The call that Tad Fujioka was overdue could not have come at a worse time. On the evening of October 29, Sitka and the outer coast of Southeast were being lashed by a windstorm, with some gusts in excess of 50 miles per hour.
Fire Chief Craig Warren says Air Station Sitka launched a helicopter nevertheless, equipped with Forward-Looking-Infrared (FLIR), to search an area about ten miles north of Sitka in Nakwasina Sound.
“The Coast Guard did fly the night of the report, and kind of looked around the area,” said Warren. “It was dense forest, they couldn’t see much through the FLIR. And then the next morning, we deployed teams out of the Fire Department before 8:00 a.m.. The first team was on the ground there about 8:30 dropped in by the Coast Guard.”
Fujioka was believed to be returning to an area where he had shot a deer on Monday in much better weather, and had cached part of the carcass.
Warren says the department organized 25 members into three teams for the ground search, plus two Alaska State Wildlife troopers, and the state biologist.
The Coast Guard flew two of the teams to a high point above the area where Fujioka was believed to be hunting, and another team was landed on the beach. His body was found by a ground team at about 11:30 in the morning, not far from where he had cached the deer. Wounds indicated that Fujioka had died from a bear mauling.
The shock reverberated quickly around Sitka. Norm Pillen is the President of Seafood Producers Cooperative, where Fujioka was board chair.
“He was very involved,” said Pillen, “Our hearts go out to his family. It’s just… can’t even imagine. It’s a huge loss to them, to the community, to the fishing industry and to SPC. We’ll miss him.”
Fujioka came late to fishing. Before becoming a troller aboard his boat, the Sakura, he worked in Sitka’s municipal engineering department. He brought precision, and an attention to detail in fisheries allocation issues that made him a powerful advocate at Alaska Board of Fisheries meetings. The next is scheduled for this January in Ketchikan. Pillen says Fujioka’s absence will be felt.
“He really could dive deep, and had tremendous ability for recall and digging into things and pulling out information that he needed,” said Pillen, “and we really appreciated that about him. It’s going to be a huge hit for the industry to not have him involved.”
Fujioka’s outside-the-box thinking wasn’t limited to fisheries. He was a long-time member of the Sitka Fish & Game Advisory Committee, which in 2021 was reckoning with an extraordinary number of brown bears killed by authorities or residents in Sitka that year, fourteen in all. Overhauling Sitka’s entire trash pick-up system didn’t seem a practical solution, nor did shooting every bear that came into town, as some on the Committee suggested.
Fujioka’s analytical mind and understanding of bear behavior led him to suggest something small-scale and possibly effective, if it’s ever tried.
“What if you looked at it from the other way, and we had some booby trapped garbage cans out there, maybe it would only take one or two bad experiences for a bear to associate that big black thing with an unfavorable experience,” Fujioka told fellow committee members..
The bear that likely killed Fujioka was a brown bear sow with two cubs. She was seen by the Coast Guard helicopter in the area near where Fujioka’s remains were found, but ground searchers did not encounter her. Fish & Game biologist Steve Bethune accompanied searchers on Wednesday. He characterizes the incident as a defensive attack – rather than predatory – and the sow had almost certainly claimed the deer carcass and was defending her food supply.
Bethune said some efforts were made Wednesday afternoon to locate the bear on the ground, without success.
Tad Fujioka was 50 years old. His death remains under investigation by Alaska Wildlife Troopers.
