For more than a century, a fish plant fueled King Cove’s economy. Without it, can the community survive?

Five months ago, King Cove Mayor Warren Wilson wrote an opinion piece in the Anchorage Daily News. The headline was stark: Fighting For Our Lives in King Cove.

Peter Pan Seafood Co., the owner of a plant that had served as the economic engine of the Southwest Alaska town of about 800 for more than a century, had just announced it would cease operations.

The Peter Pan plant, which had run year-round for the past five decades, had already been closed all winter. That it would stay closed — indefinitely — was a shock. Wilson wrote that he worried King Cove was on the edge of becoming a ghost town.

“As King Cove’s mayor,” he wrote at the time, “it hurts my heart to say that it has taken only a few short months for me to no longer recognize my world. Events have conspired to threaten our very existence.”

The seafood industry around the world has been devastated by low fish prices, high interest rates, oversupply in some markets and poor fish returns in others. In Alaska, according to a recent report from NOAA Fisheries, profits fell by half between 2021 and 2023.

Few Alaska communities have felt the pain of the seafood industry crisis more than King Cove. With the plant’s owner out of business, residents are left to wonder if their community has a future. 

Driving in his distinctive yellow Ford pickup on a tour of town this summer, Wilson said even his earlier grim assessment might have been a bit too rosy.

“If I had to write that story again now, there would be a little more gloom and doom in it,” he said. “But we’re still fighting for our lives, for sure.”

Aside from the occasional passing car and boat, much of King Cove is quiet. The bar just outside the plant’s chain-link fence is closed.

The shuttered Peter Pan plant is sprawling. It dominates the gently sloping waterfront, rivaled only by the boat harbors just down the road. Fishermen used to unload salmon, crab, pollock, cod, halibut and more on the four piers that jut into King Cove’s namesake waterbody. Steel-roofed bunkhouses once housed hundreds of staff who processed the catch.

Today, blue steel containers emblazoned with the logo of Samson Tug and Barge Company block the plant’s main entrance. Little activity can be seen from outside.

This weekend, all of the action is up the road. Cross-country running teams from Sand Point and False Pass are in town for a regional meet. There’s an all-community volleyball game at the King Cove School.

“Peter Pan was the heart of our community for many, many years,” Agdaagux Tribe of King Cove President Etta Kuzakin said during a break in the action.

King Cove has always been something akin to a company town. It didn’t exist until 1911, when Unangax̂ people relocated from nearby villages to fish for and work at the new Pacific American Fisheries plant. People in King Cove talk about fishing for Peter Pan for decades, or their whole lives. And with the plant idled, Kuzakin says life just feels different.

“A great example is driving down the road at 7 a.m. to go to work, and it’s peaceful,” she said. “There’s no humming, there’s no boats in the bay, there’s nothing.”

“I’m born and raised here. I’m 47 years old, and I’ve never not heard those noises before,” Kuzakin said. “The silence is deafening.”

The hum is gone, but King Cove’s fishermen are still fishing. Many have no other choice. They’re fighting low fish prices and rising costs and doing everything they can to stay afloat. Many are sailing hours out of their way to deliver their catch to plants that offered to buy fish from some King Cove fishermen left in the lurch after Peter Pan folded.

But it’s not easy. And some are thinking about leaving.

In King Cove’s Harbor House, a blue-and-white corrugated metal building near the community’s boat yards and harbors, fishermen sat on overstuffed recliners and couches watching college football, drinking coffee from Styrofoam cups. A gale-force storm was about to roll in, so it was more crowded than usual.

If the plant doesn’t reopen, “[I’m] not staying here,” said Ken Mack, a fisherman who recently purchased land in a nearby community.

Mack has been fishing out of King Cove for decades. With no fish plant to support the primarily small-boat fleet, he said, fishermen are forced to sail hours out of their way to supply their boats and deliver their catch.

“Right now we’re running six hours to False Pass to get fuel and bait, and we’re running nine hours to Sand Point to get rid of the crab, or halibut, or whatever you catch,” he said. “You have to cut off that expense. [The] only way you cut that expense up is [to] move someplace.”

That’s not to mention the unpaid bills that fishermen say they were left with when Peter Pan unexpectedly closed its doors. Ken Mack says he’s still owed money from tendering. Many have filed liens, some in the six figures, for unpaid debts. 

But even so, some of the fishermen are optimistic.

“You have to be,” said Ben Ley, who runs three boats out of King Cove. Otherwise, he said, “I don’t know how you’re doing the next tow, or set, or anything.”

At the same time, he said, there’s only so long fishermen and the businesses they support can hang on.

“I’m worried that by the time it does get good again — which I am optimistic about — the damage is going to be done,” he said. “There’s going to be some businesses here that don’t make it.”

There are other practical considerations, too — until the city put in a gas station shortly before the plant closed, Peter Pan was the only place to buy gas and diesel. And this summer, it still wasn’t clear whether there’d be enough fuel oil to heat residents’ homes for the winter. It all used to come from Peter Pan.

The plant closure is also taking a toll on the city’s finances. 

Some 70% of the city’s general fund revenues come from fish taxes and sales taxes connected to the fishing industry, and King Cove has put millions of dollars in public money towards supporting the plant’s needs — water, power and garbage system upgrades aimed squarely at meeting the needs of the Peter Pan plant. 

Mayor Warren Wilson said that so far, the city itself has been able to hang on with savings it squirreled away during years when the fishing was good. Grants have come from the state and federal governments to prop up projects in the meantime. The city hasn’t had to make serious cutbacks in services. But that can’t go on forever, Wilson said.

“If it’s not up running next year,” he said, “the cuts will be happening.”

Whether the plant will ever reopen is an open question. Peter Pan, partially owned by a state-backed investment fund, is being sold off for parts in a Seattle court. Rodger May, one of the investors who bought Peter Pan from a Japanese conglomerate recently won an auction to purchase the plant, along with a wide swath of other former Peter Pan assets. 

But the community is still waiting for an announcement about the plant’s future.