawn before the fishermen open their nets.
“It’s extremely, super physically demanding work to fish. The hours are grueling, and it’s really scary on the ocean sometimes. The waters have sunk a boat in the dark of night and people have barely gotten rescued by someone,” Nicolson said.
“So, having said that—it’s dangerous, it’s really hard work, and it’s filthy; mud, blood, and guts and all that—I think one of the things I value about it is the work ethic it teaches you,” Nicolson said.
“Also the necessity of working together with your crew and with your family. It’s definitely a very group-oriented kind of thing, even though, of course, when you’re on your boat by yourself, it’s just you, you have to be able to figure it out, you have to be both team-oriented and self-reliant,” Nicolson said. “I guess one of the things I love or value about it is being a fisherman really teaches you that. And in a practical way, like you have to learn it or you won’t survive.”
These are values Nicolson feels gets passed down through the work and lifestyle, and things he will pass on as well. The work also confers a love and respect for nature evident in the way Nicolson speaks. None of the fishermen need to know too much about the habitat and sustainability numbers to do what they do, but he feels it’s natural to want to know how his work fits into the environment.
When the fishermen aren’t waiting on the boats, they camp just a few hundred yards from the water, killing time.
“Whittling, I don’t know,” Nicolson said with a laugh. “It’s all over the place.”
“It’s off the grid, we have no running water, no power, we have limited telephone service; it’s really remote, where we do our work,” Nicolson said. “It’s really a pleasure, a joy, to be together with them. Also just the years of being on the ocean, to have a life on the sea and to make your living from the sea and the fish, it’s a blessing, I really love it.”
“I’m also a huge fan of salmon themselves; it’s amazing to watch them, how they live and give themselves to our nets and we eat the heck out of them, they’re delicious fish also,” he said.