Chances are that even if you’ve heard of New Day Fisheries, you might not know much about it. In an informal office poll, just saying the name seems to elicit a similar far-off look, up and slightly to the left, as people try to place the name they know they’ve heard.

From the land, it’s located in a few metal buildings on the water side of Sea J’s Cafe, or a few doors down from the Pourhouse if your navigation relies more on alcohol than milkshakes.

New Day Fisheries has been there for 32 years, quietly serving as the crossroads for seafood coming off boats and getting one step closer to plates worldwide. From the buildings, you wouldn’t know it, but New Day is big-time.

MIDDLE MAN

We’ll start the story in 1986. Scott Kimmel and his dad had already been in business for a few years. Both had fished commercially for decades, but it was the older Kimmel’s dream to take out the middle man and sell directly to restaurants. So, they started to do that, first by selling just their own boat’s catch, but gradually they began selling, processing and distributing fish from others – all off a dock in their hometown of Poulsbo.

What we now call gentrification was starting to take hold in the 1980s as the Poulsbo town fathers, knowingly or not, pursued a tourism strategy roughly equivalent to “Norwegian Leavenworth.”

What the town seemed to want was the atmosphere of a working waterfront without the actual work, so Scott and his dad moved their business to Port Townsend, to Ivar Haglund’s old clam cannery, a project Haglund started on a lark right before he died.

Why here?

“A couple reasons,” said Scott, owner and cofounder of New Day Fisheries, “but it really boils down to location. Being this close to the Strait [of Juan de Fuca] makes a great central location, and the water is a lot cleaner here.”

To keep the live tanks fresh and the live crabs and prawns healthy, New Day Fisheries requires a constant flow of clean seawater. The Kimmels were going to buy the Ivar’s facility and lease the ground from the Port of Port Townsend.

“At the time, the port ended up wanting to own the buildings, so we just got a 15-year lease for the whole thing. We wanted more, but they said that fishing was only going to be a temporary use here,” Scott said with a wry smile and a shrug. New Day has been operating without a lease since 2003, but it hasn’t seemed to slow it down much.

32 YEARS AFTER LANDING

In the 32 years since it landed here, New Day Fisheries has gone through a constant evolution to keep up with the market, but as of right now, New Day buys and processes fish and shellfish off of more than 200 boats, including tribal fisheries, from as far away as the bottom of Hood Canal. It handles salmon and other fish, but its specialty is live crabs and prawns.

If you’ve seen live crabs in a glass tank, there’s a good chance it’s from New Day. “One of our biggest customers is QFC, but we ship to California, Boston, New York … ” the list trails on. “This week we’re shipping 2,000 pounds of live crab to China, and this summer, pretty much our whole live catch is going to Iceland,” Scott explained.

In total, New Day ships more than 1 million pounds of fish a year, including 25,000 pounds of lutefisk, a lye-aged cod product that is either a delicacy or a punishment, depending on the strength of your Nordic heritage. Twenty-five thousand pounds puts New Day Fisheries as the top supplier on the West Coast.

Does that make Scott the lutefisk kingpin of the West Coast? “Sure.”

The lion’s share of their business is wholesale (including the lutefisk), but Scott and his 25-person crew are always happy to sell to the intrepid customer who is willing to navigate the mud puddles and dodge the forklifts.

“We love selling people fish; we don’t turn anybody away,” he said.

Customer service is as authentic as the business itself. Thank you, New Day Fisheries, for your part in keeping the waterfront working, and for offering Port Townsend the chance to evolve from a “Victorian seaport” to “Lutefisk Capital of the West.”

Jake Beattie is executive director of the Northwest Maritime Center in Port Townsend. He’s also a small-boat enthusiast and a founder of the Race to Alaska. His column on maritime concerns is published monthly in The Leader.