Catching a Deckload of Dreams recounts the remarkable journey of Chuck Bundrant, chairman and founder of Trident Seafoods Corporation, the largest vertically integrated seafood harvesting and processing company in North America. Born and raised in the heartland of Tennessee and Indiana, as far away from salt water as a young man can get, Bundrant knew nothing about Alaska or how wild seafood was caught and processed. But he knew how to dream, and he had what it takes to chase a dream down with unwavering determination and the ability to enlist others to do things they would never have done on their own. The pursuit began in a '53 Ford station wagon, jammed tight with three other boys he'd talked into quitting college after one semester. Bundrant's plan was to point the Ford west to Seattle and make their way north to Alaska in the dead of winter, 1961.
Progress was slow at first. One by one, the others fell by the wayside, but Bundrant pressed on. He beat the docks at Fishermen's Terminal in Seattle until he finally landed a job bustin' freezers loaded with trays of frozen king crab meat aboard an old hulk of a floating processor, anchored at the end of the Aleutian chain on the remote island of Adak. Undaunted by bar fights, drownings and drunken skippers, he worked his way up from the bottom of the freezer hold to become captain of his first crab vessel. Eventually he met up with Kaare Ness and Mike Jacobson. Together they built the 135-foot Billikin and established Trident Seafoods, fulfilling Bundrant's vision of harvesting and processing king crab aboard the same vessel and bypassing the established crab processors on the beach. From there, as Bundrant recalls, We were off to the races ; with a fleet of 'hostile and mobile' processing vessels that capitalized on the strong yen and the developing Japanese market for frozen crab, salmon and herring from Alaska. By the early '80s the king crab resource had collapsed, but Trident remained young, nimble and hungry. Undaunted by risk, Bundrant shifted course and pioneered the whitefish market for cod and pollock fillets by blasting a one-of-a-kind shorebased processing facility out of a mountainside on the remote island of Akutan. Today, Trident's harvesting and processing network covers Alaska on land and at sea, and its finished products are sold in more than 50 countries. Bundrant's race was a race to the top. When he arrived in Seattle in 1961, he had $80 in his pocket. Currently, Trident provides employment for more than 10,000 people around the world.
As the book jacket notes: The story of Chuck Bundrant and Trident Seafoods is more than a business biography. It's a tale of true grit, salt air, and danger, with breaking waves, shallow sandbars, and shaky business deals to navigate against a backdrop of global politics, huge financial risk, and enormous economic expansion in a remote place called Alaska, where brown bears walk the beaches, volcanoes are still active, and whales swim out to look at people. It's a dramatic account of plant fires, flooded galleys, plane crashes, pistols and bags stuffed with hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash. The stories are told by those who pioneered the fisheries, bucked the political tides, built the Alaska seafood industry, and literally risked their lives to do it.
