Swimming with the tide

A worker hoses down the dock where 60,000 pounds of salmon, mostly chums, were just unloaded at Taku Fisheries and Taku Smokeries in Juneau. The slime line is already busy, fed by forklifts full of fish totes, in a cacophony of metallic machine noise and a constant rush of cleansing water.

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The globs of precious bright-red eggs are extracted for caviar. All the fish will be headed and gutted in a few hours. And in 36 hours the ice-packed flesh, already bought by a broker, will be in Seattle via ferry and truck.

Elsewhere in the plant, the pace is considerably slower and the fish are handled with finesse. Two men carefully fillet sockeye salmon for lox, a slow-smoked product that may await a tourist when he gets home.

In fact, tourists are watching the workers through a window from the retail store.

What began in a Mendenhall Valley garage in 1984 with one guy smoking a few thousand pounds of fish has grown into a multifarious business that employs up to 110 at peak times and processes about 7 million pounds of fish a year.

``Unfortunately, until Taku Smokeries and a few smaller operations, Juneau virtually had abandoned the commercial fisheries industry,'' said Charles Northrip, executive director of the Juneau Economic Development Council.

``Commercial fishing is a real small part of the Juneau economy. But these are encouraging signs,'' he said.

Most of Taku's fish are primary-processed, in the downtown plant built in 1991, for brokers and buyers in the seafood industry, or for a fee for other processors. A much smaller portion of the fish will be smoked for retail and mail-order sales under the Taku label.

Salmon entrepreneur: Sandro lane started Taku Smokeries out of his garage in 1984; it's grown into a large, year-round company.

MICHAEL PENN / THE JUNEAU EMPIRE

``Most people in town don't really realize what's going on here,'' said Sandro Lane, president and majority owner of the company.

The business certainly has grown in 15 years, but it's been a gradual and limited growth - the way Lane wants it. The company is administered by about six people and Lane is not much farther from the fish now than he was in his garage.

While General Manager Eric Norman watches the fish come in over Taku's dock and grades it for quality, Lane is on the phone to buyers. Unlike his counterparts in big companies, he knows what the fish look like.

Lane and Norman ``are talking to the fishermen right there,'' said Takashi Nasa, international sales manager of Consolidated Factors in Monterey, Calif. ``Then they talk to me, as a Japanese agent, and we decide yea or nay right there.''

Tradex Foods Inc., a Victoria, B.C.-based processor and trader, has bought about 15 containers of frozen fish from Taku this season.

``I never had one fish returned from production that had a problem with it,'' said company president Robert Reierson.

Quality begins with the fishing fleet - lots of ice and short trips, Norman said.

In a way, that's the principle that keeps Taku afloat in an industry that has suffered poor years recently. Taku is looking for a steady supply of moderate amounts of fish, which can be processed quickly while the product is at its best.

Every element of the business fits together. The volume of product matches the locally available labor supply that can process the fish quickly. If Taku handled bursts of very large volume, it would have to import workers - if it could find them - and build dorms to house them.

``If you're a processor, the greatest world of all is to be able to control your product's flow, so you can control your labor costs and you can control your quality,'' said Larry Cotter, co-owner of fisheries and marine consultants Pacific Associates of Juneau.

Processors in some Southeast cities have problems keeping workers, said personnel manager Dawn Pedersen. But Taku can find nearly all its workers locally, she said.

Employment peaks at 110 workers in July, and averages about 70 in the summer. It declines to 20 to 30 after Christmas.

Line workers make between $7.50 and $12 an hour, and they get overtime pay after eight hours a day or 40 hours a week. When the plant is at its summer peak, workers may put in 75-hour weeks.

``That's what they're here for is the overtime - to make a lot of money fast,'' said production foreman Mike Milligan.

The plant functions nearly year-round thanks to its emphasis on some longline fisheries that run for about eight months, and to its retail smoking operation.

It's part of Taku's strategy not to be too reliant on salmon, whose prices have plummeted in recent years in competition with farmed salmon.

Although about half of Taku's volume is salmon, a lot of that is processed for other companies. Taku gets a processing fee without taking the risk of ownership or the expense of inventory.

Taku does buy salmon for itself from 20 to 30 local fishermen, Lane said. Some is frozen and sold wholesale. And much of Taku's sockeye salmon go into value-added products in the retail and mail-order side.

Some local fishermen wish Taku would buy more salmon.

Charlie Polk, a local gillnetter, said most gillnet-caught salmon harvested near Juneau is sold to one big company's tenders. As a result, fishermen get poor prices and other communities get the fish tax, he said.

The salmon industry is in difficult shape these days and it would be hard to justify investing in a big plant in Juneau, Cotter said. One way to go is to be a small player who has developed niche markets.

Only 1 percent of Taku's fish gets smoked, but it generates 10 percent of sales, Lane said.

``Value-added is the difference between selling a tree in the round as a log, or as a piano or a chair,'' Lane said.

Hot-smoked sockeyes are Taku's Steinways. A two-pound fillet sells for $44.

On a busy day, the retail store at the plant sees about 500 customers, mostly from cruise ships, said retail operations manager Gary Wood.

Because smoked products need to be refrigerated, many customers choose to have the fish shipped cold to them. Some of them phone again at Christmas to buy smoked fish as gifts.

Since Lane began his company, he's assiduously collected the names of retail customers. The list now numbers well over 100,000, he said.

Taku ships out more than 15,000 packages of smoked product a year, about half at Christmas, said customer service manager Robert Myers. Sales are growing about 15 percent a year, he said.

After the Christmas rush, there's a break. Then the production year starts with crab in February. It's followed by longline halibut and black cod fisheries that stretch from March to November, under a new management system implemented in 1995.

The long seasons have created ``a tremendous fresh market,'' Cotter said, which makes Juneau an attractive place to process fish because it can be flown out quickly.

So far this season, Juneau is the third largest port for landings of halibut caught in Southeast and is second only to Sitka for regional landings of black cod.

``Being busy 11 months a year is one way to pay your bills,'' Norman said between phone calls from buyers.

``But to do that you have to have a lot of action to feed the fires, to feed the hungry mouth of the facility,'' he said, and took another call.