Remembering Chuck Bundrant

Floor Speech

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Ms. MURKOWSKI. Mr. President, this afternoon I come to the floor to recognize the life and the contributions of a friend, an Alaskan, a gentleman: Chuck Bundrant. He was the founder and the majority owner of Trident Seafoods and a fisherman who really forever changed the seafood industry in Alaska.

Employing thousands of people across Alaska and the country and processing hundreds of millions of pounds of finished seafood products each year, Trident is the largest vertically integrated seafood harvesting and processing company in North America today.

The company--and, really, by extension, Chuck Bundrant--has been critical in giving the rest of the United States and the world a taste of Alaska's delicious and, of course, sustainably managed wild seafood.

Chuck has a pretty interesting story. He didn't grow up in Alaska. He didn't even grow up near the ocean. He was born in Tennessee. He was raised there and in Indiana. He had initially hoped to pursue veterinary medicine and enrolled in a pre-veterinary program at Middle Tennessee State University.

But by the winter of 1961--19 years old; he has $80 in his pocket--he and a few friends drove from Tennessee to Seattle with the thought that they would make it up to Alaska. At that point in time, he didn't have any experience, any exposure to the State. Apparently, he had watched the John Wayne movie called ``North to Alaska,'' and that kind of spurred him.

But he had heard that there were some pretty lucrative opportunities within the fishing industry, but he also knew that finding a job wasn't going to be an easy task. So, apparently, his buddies reconsidered the merits of the trip, but Chuck doubled down and continued on his way to the dream of working in The Last Frontier.

So, according to legend, he spent his first summer in the State working wherever he could in the Bristol Bay fishing industry, even sleeping under a boat on the docks. He eventually got a job busting freezers--which, for colleagues, means literally banging metal pans to knock loose the blocks of frozen shelled crab--and he was out on a floating processor anchored near Adak out in the Aleutians.

Like so many who have the chance to come and visit Alaska, Chuck wasn't satisfied with just one quick stint in the State. He turned his journey north into a 12-year learning experience--and, really, a lifelong business.

By 1965, he had worked his way up from the freezer hold to buying his first crab fishing boat. As Chuck gained more experience in and understanding of the crab fishery, he noticed that there was an inefficiency in the way that the industry operated. After bringing in the harvest, most fishermen would then head back to shore to hand it off to the shoreside processing outfits, where the crab meat would be removed from the shells and then sent to market. And just a lot of back and forth here meant that the fisherman loses valuable time at sea. And this is where Chuck's ingenuity really struck.

In the early 1970s, he and two other crab fishermen, Kaare Ness and Mike Jacobson, used whatever collective earnings they had at that point in time and they built the Billikin, which was a 135-foot boat with both crab cookers and freezing equipment that allowed for immediate onboard processing. So this was new. This was novel at the time.

Chuck pushed on. He kept fishing and processing on the Billikin. There were protests from other Bering Sea crab fishermen who were in the middle of a strike to secure better prices from processors. Around this same time, he, Kaare, and Mike partnered with another individual, Edd Perry and his Bellingham-based company San Juan Seafoods. And this was, really, the beginning of Trident Seafoods in 1973.

Trident's early years coincided with a phaseout of foreign fleets from the North Pacific harvest due to the enactment in 1976 of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act--we know it as the MSA--and, also, a burgeoning Japanese market for Alaska frozen fish, salmon, and herring. So Chuck and his colleagues took advantage of this opening. They built a fleet of mobile processing vessels that, really, very quickly made their mark on Alaska fisheries.

Chuck's competitive, resourceful mentality, again, proved useful as king crab numbers and harvest started to decline in the early 1980s. In the seventies, he had watched giant Japanese, Korean, and Norwegian trawling vessels rake in billions of pounds of pollock from the Bering Sea. And then with the enactment of the MSA in 1976, it extended U.S. fisheries jurisdiction to 200 miles offshore, giving American fishermen priority access to stocks of abundant fish, like pollock, that inhabited Alaska's coastal waters.

There was a significant market opportunity for pollock in Japan, but in America at the time, pollock was kind of considered a junk fish, a trash fish. And what is more, American boats and processors did not have the equipment to harvest pollock, to extract its roe that was very popular in Japan, and to transform its flesh into commonly consumed surimi paste and fillets.

