The Wards Cove Packing Company operated the facility on the Egegik River from the 1960s until it closed in 2002.
A historic cannery in Egegik is up for sale, and is also open to investments. The price tag: $3.5 million. The Wards Cove Packing Company operated the facility on the Egegik River from the 1960s until it closed in 2002.
The property includes almost 30 acres of land and six acres underwater, and multiple operations and residential buildings. That includes bunkhouses, a mess hall, a laundromat, a dock with a loading pier and a crane, 50,000 gallons of fuel storage, and a variety of boats and vehicles.
Ken Bozinoff, the custodian of the site and the owner of Santaska, the company that currently owns the property, said he wanted to fill what he saw as a hole in the market: processing late season fish from the Egegik river. But he realized he couldn’t do it alone.
“My whole focus for even being here was to help fishermen get some more fish,” said Bozinoff. “We’d just like to find some investors to come and help us do it or buy it and do something with it… I would like to get in a travel lift and store boats and service those boats and then within like three years start processing fish! Not 30 million pounds a year or anything, but process late fish.”
Santaska estimates the cannery could show profits of over $31.5 million by the third year after investment or sale, though the company notes that those financial projections are purely illustrative.
There are five canneries currently operating in Egegik.
Contact the author at sage@kdlg.org or 907-842-2200.