KCAW

Kelp is showing up in everything these days– cookies. Hot sauces. Even vodka martinis. The last one may be thanks, in part, to Mark Shear, a kelp and oyster farmer who partnered with a distillery in Ketchikan to develop sugar kelp vodka. 

“And just on a, just on a whim, I was talking with them, and I had just happened to have some seaweed in the plant, and Travis said, ‘Well, let’s, let’s try to make a vodka out of it,’” recalled Shear. “And so we dropped a couple 100 pounds of ground sugar kelp off, and they went and did their voodoo that they do, and whatever it is, and came up with this hold fast vodka, which is, which is freaking awesome! It is really good!”

Shear was one of three mariculture experts who participated in a panel discussion at the Southeast Conference, an annual gathering of regional business and community leaders in Sitka in mid-September. 

His company is one of many that has received funding from the Alaska Mariculture Cluster, a grant coalition working to develop a profitable and sustainable mariculture industry in Alaska in under five years. The cluster was funded by a $49 million grant from the U.S. Economic Development Administration under the Build Back Better Regional Challenge program. 

With the support of the cluster, Shear’s business, Seagrove Kelp and Oysters, has not only been able to create over 12 new jobs, but also has gotten a foothold in seafood markets all over the world. Shear is optimistic that his company will continue to  expand.

“If things go to plan, we will build another farm outside of Ketchikan, another scaled oyster grow farm outside of Ketchikan in the new year, and, and then hopefully stock that, and it would hopefully start producing in ‘27,” said Shear.

Panelist Angie Bowers is an assistant professor at the University of Alaska Southeast (UAS) Sitka campus. She said that nearly 90% of alumni from the university’s Applied Fisheries Program found work in the industry and aquaculture fisheries. Three-quarters of those jobs were based in Alaska. Bowers feels these statistics reflect how the mariculture industry has grown since the program began.

“Because I feel like in past years, especially when we first started this program, it was a little bit like the egg before the chicken,” said Bowers. “I guess it was kind of like we’re developing, we’re training these students in this industry that did, there wasn’t a lot of opportunity for them to go into and that’s definitely changing quickly, which is really exciting to see.” 

Dan Lesh is the deputy director of the Alaska Mariculture Cluster. He emphasized that collaboration is key as the industry continues to grow. Through a program the cluster has developed called the Alaska Mariculture Insights, people at all levels of the mariculture industry around the world are able to exchange knowledge. 

“It’s just kind of interesting to see yourself being talked about on a global stage,” said Lesh. “It’s quite inspiring how much excitement and interest there is in what we’re doing. Even though we’re small, we’re innovative. We’ve got so many interesting problems and resources here.”

Amongst other initiatives, Lesh said the remaining $34 million will fund their current and new contractors in research, along with new farming and hatchery techniques, and the cultivation of different kinds of wild seaweeds. By the end of the next year-and-a-half, they hope that all their investments will have paid off so that they can continue on their own from there-on-out. 

“We have to produce something of value to the world, or we this way, industry won’t stand on its own,” said Lesh.

With the Southeast shoreline at their fingertips, all three panelists were optimistic about the potential the industry has to support coastal communities.

Editor’s Note 9-22-25: Edited the audio for brevity

As the school year ramps up, Sitka Sound Science Center is back with a wide variety of after-school programming. Maia Carter from the Sitka Sound Science Center joins KCAW for the Morning Interview to discuss how youth can get involved in gaining hands experience in explaining scientific data in compelling ways, as well as learning how to run a aquarium.

A warm August and early September near Sitka raised water temperatures to over 60 degrees. And those warm waters attracted an unusual fish to the area – tuna. Sitka anglers had historic luck bringing home the fish that usually swim farther south.

Growing up, fishing was a scary prospect for Jason Own.

“I had kind of a bad experience on a fishing trip when I was a kid, and got a hook stuck in my hand and ever since that day, I was very scared to pick up the rod and reel,” Own said.

That changed when he moved to Sitka around two years ago, and took up spearfishing. 

“After work almost every day, I’d pick up the spear gun, put on a wet suit, and hop into the ocean,” Own said.

Own was busy studying to get into med school one day in late August, when he heard a couple of tuna were spotted in a harbor in downtown Sitka. The highly unusual sighting was enough to pry him away from his books. At the harbor, he watched as folks tried to catch the fish, but they weren’t biting, and fishermen on the dock were getting frustrated. One hollered, “Someone should just go in the water and spear that thing.” Own said he had his spear in the car. 

