Tenders, processors and the price chain

A tender is a vessel that buys salmon from the fishing fleet out on the grounds and hauls it to the processor. It is the middle link in how a fisherman gets paid: the chain runs from fisherman to tender to processor, and the money runs back the other way. What a permit holder finally earns is a base price at delivery plus post-season adjustments and bonuses that land later, and the tender is where that transaction usually begins.

What a tender does

Picture a floating buying station. A tender anchors near the fishing grounds, often a long way from the nearest plant, and takes deliveries from a fleet of small boats through the day and the night. It holds the fish cold, in refrigerated seawater or on ice, and runs loads to the processor so the fishing boats never have to leave the grounds to sell. Many tenders also carry fuel, groceries, water and spare parts out to the fleet. The tender is what lets a thirty-two-foot gillnetter fish a remote district all season without steaming to town every time the hold fills, and it is a big part of how Alaska moves millions of fish out of places with no road.

From delivery slip to settlement

When a boat delivers to a tender, the fish are weighed and a ticket is written at the base price the processor is paying at that point in the season. That is the money a fisherman sees first. It is rarely the whole of it. Processors commonly pay more after the season in adjustments and bonuses, for delivering chilled or iced fish, for quality and careful handling, for bleeding the catch or simply because the market moved after the base price was set. Roe can factor into the settlement as well. Add the base and everything paid afterward and you have the ex-vessel price for that season.

Why the final number takes so long

The gap between the base price and the final settlement is why salmon prices are reported the way they are. A base price is known in season. The retroactive payments are not settled until the processor has sold its pack and closed its books, which can run into the following year. That is the same lag that shows up when ADF&G publishes ex-vessel values a season behind. The fisherman feels it directly: a decent base price can turn into a good season, or a soft one, depending on what the post-season money does.

The value side of the chain

The sockeye page above carries the harvest and, where ADF&G has published it, the ex-vessel value that sits at the end of this chain, dated to its season. The price a tender writes on a delivery slip in July is the front of that number. The adjustments and bonuses paid months later are the rest of it. This site reports the published result and does not carry any individual processor's terms, which vary boat to boat and company to company.

For the price itself and how ADF&G reports it on a lag, see what is ex-vessel price, and for how that price turns into a season's earnings, see how much do you make salmon fishing in Alaska? The Run explains the mechanics of the price chain and does not advise anyone on selling fish.