Digital Bob Archive

\"The finest breakfast dish in the land; sliced halibut and salmon, put up by the Juneau Packing Company of this city. For sale by all grocery stores.\" That reader advertisement ran regularly in the Alaska Record-Miner published in Juneau in 1905 and indicates one phase of the effort to establish a local halibut fishing industry.

About that same time the Juneau Packing Company made an experiment that had been tried by other Alaska canners ever since 1878, when the Klawock cannery put up a small pack of canned halibut. The Juneau company packed 36 one-pound cans of halibut in 1905, but it was no more successful than others had been. Halibut just does not can well, at least on a commercial scale.

The first local commercial halibut fisherman is said to have been Martin Holst who was born in Vejen, Denmark, on July 21, 1875. He arrived in Juneau in 1897 at the age of 18 and soon began fishing halibut with a rowboat and selling his catch locally. Later he acquired a small power boat, the Belle, fished at greater distances from town, and shipped at least a part of his catches to Seattle on the steamboats. Still later, as the Juneau halibut fleet grew, Holst began fishing herring for bait and for many years he owned the herring pound at Auke Bay. He died in Juneau on October 7, 1945.

Although Martin Holst was a Dane and after about 1910 the local halibut fishermen were predominantly Scandinavians, most of the early ones hailed from Massachusetts or Nova Scotia. In the late 1880s a couple of dozen fishing schooners sailed around Cape Horn to the Pacific Northwest to engage in pelagic seal hunting and halibut fishing. Some of the fishermen who came out from Gloucester and Halifax acquired small boats, mostly equipped with sail alone, and began fishing halibut off Cape Flattery and Vancouver Island. That was tough fishing in the winter months and when it was learned that iced halibut could be shipped from Southeastern Alaska to Seattle on regular steamers, some of them moved north for their winter season. Petersburg was their first port, fishing Frederick Sound, but after a time some of them moved to Icy Strait and shipped their fish from Juneau.

Wind and tide being what they are in these parts, the all-sail boats were handicapped. They had to get to port to meet the steamers; if they were late, they had literally missed the boat and could only dump their fish. Auxiliary engines soon became the rule in the halibut fleet. Even then, winter fishing was no fun. It was all dory fishing in those years, two men to a dory, pulling the gear by hand with the help of a hurdy-gurdy. Some of the boats carried only one dory, some carried two or three.

Many of the boats went back to Cape Flattery in the summers, but a few began to stay in Alaska the year around and by 1913 the Juneau-based halibut fleet numbered some three dozen vessels.