But Chuck saw things with a vision. He saw this as an opportunity and not pollock as a trash or poor investment. He studied Japanese methods for catching and processing pollock. He strategized about how Trident could enter this market and, in 1981, he took a pretty bold move. He built a plant on a very remote Aleutian island, Akutan, for onshore processing of crab; salmon; and, of course, pollock.

So Chuck really took a risk there. He, after years of trying to convince food wholesalers and restaurant owners to take a chance on pollock, was able to secure a pretty pivotal deal between Trident and Long John Silver's. This was the first major contract to bring the fish to U.S. market. And this deal didn't take place in some fancy restaurant in some major city. This deal took place out in Akutan--the Akutan processing facility that he had taken this chance on back in 1981.

So companies like McDonald's, Burger King soon followed Long John Silver's in replacing cod and whiting with very tasty, and now cheaper, pollock. And these companies have grown to become some of Trident's biggest customers. Odds are that if you have tried their fish and chips or fish sandwiches, you have probably tried Trident product.

Today, Seattle-based Trident operates a fleet of 40 vessels, including catcher processors, trawlers, crab boats, tenders and freighters; 11 processing plants in Alaska--so good jobs in Alaska--5 processing plants in Washington State, Georgia, and Minnesota. It offers a host of frozen, canned, smoked, and ready-to-eat seafood products; and its harvest-and-business model means they know exactly where its products come from. That is important to us.

But as Trident has grown and propelled the industry forward, Chuck remains steadfast in his commitment that Trident remain a family business that supports its employees and the independent fishermen that it partners with. Chuck's son Joe now serves as the company's CEO. He has continued his dad's efforts to seek out new value-added products that can be created from Alaska fish.

It is always a good story, I think, to know of these very successful businesses that keep grounded with the base from which they began; and with Chuck, it was really important that his family continued to be part of this success story.

I am told that Chuck had some pretty strict rules, that if any of his grandkids--and I think he has about 13 of them--if any of them decide that they want to work for the family business, you first have to earn a college degree, which Chuck did not have; but they also had to spend at least 4 years working someplace else other than Trident; and they had to have cut their teeth and fished at least two summers in Alaska.

So he wanted to make sure that you weren't just going to get the job just because you were a member of the family. You worked for it; you knew what this was all about.

It really is difficult to overstate the impact that Chuck has had on his fellow fishermen. Beyond the industry innovation that he drove, he always sought to pay it forward, to offer younger fishermen the same mentorship and support that allowed him to get his start in the 1960s and the seventies and to make Trident the company that it is today.

And this dovetails, really, with Chuck Bundrant's commitment to charitable giving. He was generous in so many, many different ways. He raised and donated money for the victims of the Tohoku earthquake, the tsunami in Japan, Hurricane Katrina, Superstorm Sandy, and contributed to multiple cancer research foundations.

I have certainly seen his generosity as he has shared in ways that demonstrate his compassion, his care. His influence on the fishing community is really clear from the outpouring of love and support that he has received since he was diagnosed with an atypical form of Parkinson's.

In September of 2019, four of the captains from the TV show the ``Deadliest Catch''--all of whom considered Chuck a mentor, a friend, and, really, an inspiration--co-hosted what they called Captains for a CURE fundraiser. It was an auction for the northwest chapter of the American Parkinson's Disease Association. They raised nearly $380,000 at the event, and this money goes towards a Parkinson's disease research grant in Chuck's honor--again, trying to shine a light on the specific form of disease that Chuck lived with.

I received a note from Joe Bundrant on Sunday, when Chuck Bundrant passed from this Earth, and I wanted to share just a couple sentences from a personal email. He says:

Dying is not easy, but Chuck was up to the task and faced death on this earth as he faced rogue waves in Alaska: head- on with dignity, determination and with the faith that he would be safe in God's hands.

He goes on further to say that ``he lived each day fully, driven by the values of integrity, loyalty, hard work and most importantly faith.''

And so as I have reflected on the life of, really, an extraordinary man, it strikes me that, at the end of the day, this individual, Chuck Bundrant, was a family man, cared for his family deeply; but he, at the base of it, was a fisherman. And he lived his life in a way that really speaks to the values of integrity; loyalty; hard work; and, most importantly, faith.

To his family, to his wife Diane: Know that our hearts are with you. We thank you for sharing a truly honorable man with so many of us.

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