Commercial fishermen have had a foothold here for more than 100 years. But until fairly recently, there was no sportfishing industry to speak of. Now the sportfishing fleet is growing larger every summer.
Seth Bone, 28, a Sitka native who started commercial fishing here when he was 15, saved enough money to buy his own boat--which he named Kingfisher--in 1990. He got his start in the sportfishing business by taking cruise-ship passengers into the sound.
A year later, he had enough money to buy another boat. His brother, Heath, became captain of the vessel, and Kingfisher Charters was born. His fleet of seven sportfishers, which now ventures well beyond Sitka Sound, is the biggest and most successful in Sitka.
Bone; his wife, Seimeen, and their 16-month-old son, Andrew, live in a two-story house on a hill above Halibut Point Road, amid a dense forest of Sitka spruce. Next to the house are two lodges that house Kingfisher guests, process their fish and offer meals prepared by Big Halibut Don's brother, Damon Orrell, a self-taught chef who is without doubt one of Kingfisher's greatest assets.
Atop an old towering spruce snag between the two lodges, a bald eagle lands almost every night to watch Bone's crew fillet the daily catch, which invariably includes piles of salmon, gargantuan lingcod and, of course, the dirty work of Big Halibut Don.
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It's long past dawn, yet dawn comes very early on a summer day in Alaska, and Big Halibut Don is leaving Sitka Harbor behind, speeding to the fishing grounds an hour or so away.
In the distance looms Mt. Edgecumbe, Sitka's most prominent landmark, towering 3,000 feet above the forested slopes of Kruzof Island, which is just west of Baranof Island.
The ancient volcano, situated about 20 miles from Sitka, was the site in the early 1970s of what many here consider to be the ultimate April Fools' Day joke. A town prankster named Porky Bickar, with the help of a few friends, hired a helicopter pilot to drop a bunch of old tires into the volcano's cone under the cover of darkness.
Bickar stayed behind and, just before dawn, lit the tires, throwing some oil and smoke bombs into the fire for good measure.
"He had notified the fire department and police department because he did not want any repercussions," his wife, Patty, recalls.
But he forgot to notify the Coast Guard, which back then had only a small base here. The Juneau base was notified and an investigation was launched.
