In the summer of 2011, I spent over a month on Kamchatka Peninsula in the Russian Far East. For the most part, I was working as as a fisheries sustainability expert in a fishing town of Ozernovsky, population 2,000. The Ozernaya River, born at Kurilskoe Lake about 40 kilometers inland, and emptying into the Sea of Okhotsk just past the town, has the largest sockeye salmon run in Asia, akin to the one in Bristol Bay, Alaska. It supports an in-river beach seine and coastal set trap net commercial fishery Over the next month, I will be posting photos of life in Ozernovsky and the sockeye salmon commercial fishery. I will also have posts about other places I’ve visited along the way, such as Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, the central city in Kamchatka and of St. Petersburg, on the other side of Russia.
A view of a volcano taken during a helicopter flight from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky to Ozernovsky.