“All of a sudden I was, you know, everyone was egging me on to go in the water and give it a shot,” Own said.

He went down to the shoreline and waded in. There, he waited, suspended underwater for over half-an-hour, until he felt the vibrations of the tuna approaching from the water above him. 

“I just was, honestly, just so enamored by how cool that thing was,” Own said. “It’s obviously very shimmery, and, you know, tuna, they’re just built for the ocean, and are really streamlined. And I was just kind of admiring how this thing had evolved over the past thousands of years, to be like a torpedo in the water, and to travel these huge distances, to migrate in such fast speeds.”

Then, Own said the tuna seemed to notice him, and, startled, it turned in the water.

“For a split second, I had a very clean look at its face,” Own said. “Then I was like, ‘Oh, well, if I’m going to take a shot, it’s probably going to be now.’ And I pressed the trigger.”

He landed a clean shot, and the front page of the local paper for the unusual catch– a 30-inch-long, 15 to 20 pound skipjack tuna.

Own’s experience was an early catch in what became an unprecedented tuna harvest in Sitka.

Bridget Ferriss is a research fish biologist with NOAA Fisheries. In an email, she told KCAW that tuna do show up in the Gulf of Alaska, but it’s not monitored by NOAA to know if it’s a rare encounter. There are two stocks of skipjack tuna in the Pacific Ocean. 2025 has brought warm waters to Alaska, and strong warm currents across the North Pacific have provided a route for tuna from one of those stocks to make their way to Southeast. 

Ferriss says Albacore are more common in Alaska, but still infrequent. She says they can handle a broader temperature range than Skipjack. As luck would have it, a group of local fishermen were about to find that out. 

Until a couple of week ago, RJ Miller had never been tuna fishing. Miller runs a charter fishing business in Sitka. Last summer, he heard about an angler who caught two albacore off the coast of Cape Edgecumbe, more than 20 nautical miles from Sitka. This summer, he was guiding a charter trip, and one of the crew snagged something really fast and strong- likely a tuna. But it was a hard sell to convince visiting charter fishermen to go for tuna when they journeyed to Alaska for something more…Alaskan.

“That thing pulled harder than I’ve ever seen anything pulled,” Miller said. “At that point, we’re beyond excited, irrationally excited.” Miller said he asked the visiting fishermen if they wanted to try for tuna, but they wanted to stick to salmon.

So he started doing more research and learning from other locals with tuna experience, including Steve Ramp. They all agreed to go out on the hunt for tuna. On a Thursday morning in late summer, Ramp got an early start toward the Cape. Miller followed him out a couple of hours later. As Miller surveyed the water, looking for that neon blue warm ocean current where the temperature exceeded 60 degrees, Miller called Ramp to check in, and someone else on the boat picked up.

“She goes, ‘Well, Steve’s fighting a fish right now,” Miller recalled. “We’re all just about to lose our minds. [I say] ‘What? Fighting a fish right now?’ And they get it in the boat, and I go, ‘Oh, what was it?’ And she goes, ‘Albacore!’ and at that point, we’re hysterical.”

Miller, Ramp and the rest of the group brought home 45 albacore tuna that day. Like Own, Miller marveled at their strength and speed.

“Well, you’re trolling at seven to 10 knots. They grab the lines and the reels just start screaming,” Miller said. “And we’re using halibut gear, with probably pushing 10-12 pounds of drag. Pretty tight, not too tight, but pretty tight drag. And they just scream out 100, 200, 300 feet of line, depending on how big they are.”

Their bounty brought more fishermen out to try their luck. ADF&G area sportfish management biologist Troy Tydingco estimated that close to a couple hundred have been caught.

“It happens from time to time down in Prince of Wales, where anglers are kind of watching the sea surface temperature. And when it hits 60 degrees, which is usually kind of a ways offshore, they go out and try,” Tydingco said. “To my knowledge, this is the first time that sport anglers have had success targeting them offshore [in Sitka].

There’s no limit to how many tuna sport fishermen can catch, as long as they have a permit. But the tuna boom in Sitka prompted the Alaska Department of Fish and Game to issue an advisory about commercial fishing, which is also legal, but far more regulated.

Miller said while he’s only recently become a tuna fisherman, he’s trying to share everything he’s learned in the past month with fellow Sitkans. 

“I hope that everybody in Sitka can go out and and get their hands on one of these,” Miller said. “Not only for how absolutely delicious they are, but the thrill of the chase and the thrill of the fight.”

More than anything, the experience has piqued his curiosity. 

