Wild Alaskan salmon. Fresh halibut. Spot prawns, black cod, and kelp. Finding these seafood delicacies nearly 3,000 miles away from where they are naturally caught has long been the Catch-22 of indulging in them. But now they can be purchased here in Falmouth.
Tracy Sylvester, a Cape Cod native, and her husband, Jesse Remund, returned to the Cape from a Community-Supported Fishery in Sitka, Alaska, with hopes of delivering seafood from the Pacific Northwest with a hefty side helping of education, passion and family values.
Being on Cape Cod when the pandemic started has kept the family in Falmouth since then, and in the year they’ve spent here they decided to open and operate the Fisherman’s Pantry, their first retail location. With their two young children in tow, the family has been fishing seasonally in Southeast Alaska for years and are fishermen-owners at the Seafood Producers Cooperative in Sitka, where they source all of their fish from. The cooperative’s website explains that it is owned by more than 500 members, each of whom are small boat hook-and-line fisherman. It was founded to serve fishermen by giving them a place where they were ensured to get a fair price for their fish and have access to processing and packaging resources that they otherwise may not have had working as individuals. The benefit of ownership in the cooperative directly benefits its members, who function like a small community or very large family.
Ms. Sylvester and Mr. Remund, who was born and raised in Southeast Alaska in a small boardwalk fishing village, met in Alaska when Ms. Sylvester was working as a tender on local fishing boats after graduating from the University of Vermont with a degree in Wildlife Fisheries, Biology and Management.
“[Tendering] was a really educational job where I got to see all the quality variation amongst the fleet, all the different species of fish, just all the variation that comes on board," Ms. Sylvester said. "It’s not as simple as I had imagined, so that’s when I started to feel an interest in quality variation and how direct marketing can help keep the quality where it should be. Fish isn’t going to last as long if it isn’t taken care of and it’ll go to waste, so we’re pulling fish out of the water for no good reason and that’s not cool.”
Ms. Sylvester also interned with the US Forest Service, which is what initially placed her in Alaska, where she was assisting in blowing up old logging bridges and culverts to restore salmon habitat and watershed integrity.
“I loved the wetlands and marshes around here [growing up],” she said. “When I went to school I actually went as an art major, but I just didn’t love it so I decided to get into something more sciencey that could inform my art.”
Her husband’s family has been members of the Seafood Producers Cooperative for over 30 years, and continues with his own family. He and Ms. Sylvester purchased their boat, a 1939 wooden salmon troller (not to be confused with a trawler, which is outlawed in Southeast Alaska) called the F/V Faithful, in 2015.
Ms. Sylvester is now back home on Cape Cod, where she lives with her family and runs the business with her husband, who balances traveling between here and Sitka to continue fishing. They began selling their fish on the Cape and throughout the South Shore at local markets and through home deliveries in January 2020. The Fisherman’s Pantry, their co-op retail shop, opened in mid-June.
In addition to fish, their shelves are stocked with local and Alaskan-sourced products and an extra space that Ms. Sylvester hopes to convert into some sort of art gallery.
“It picked up steam,” Mr. Remund said. “We weren’t moving crazy amounts of fish, but we were probably delivering 50 to 60 pounds a day, twice a week. So we’d load up the car with anywhere from six to ten boxed orders for Boston, the South Shore and Cape Cod twice a week.”
One of the biggest focuses for the couple is spreading awareness and fostering education surrounding the fishing industry, specifically when it comes to quality control, conservation and sustainable seafood.
“We bring the fish in as gently as we can, trying to minimize trauma to the fish and scale loss, because if the fish gets banged around a lot it’s going to get bruised and not taste as good. So it’s all about really careful handling, and that’s the difference,” Ms. Sylvester said. “When people eat our fish, they’re like ‘Wow, I’ve never had such good fish!’ Because they might’ve had wild salmon, but it might not have been handled so carefully… We treat it like we’re going to eat it.”
Trawling is a form of fishing in which a large net being dragged behind one or more boats is used to catch fish. This type of fishing has been outlawed in Southeast Alaska since 1998, after local fishermen, conservationists, community members and local government officials came together to advocate against it due to environmental concerns.
“When they banned [trawling], local fisheries came back strong so there’s all these great hook and line family owned boats,” Ms. Sylvester said. “And the other cool thing is that my first job — blowing up bridges to restore salmon habitat — the economic value of the wild salmon from that region is strong enough that it keeps the [Tongass] forest from being used for other things like logging and mining.” The Tongass National Forest, the nation’s largest carbon sink, is also in the process of being newly re-protected by the “roadless rule,” a piece of Clinton-era legislation that prohibited logging and road construction in a majority of the national forest system that had been repealed by the Trump administration.
Conservation of these precious environments across the country is something Ms. Sylvester is passionate about and she intends to bring her passion to the like-minded community of Falmouth, in hopes of furthering education efforts in the ecological and marine sciences.
“That’s what drives us to want to work on public education down here, because it can’t just be the people who are lucky enough or willing to live in southeast Alaska who speak up,” Ms. Sylvester said. “These are public lands that we all own, and everybody’s like ‘I’ve always wanted to go to Alaska,’ and I’m like, ‘Well it won’t be there if you don’t actually start thinking about it on a deeper level.’”
The concept of a co-op space began when Ms. Sylvester noticed a lack of seafood options, despite the massive population of marine-minded people living and working in this corner of the Cape.
“I’m hoping to use this space to bring fishermen and scientists and artists together to talk about things other than the basics of work,” she explained. “One thing we do up in Sitka is art shows where it’s the fishermen as artists and the artists as fishermen… Basically anyone can do it, but it’s been super fun, and I’d like to do that kind of thing here with all kinds of community members.”
Keeping the story with the salmon is the endgame for the Fisherman’s Pantry, says Ms. Sylvester.
“You can buy wild salmon online or at the store, I hardly ever see the salmon with the story still attached. You have to know all of that, and I have a degree in this and have lived it for 15 years. I want people to have access to that understanding of where their food comes from without having to go to school for it.”
The Fisherman’s Pantry can be found at 95 Palmer Avenue in Falmouth and is open Thursday-Monday afternoons and evenings. Learn more at https://www.woodenislandwild.com/.
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