Anna Hoover

"Growing up as a kid in the summers in Egegik, I remember at the peak of summer the grass was taller than I was. It was always a fun and mysterious thing. My friends and I would chase rabbits in the grass, and my parents would be out fishing. It was fun growing up in a community where everything revolved around salmon, the tides, and the weather.

My parents drifted on a gillnetter, so they left out to sea when I was small. I had a babysitter, and then when I was 11, I started going out on the boat. My father grew up in Cordova, so he fished the Copper River system his entire life, and my mother’s side is how we have a connection to Bristol Bay. Her father and grandfather were around during the times of Alaska Packers Association (APA), and so my grandfather, Norm Rockness, learned to fish from his father Nels Rockness who emigrated from Northern Norway. Nels used to fish the Bering Sea in the early 1900’s on a sailing ship. It was unreal, I can't imagine it — the ships had three or four masts, they were very large. My grandfather did it once and decided it was not for him. Bristol Bay was more his style.

After supporting the fishery in a number of jobs, Norm became superintendent of the APA Cannery in Egegik and then Naknek. He brought his children up when they were old enough to work. My mother worked in the mess hall as a waitress in 1969. Her older brother was already fishing by that time, and her older sister worked in the office, and that’s how everyone learned."

—Anna Hoover, filmmaker, commercial fisher, writer and artist

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