Free Fish! Giveaway Is Coming To Seattle -- Alaska Finds Itself Flush With Too Many Salmon

ANCHORAGE - Alaska is so overrun with salmon that the fish are being given away on downtown Anchorage street corners. And there are plans to bring the giveaway to Seattle this weekend.

Every day at an Anchorage sidewalk stand run by a social-services agency, residents can select as many fresh pink and chum salmon as they want - for free.

"We've just got too many fish; I guess we can't even give them all away here," said Richard Venema, owner of an Anchorage bed-and-breakfast, as he stuffed a dozen fish into a plastic garbage bag. He planned to smoke the salmon and serve them to his guests.

So flush with fish is Alaska that this weekend EARTH, a nonprofit food bank in Anchorage, is bringing 40,000 pounds of fresh salmon to Seattle.

The group will try to give them away at noon on Saturday at a location still to be determined. Mike O'Callaghan, who is leading the EARTH salmon giveaway in Seattle, said he needs help finding a suitable site. People with leads can call him at the Eastlake Inn, 322-7726, No. 109.

The salmon are being handed out free because otherwise they would be discarded in the ocean, Alaska fisheries officials say. Many more pink and chum salmon are swarming back to hatcheries here than are needed to sustain the stocks, and the excess in recent years has become a nuisance.

The market for pink and chum salmon, considered to be lower quality than kings, silvers or sockeye, is almost nonexistent, said Geron Bruce, assistant to the Alaska Commissioner of Fish and Game in Juneau.

The glut of pinks, which are used primarily for canning, and chums, which are sold as fresh and frozen, has flooded the market.

The salmon must be killed when they return to the hatcheries so they don't interbreed with wild fish, which spawn naturally by laying eggs in gravel river bottoms.

Last year, during the largest salmon run in modern Alaskan history, 250,000 fish were killed and dumped at sea.

"The hatcheries are trying to give away as many as they can, but people are interested only in the highest-quality fish," Bruce said.

The group EARTH has given away about 50,000 fish so far this year, according to O'Callaghan. The group has been giving away fish since 1991 but has stepped up its efforts in the past two years as the number of fish discarded has increased.

"It's a disaster that they're throwing away salmon that could be feeding hungry people," O'Callaghan said. "This is a resource that's owned by the people, and it's being squandered."

EARTH is a social-services agency that primarily distributes surplus grocery-store merchandise, but people of all income levels are invited to take as many free salmon as they want wherever the fish are given away, O'Callaghan said.

While business at the free fish stand in Anchorage is steady, it's clear most people here are preoccupied with the choicest salmon in Alaska's vast run.

At noon one day this week, anglers crowded the banks of Ship Creek, a stream that runs near the mirrored office buildings of downtown Anchorage, only a quarter-mile from the free-fish stand.

Wild silver salmon thrashed in the 30-foot-wide stream. Each fisherman, some of whom were trying their luck on their lunch break, can catch up to six of the prime fish a day.

The catch from this creek is only a tiny portion of the estimated 180 million salmon that will be harvested from Alaskan waters this year - about 30 times more than the typical yearly salmon catch in Washington.

"It's a different world up here," Bruce said. "We don't have all that development and agriculture. We still have our natural habitat.

"It's given us a bit more fish than we can use right now."