By: Captain Steve Kurian, F/V Ava Jane
In the summer of 2002, I drove six days from Idaho to Alaska in a 3/4-ton pickup, towing a plywood shelter my cousin Jeff and I had built on a snowmobile trailer. Jeff had quit his carpentry job to make the trip. Neither of us had ever fished commercially, or even set foot on an ocean boat. By the time September came, I had called in a 58-inch bull moose with my voice alone and taken him with a longbow. Standing over that animal in the Alaska brush, I knew that the direction of my life had changed for good. That was twenty-four years ago. I have been back every summer since.
This is the story of how Pride of Bristol Bay got started; not the business, but the man behind it, and the place that made him.
The Seed Was Planted in Pennsylvania
I grew up in rural Pennsylvania, hunting and fishing from early childhood. Summers were spent at my grandparents’ place on the New Jersey Shore, crabbing, clamming, and being out on the water any chance I could find. As a kid, I read Ranger Rick magazine and daydreamed about faraway wild places. My father shot his longbow in the backyard and talked about hunting moose in Alaska someday. That image stayed with me.
After high school, I studied Forestry at Penn College, worked a summer with the Forest Service in Utah, and finished a Forest Management degree at Penn State. I then moved to Kamiah, Idaho, to take a job with the Idaho Department of Lands. The man I rented a room from was a retired airline pilot named Hunt Hatch. Hunt owned a set net camp in Bristol Bay and took his whole family there every fishing season. I spent a lot of evenings listening to him talk about it, and by the following spring, I had quit my state job and was pointing the truck north.
I convinced Jeff to come along. We built the plywood enclosure ourselves, loaded up the trailer, and drove six days straight to Alaska. When we arrived, we had no idea what we were walking into. That turned out to be exactly the right way to do it.
The First Summer at Libbyville
We fished at Libbyville, a set net camp sitting right between the Naknek and Kvichak river systems on Kvichak Bay — prime ground. Hunt’s wife Letty was an exceptional cook who had come to the U.S. from Malaysia. She prepared sockeye salmon in ways I had never encountered, and it was the first time I truly understood what a wild sockeye tastes like when it is handled right: fresh out of cold, clean water, processed with care, cooked simply. That first summer changed what I thought I knew about food.
Jenn, my girlfriend at the time, now my wife, joined us when a neighboring camp needed another hand. She caught a treble hook in her eyelid on the Naknek River one afternoon, and while got it out ourselves, she didn’t quit fishing. That told me something important.
When the fishing season ended, I stayed in Alaska, working carpentry in Anchorage until moose season opened on September 1st. On the 19th, I called in a 58-inch bull moose using nothing but my voice. As it moved past me, I drew the longbow and made the shot. Jeff and I butchered the moose, loaded it into a freezer on the trailer, and drove back to Pennsylvania. The summer of 2002 had taken a forestry kid from central PA and turned him into a Bristol Bay fisherman. My father never did hunt that moose in Alaska. But his kid did.
What Bristol Bay Actually Is
Bristol Bay sits at the northern end of the Alaska Peninsula, where the Naknek, Kvichak, and Nushagak rivers drain out of some of the most pristine wilderness remaining in North America. Every summer, between 40 and 60 million wild sockeye salmon return from the Pacific Ocean and run up those rivers to spawn. It is the largest wild sockeye run on Earth. The ecosystem that supports it, with clean headwater rivers, undammed drainages, and pristine habitat, is the reason these fish are so incredible.
When you spend 24 summers in the same waters, you stop thinking of fishing as extraction. You start thinking of it as a relationship. I know the run timing, the water temperatures, the way the fish behave when the tides shift. I know when to push hard and when to back off. That knowledge does not come from a spreadsheet. It comes from being there, season after season, paying attention to what the water tells you.
Why the Origin Story Matters for the Fish on Your Table
Pride of Bristol Bay exists because of that first summer, when Letty showed me what wild sockeye tasted like when cooked right. Because I fell in love with those waters before I had any reason to, and because twenty-four years of returning to the same fishery have given me a connection to it that I take seriously.
The sockeye we harvest has never seen a hatchery. It has never been fed pellets or raised in a pen. Every fish was born in the gravel of a wild Alaskan river, spent years growing in the Pacific Ocean, and made its own way back. Bristol Bay salmon is wild-caught in the truest sense of that phrase; not as a label, but as a description of a biological event that has been happening in these waters for thousands of years. We harvest a sustainable portion. We handle each fish with purpose. And we get out of the way so the run can happen again next year.
That is what it means to be fisherman-direct. Not a distributor, not a middleman, not a brand that sources from whoever is cheapest that season. The man who caught the fish is the man behind the company.
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FROM THE WATER The first time I ate wild Bristol Bay sockeye was the summer of 2002, in a set net shack on Kvichak Bay, cooked by a woman named Letty who understood what good food actually is. That meal changed how I thought about salmon — and eventually led to everything that became Pride of Bristol Bay. The fish on your table came from the same waters. Nothing about that supply chain is accidental. Wild-caught Bristol Bay sockeye is one of the most nutritionally dense proteins available anywhere. It is rich in omega-3 fatty acids, clean protein, and the kind of flavor that only comes from a fish that earned it — years in the Pacific, hundreds of miles of river, every inch of it wild. |
Order Wild Sockeye Directly from the Fisherman
If you have been looking for wild-caught Bristol Bay sockeye salmon delivered directly from the fisherman who caught it, that is exactly what Pride of Bristol Bay offers. We ship fillets and portions nationwide, and every purchase supports the ongoing protection of the Bristol Bay watershed that makes the run possible. We will start pre-ordering for 2026's sockeye salmon catch this summer. Follow us on social media to stay up to date!
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