“It kind of feels like Pandora’s box,” Miller said. “What’s really out there? If albacore are out there, what’s eating the albacore? It has me curious. Is there giant Bluefin? Are there Marlin? I mean, we just really don’t know.” 

But Miller hopes to find out. 

Candidates running for a seat on the Sitka School Board were invited to join KCAW to discuss issues and answer listener questions in a forum on Wednesday (9-18-25).

Over an hour, two of the three candidates in the running, Paul Rioux and Courtney Amundson, discussed everything from school funding and the board’s approach to advocating for money from the state, to standardized testing and early childhood education.

Listen to the full forum here:

Full audio of the assembly and ballot proposition forums is available on KCAW’s Election Center, along with candidate questionnaires, interviews, and more information on the October 7 municipal election.

Sponsors of two ballot propositions that will be put to Sitka voters in October joined KCAW Thursday (9-18-25) to discuss the issues and answer locals’ questions. 

Chris McGraw is a sponsor of Proposition 2, which would require future citizen initiatives to include independent studies spelling out the potential impact on Sitka’s economy. Assembly members Chris Ystad and Kevin Mosher are co-sponsors of Proposition 1, which would lift restrictions on a city hospital fund to pay for upgrades to local recreational and athletic facilities.

Listen here:

You can find audio from KCAW’s forums with this year’s assembly and school board candidates, along with candidate interviews, a candidate questionnaire, and a sample ballot for the upcoming Oct. 7 municipal election at Raven Radio’s Election Center.

This year’s municipal election will take place on October 7th. Sara Peterson, Holley Bayne, and Brian Schoenfelder from the City of Sitka’s Municipal Clerk Office join KCAW for the Morning Interview to explain what is on the table this election, as well as how to cast your vote both during the early voting period and on election day.

Candidates vying for a seat on the Sitka Assembly gathered in Raven Radio’s air room on Tuesday (9-16-25) to discuss issues important to Sitkans and how they’d govern if elected.

Five of the six assembly candidates participated in the hour-and-a-half program, answering questions posed by locals. Topics ranged from the role of local government in addressing Sitka’s housing crisis and childcare, to how the assembly can foster better relationships with underrepresented communities.

Listen here:

You can find audio from KCAW’s forum with this year’s school board candidates, along with candidate interviews, a candidate questionnaire, and a sample ballot for the upcoming Oct. 7 municipal election at Raven Radio’s Election Center.

As fall ushers in community events, the Ramshackle Cabaret will be starting up their 2025-2026 season and are looking for performers, crew members, and volunteers to help bring their upcoming shows to life. Shelby Williams and Christian Litten from the Ramshackle Cabaret join KCAW for the Morning Interview to speak on the upcoming info session for the season (7pm at Mean Queen on 9-19-25), the importance of building community through “weird” art, and the role the arts play in activism.

Biologists have launched the first-ever state study of brown bear numbers on Sitka’s Baranof Island. Managers say they need updated data to manage the population appropriately. 

Baranof Island is really big — about 1,600 square miles — larger than the state of Rhode Island. The brown bear population is currently managed using really old numbers based on populations from a different island, measured nearly 40 years ago. 

Stephanie Sell, a wildlife research biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, said there’s never been a population estimate study completed on Baranof.

“The management numbers that we’re using for brown bears on Baranof were extrapolated from a project that happened on northern Admiralty [Island] in the late 1980s and the early 1990s,” Sell said.

(There was a track study in the 1930s, where researchers went up salmon streams to measure the widths of paw pads to determine how many animals were on the island, but modern research techniques invalidate it.)

Based on the information they found on nearby Admiralty Island — located between Sitka and Juneau — Sell said researchers determined there was likely more suitable habitat on Baranof, meaning more bears. 

The number they settled on? 1,045. 

But Sell said they really don’t know how accurate that number is. And to be able to sustainably manage brown bears on the island, it’s really important to have updated information. 

“What we’re trying to do is figure out what those numbers are,” she said.

Sell estimates the study will take about five to six years to complete. Biologists recently wrapped a similar six-year project near Haines and Skagway. Sell said ADF&G had been managing for a population of 400 bears in the area, but the study led them to lower that estimate to just over 300.

“I don’t know if it’s going to be more or less on Baranof Island, but that’s what this project is going to hopefully find out,” she said.

The price tag on the study is still unknown, according to Sell, but they have a funding source: the Pittman-Robertson Wildlife Restoration Act, which is supported by federal excise taxes on the sale of ammunition and firearms.

In early September, Sell and her assistant began capturing brown bears near Sitka and putting GPS collars on them to learn more about their habitats and day-to-day movements.

