Dave Beebe has an exceptional approach to commercial fishing.  While many Southeast Alaskan fishermen move from place to place in search of the largest schools of fish, Dave centers his fishing on experience and lifestyle rather than profit.  He sticks to his traditional fishing grounds in the Keku Strait between Kupreanof Island and Kuiu Island “through thick and thin,” because, he says, “I have a really strong personal attachment to the place.”
 
With salmon prices often hovering at cents per pound and independent fishermen struggling to compete with fish farms, Dave has chosen to steer clear of the salmon fishery entirely.  He sets crab pots and fishes for halibut in the summer and fall, dives for sea cucumbers in October, and harvests herring roe on kelp in the spring.  This cobbled-together fishing schedule allows Dave to live an unconventional but highly fulfilling life.  When he’s not on his boat, Dave lives in Kupreanof, a town of roughly 35 with no roads and no municipal electricity or running water.  He has served as mayor and lived for years as a caretaker in a house that doubled as the community center. 

Between seasons and when the fishing is slow, Dave explores the wild lands of Keku Strait.  “The connection between the land and where you get your food is very strong for me,” he says.  “The landscape should provide sustenance for spirit and body.”  By boat and by foot, Dave roams the rocky beaches and the cold waters lapping Kupreanof’s shores with a digital video camera.  Over the years, he has collected remarkable footage of weather, water, and wildlife.  In the spring when the herring spawn, he captures with his lens the sea lions, orcas, humpback whales, loons, and mergansers for which—as for him—the herring symbolize the end of the lean winter season.

In late summer, he hikes up a remote creek in Rocky Pass to shadow the black bears that throng to feast on spawning salmon.  Dave watches quietly, often coming within ten feet of the agile animals.  He recognizes individuals by size, pelt, personality, or the favoring of an injured paw.  Dave shoots underwater footage of live salmon, and of their decaying carcasses where the bears leave them in the forest.  He zooms in on the insects that stud the rotting fish, then turns the camera to the ancient, towering spruce trees that are nourished by the nitrogen-rich flesh of the salmon.  Dave’s purpose is “to establish a visual relationship between salmon carcasses and black bears, and to show the bears’ crucial role over millennia in distributing salmon well away from creek beds.”  He refers to studies that point to the importance of fish carcasses to the forest, saying, “Who would have thought that the bears may be partly responsible for the health of these four hundred-year-old trees?” 

Dave also shoots video of porpoises and whales, sunsets and storms, crab pot-setting and kelp harvesting.  His attention to detail is masterful.  In one take, rain beads up in luminescent droplets on the wheelhouse window of his boat, each drop holding in its center a perfect inverted image of the tree-lined shore.

Dave’s photography is “an act of gratitude” that he can participate so fully in the natural cycles of Kupreanof and Kuiu Islands.  To Dave, it is a continual source of wonder that, twenty years after escaping a suburban fate, he can fish “with a certain frame of mind that truly appreciates the bounty of the natural world, beyond making money, and to do that for a living in a place I would otherwise vacation in.”