Fishermen want to keep their terminal

Associated Press

SEATTLE — For more than 85 years, Fishermen’s Terminal has been home to this city’s commercial fishing fleet. Now, with Puget Sound salmon in decline and cheaper farmed fish swamping the market, nearly a third of its 371 small-boat slips are empty.

The Port of Seattle, in the middle of a $35 million overhaul of the sprawling terminal, wants to lease about 50 of the 114 empty slips to pleasure craft at higher rates that could help keep moorage fees low for working boats.

But the proposal has brought furious resistance from activist fishermen, who fear their salty blue-collar world could be overwhelmed by yacht people with little patience for the sights, sounds and smells of a working dock or even working people.

"This is one of the last places in Seattle where people with grease under their fingernails can feel comfortable," says gill-netter Pete Knutson, 49, who teaches anthropology at Seattle Central Community College when he’s not fishing on his boat Loki.

The matter comes up for a final vote before the port commission Tuesday.

Fishing boats will always have priority at the terminal, port officials say. If a fishing boat needs a slip and all are filled, a pleasure craft will leave.

Port Commission Chairman Clare Nordquist says the higher moorage fees for pleasure craft — they’ll pay about double the $3.30-a-foot rate paid by active fishing vessels smaller than 80 feet — are not sought to pay for the overhaul.

The port is committed to the work already, he says. "We need to have boats there, we need to have it full."

Knutson challenges use of the vacancy rate as a measure of success.

"Those boats are making money when they’re gone," he said.

Port officials allow that some may be in drydock or out fishing, but say winter is when the most boats are likely to be at their home moorage.

Knutson cites a recent study by a consulting firm showing the terminal supports 5,306 jobs — direct, indirect and induced — and more than $246 million in wages and $161 million business revenue — well above the showing so far for the port’s swanky new cruise-ship dock.

But he worries about gentrification. The terminal could allow up to 49 percent recreational vessels — "rec boats" — without a zoning change.

"So you get all those yachts in here … and then all of a sudden it’s not much of a leap to build an office building over here, or build a condo," Knutson said darkly.

"You can’t simply transform Fishermen’s Terminal overnight into a theme park. You’ve got to sugarcoat it. Otherwise the public wouldn’t stand for it."

Port officials adamantly deny condos will ever be allowed.

The terminal’s mission, defined soon after the railroad land was donated to the city in 1913, is to serve the North Pacific fishing fleet based here. That has not changed, they say.

And not all the mariners who dock there are as adamant about rec boats as Knutson.

Third-generation fisherman Jack Knutsen — who calls himself semi-retired after 49 years though he still has two boats here — sees no alternative.

"You’ve got a 33 percent vacancy rate here, when every other marina has a waiting list a mile long," he said on the 42-foot Cape Decision. "It seems to me we’re going to have to fill those spaces with somebody, otherwise moorage is going to go up for existing tenants."

"I can’t say I’m in favor of bringing in pleasure boats," added Knutsen, 61. "I just see it as inevitable."

"A boat’s a boat," shrugged one young man who declined to give his name. "The way things are, money’s money."

"I don’t mind myself," said Frank Du Frain, who moors his 58-foot seiner here when he’s not fishing off Alaska.

The dock in question — Dock 10, one of five terminal docks built for boats less than 80 feet long — is already half empty and "we don’t use it much," Du Frain said.

But Knutson says Dock 10 is the only small-boat dock with vehicle access — handy for offloading a catch or heavy gear.

He’d like the port to follow through on a plan discussed in the 1980s and install a direct-sale facility alongside, where consumers could rediscover wild-caught fish. Even Pike Place Market’s Pike Place Fish, a tourist destination where vendors fling salmon to be wrapped and sold, is peddling farmed fish these days.

Nordquist says a direct-sale facility has not been written off, but he’s dubious about its prospects.

Some boats carry defiant signs: "Yachts don’t feed people, fishermen do."

But the protest banners are far outnumbered by for-sale signs at the freshwater terminal on the Salmon Bay Waterway, which links Puget Sound with Lake Union.

Over the next six years, the port plans to rebuild and reconfigure the five small-boat docks — work that will reduce the number of boats that can moor there.

Knutson contends this will eliminate the vacancy problem, but Nordquist disputes that.

Knutson contends some fishermen have left the terminal in protest because the aging docks are in disrepair.

"It’s a great dock," says Nordquist, who attributes the vacancy rate to the region’s declining small-boat salmon fishery.

There were 1,900 state licenses for the Puget Sound gillnet fishery in 1981, and less than 300 are in use today, port spokesman Mick Shultz says. At issue are fish farms, declining Puget Sound stocks and the 1970s Boldt decision allotting half the state’s fish harvest to tribal fishermen.

"We’re not displacing anything in the fishing industry. If you’re filling an empty slip, what’s the displacement?" Nordquist says.

Associated Press