There is a small business selling something that shouldn’t really be able to be sold somewhere between Dutch Harbor and the docks at Kodiak. It’s a boat seat. A couple of hours on the water. A brief window during which a paying visitor—typically a tourist arriving by plane from Texas, Frankfurt, or Seoul—can witness a steel pot the size of a refrigerator rise over the rail, dripping seawater and snapping with red king crab. The total cost is higher than that of most cruises. Nevertheless, it always sells out before the previous season is even over.
When I first learned about it, I thought someone was making it up. Superlatives are frequently used by Alaskan tourism operators. However, once you begin to pull on the numbers, they become truly bizarre. Reservations are about a year in advance. On a boat whose captain hasn’t yet chosen which grounds to fish, people are booking spots for an unannounced season. It seems as though the demand has completely separated from the supply, hovering above the actual experience.
Deadliest Catch is obviously a part of this. It’s difficult to ignore how much of the contemporary image of the Bering Sea was created in a television studio. The world was given a specific impression of crab fishing by the Discovery Channel program, which at one point attracted over four million viewers each week: bleeding captains, ice-covered decks, and fortunes made and lost in a single haul. It remains to be seen if that picture was ever entirely accurate. The fact that it stuck is what counts. Visitors are interested in more than just crabs. They wish to briefly enter a narrative that they have been following for years.
Contrary to what the show implies, the tour is quieter and smaller. There aren’t many boats. Six to ten people are typically accommodated by operators, though occasionally fewer. It’s not the open-ocean derby that created the legend, but the fishing is real. When Bering Sea fishermen reluctantly decided to split the yearly catch into individual shares rather than compete for it, that derby came to an end years ago. Lives were saved by the system.
Additionally, it altered the work’s rhythm. One could argue that it reduced the fishery’s photogenic appeal. Since no captain in his right mind would have taken paying passengers out during the previous race-for-fish era, you could also argue that it made these tours possible at all.
It’s important to note the longer shadow that lies behind all of this. Since 1982, the Kodiak red king crab fishery has been shut down. Once surpassing 130 million pounds in a single year, the Bristol Bay harvest collapsed and has never fully recovered. Overfishing and warming water are cited by researchers. Programs for hatcheries have been tried, stopped, and then tried again. As of yet, none have yielded the restoration that anyone had hoped for. It turns out that raising king crab is a challenging task. Its lifespan is excessively long. It doesn’t adhere to the same regulations as salmon.
This brings up the obvious, somewhat awkward question. What precisely are viewers paying to see? Yes, a functioning fishery, but a reduced one. A custom, but one whose future is uncertain. Perhaps that’s the idea. An appetite can be heightened by scarcity, and in this case, scarcity is genuine rather than artificial. It’s possible that the crab on the deck is a product of the previous great years. The captain might recall a time when three hundred boats were pursuing the same season.
The waitlist might be partially nostalgia masquerading as travel. Experience-based tourism investors seem to think that authenticity—regardless of how you define it—is the one thing that never goes out of style. You begin to believe they might be correct when you see how this little tour sells out two seasons in. or that they’re not wholly incorrect. It remains to be seen if the crabs themselves can meet the demand for their own legend.
