Last year, Esther Bower and her friend Maggie Dunlap noticed that the sand dollars were disappearing from Sandy Beach near Sitka.  For years, people in their town had casually picked the odd sand dollar off the hard-packed sand at the water’s edge without harming the population, but now the creatures’ numbers were dwindling.  The girls became alarmed that some people were collecting the creatures to bleach and sell to tourists.  “Everybody is taking them in bucket loads,” Esther said.  To make matters worse, “They take the sand dollars in the spring when the really low tides are, and that’s when they’re supposed to be breeding.” 

So Esther and Maggie, both age 10, decided to do something about it.  The girls painted “Please don’t take the live sand dollars” on a large sign and pounded it into the sand on the beach.  They also developed an “eco-friendly” clay sand dollar as an alternative souvenir for tourists. 

The girls’ campaign made them overnight heroes.  They made the front page of the Sitka newspaper and drew the attention of state biologists, who were appalled that the sand dollars were being collected for commercial use. 

Such passion and initiative are unusual in a 10-year old, but then Esther is an unusual girl.  Every spring since the Hoonah Sound herring spawn on kelp fishery opened, Esther’s family has gone out with friends in their boats to produce the gourmet food.  “The first year it opened I was in my mom’s stomach, so I’ve gone every year except for one year when they [the Alaska Department of Fish and Game] closed it to see how the fish were doing,” she says.

To harvest herring roe on kelp, the family nets schools of herring and herds them into a pen, where the fish spawn on carefully chosen stalks of wide-leaved brown kelp.  After they spawn, the fishermen let the herring go.  “Then we wait one or two days,” Esther says, “and then we start processing the stalks of kelp.  We take them out of the water, salt them, and put them in this large tub of brine, and then we sell them to the Japanese people.”   In Asia, the translucent roe, clinging like jellied snow to the slick kelp, are an expensive delicacy sold in stamp-sized pieces.

But for Esther, the sea and sandy beaches are not just about fish.  She has grown up on the beaches of Hoonah Sound—camping, playing football, building bonfires, and eating freshly-gathered clams.  Motoring on the boat, the wind in her hair, she loves watching the Dall’s porpoises play in the bow wave. This year, she is learning to kayak.  When the water is calm, her mother lets her put her 5-year old brother in the kayak’s stern hatch and paddle him between the boat and the shore. 

Her life on the water, she says, “is just really fun, and I don’t want it to stop.”   

Young as she is, Esther is worried that her family’s fishing could end someday.  “Right close to where we fish they want to log Ushk Bay.  It’s just the next bay down, and we’re afraid that if they do that it’s going to be really ugly and the fish are going to start dying….It would be really sad, too.  The trees are really big down there.”  As with the decline in sand dollars in Sitka, the prospect of logging in places around Hoonah Sound like Ushk Bay, Deep Bay, and Poison Cove has made Esther fiercely opinionated.  “I think logging is really bad because they make all these roads, and I think it’s really mean to the trees.  If there are birds’ nests in the trees, they kill the little birds, and it’s hard on the bears because the salmon runs get trashed because of the slash.”

Esther’s mother is often amazed at her daughter’s energy and zeal about protecting the forests and waters of Southeast.  “I try not to preach to her too hard and try to show her other points of view,” she says, “but she’s pretty passionate about it.” Then again, as a born and raised Southeast Alaskan, Esther has had a very different childhood than her mother’s.  As Esther’s mother says, “I never took naps on a beach in Hoonah Sound when I was eight months old.”