“We use helicopters wherever we can to dart bears, and then it takes us about an hour to process the bears,” she said. “We also use foot snares in places where we won’t run into people, for safety reasons. And then the other method is free range darting, where we sit next to some sort of salmon stream or some sort of attractant, where the bear is drawn in by some natural food source, and we just wait for bears to show up.”

Each of the 25 bears they aim to capture each year will wear a collar for up to two years. When they retrieve them, researchers will then be able to look at that data and focus their efforts on the next part of the study: genetics.   

“Once we get more spatial data and see where bears are moving across the island, we can start looking at where we’re going to actually put genetic sampling detectors,” Sell said. “We’re going to start catching bear hair to increase our sample size, and that way we can use that information to determine how many animals are actually on the island.”

Sell said Baranof bears are generally really dark, almost resembling black bears. They’re also quite fat this time of year because of the island’s healthy salmon runs — something she said they didn’t see everywhere else this year.

“What we do know about Game Management Unit Four bears is that they’re genetically similar to polar bears,” Sell said. “They had refugia, it seems like, since the last ice age. And so they’re genetically different from mainland bears.”

(Refugia are geographical areas where a population, species, or community has survived environmental instabilities over long periods of time.)

As of Friday (9-12-25), Sell said they’ve put 20 collars on bears: 14 on females and six on males. 

Brown bear hunting season in Sitka starts on Sept. 15. Hunters are currently able to harvest 42 bears on Baranof — that’s 4% of the estimated population. Sell said they hope to be done tagging for the season before that begins. 

Later on in the study, she said they’ll be reaching out to the community to see if anyone wants to volunteer by checking hair snares. If anyone has questions, wants to volunteer, or even give her a guesstimate on how many bears they think might be on Baranof Island, Sell said they can email her at [email protected]..

While she has dedicated her career to writing nonfiction, Sitka author Debbie Miller has always had a soft spot for documentary films. She believes they play an important role in uplifting authentic stories across the globe.

“Today, maybe more than ever before, we really need those true stories,” says Miller. “We’re craving documentaries. We want to know the truth of what’s going on in the world.”

Her love of documentaries led her to serve as a moderator for the American Documentary and Animation Film Festival, or AmDocs, which premiered in  Palm Springs, California in 2012. Miller says through her involvement in AmDocs, she is also able to honor her late father and step-mother, who were the festival’s co-founders. Now, Miller has worked tirelessly to bring the biggest documentary and animation-only festival on the West Coast to Alaska for the first time in the festival’s history. Miller believes Sitka is the perfect home for AmDocs given its unique arts scene.

“I think of Sitka as my home, and also the center for the Arts in Alaska,” says Miller. “We’ve got the music festival, Sitka fine arts camp. We have so much going on year round with theater arts, the grind. You know, all of these wonderful programs. In my mind, I thought and heart, ‘Sitka is going to love this,’ the people here, but also putting it on for everybody in Alaska.”

Sitka’s festival will feature a selection of 20 award-winning films from the AmDocs Festival in Palm Springs earlier this year. The films cover a wide range of subjects, from a profile of a fisherwoman in Southeast Alaska, working to keep her small salmon business afloat, to an investigative journalist in rural Russia uncovering political corruption. 6 of those filmmakers are currently slated to attend, coming from all corners of the world from the Lower 48 to Brazil. Teddy Grouya is the Festival Coordinator and founder of AmDocs. Grouya believes that the festival could help Sitka become a more prominent filming location. 

“When we bring the industry people there, and they have a great experience in your and your lovely city and environment, they’re going to spread the word wherever they go, and they may even decide, wow, what a great location to shoot at,” said Grouya.

While she was initially hesitant as to whether already busy Sitkans would want to collaborate on another big arts event, Miller says that collaborating with local organizations was the most enjoyable part of bringing the festival to life.   

“Because we are an arts community, and I had this fear that maybe this would be one more thing that might be too much, and it’s been absolutely the opposite,” said Miller. “There’s so much excitement about this festival that people have been coming forward.”

If the festival proves to be a success, Miller and Grouya hope that Sitka will host future AmDocs screenings for years to come. In the meantime, they invite everybody from Sitkans to visitors all across Alaska and the world to laugh, cry, and be inspired by the films they have in store.

The AmDoc film festival will take place from October 10 through 12. You can check out AmDocs’ website to learn more about the festival’s offerings and where to buy tickets.

Editor’s Note 9-16-25: Updated link directly to schedule and ticket buying options