To some Canadian fishermen, the end of a blockade of an Alaska ferry is just the beginning of a fight for a fair haul of the millions of Pacific salmon roaming between Alaska and Canada.
A wall of fishing boats that had ringed the ferry Malaspina at its Prince Rupert dock for two days - holding up hundreds of passengers bound for Alaska - broke up late Monday.The British Columbia fishermen moved off after being assured their federal government would try to settle a dispute over the salmon netted by oceangoing U.S. boats as the fish swim to spawning streams inside Canada.
"The people who did this did it out of desperation because their fish, their livelihood, is being stolen by our neighbors to the north," said John Cummins, a fisherman and member of the federal parliament from the Vancouver suburb of Delta.
With three long blasts of its horn, the Malaspina pulled away with 135 passengers and 88 vehicles under a steady rain and quickly vanished in dense fog. It was bound for Ketchikan, Alaska, about a 4-hour trip.
The ferry was surrounded Saturday morning and as many as 300 vessels joined in at the height of the protest, which was ordered disbanded by a court injunction won by Alaska attorneys.
The last of the boats pulled out after local fishing leaders met with Canadian Fisheries Minister David Anderson, who said pressure would be stepped up on the United States to reopen negotiations over a 1985 treaty on Pacific salmon.
Every year, hundreds of millions of ocean salmon attempt to return to the freshwater rivers and streams of their birth to spawn. Many are sockeye, a variety prized by Canadians and bound for waters inside British Columbia.
But Canadians claim U.S. fleets are netting the fish in the ocean as they swim to Canada, in violation of the treaty.
Alaska produces more salmon than any nation. In 1996, fishermen caught 891 million pounds of chinook, chum, coho, pink and sockeye - worth $363 million. Of that, 310 million pounds and $263 million were sockeye.