Meet the Modern Farmer: Billie Delaney

“I never did that well in school, because the 9-to-5 existence ahead did not appeal to me,” says Billie Delaney, 28, one of the growing number of women who helm their own boats in Alaska’s Bristol Bay, the largest sockeye salmon run in the world.

As a teen, the self-described “punk kid” from Oakland, California, spent a summer offloading fish on the docks in Homer, Alaska, and was instantly hooked – mostly by the notion of working hard for a few months and making enough money to travel the rest of the time. “I saw that there was more than one way to live a great life,” she explains. “As I get older, the environmental and sustainability issues tied to small-scale commercial fishing really speak to me.”

Now, Delaney fishes up to 10 months a year, overseeing a two-person team on her 27-foot skiff in June and July, and crewing friends’ ships off the coast of southeast Alaska and Washington State in other seasons. “For me,” she says, “fishing opened up a whole new world.”