ASTORIA, Ore. — The factory sounds and briny scent of fish processing have returned to the Astoria Riverwalk at Ninth Street after a two-year lull.
SeaA Inc., a business that sorts, freezes and conveys anchovies wholesale to domestic and international markets, has reanimated the warehouse and processing plant once occupied by Astoria Holdings Inc.
From late afternoon until midnight, the workers take the day’s haul, separate the damaged fish and pack the rest into plastic-lined boxes.
The packages are frozen, loaded onto refrigerated trucks, transported to Tacoma and shipped to markets in Japan, China and western European countries for use as food and bait.
In summer 2014, Astoria Holdings, a sardine-only business that opened in 1999, shuttered after the Pacific Fishery Management Council set unexpectedly low catch limits for the year’s sardine season.
Marine scientists had documented a plummeting sardine population, prompting the council to scale back traditional quotas.
“That pretty much stopped us,” said Rick Parker, a SeaA Inc. engineer who worked for Astoria Holdings.
The council, which regulates Oregon, Washington state and California fisheries, shut down sardine fishing for the 2015 and 2016 seasons.
The decision proved controversial, but Barry Schauff, SeaA Inc.’s sole fish supplier this summer, takes a measured view.
“It doesn’t do you any good to kill them all ’cause then nobody gets to catch them later,” he said.
Burgeoning business
Astoria Holdings’ machinery sat dormant until SeaA Inc. owner Tony Kim, who has spent decades in the fish business, arranged to take over the facilities last fall and convert them into an anchovy-based operation.
In early August, the first catch came in, courtesy of Schauff and his small crew. They try to take in about 85 tons of anchovies per day.
The burgeoning business employs roughly 40 people, some of whom are former Astoria Holdings’ workers, said Larry Normand, the chief engineer, who himself worked for the sardine plant.
“A lot of people, they came back,” Assistant Manager Gustavo Velasquez said.
The fishing business has been through hard times, Kim noted, especially because of the effects of the 2014-16 El Nino — the cyclical warming of Pacific Ocean waters — among the strongest such events on record.
“Hopefully, next year we have a better chance at hiring more people,” Kim said.
The owner said he plans to eventually turn the Astoria site into a year-round enterprise by branching out into other species like hake, shrimp and squid.
SeaA Inc., which has some plants in Mexico, has also done custom-freezing for an Ilwaco company.
‘Still a fishing town’
Schauff, a skipper from Kodiak, Alaska, observed that Astoria is “still a fishing town, like where we’re from, it seems to us — still blue-collar, between the logging and the fishing.”
Despite the tremors in the fishing industry, Schauff said being a fisherman is the “best job in the world.”
“It’s entirely up to you to make it work — and if you don’t, you don’t survive,” he said. “It’s very competitive, and the people that I compete against are mostly friends. You gotta live by your wits. It’s hard work, and a little luck, and taking care of your equipment, and getting good people to work for you.”
