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But though the town's people are in good spirits, its economy is hurting. Compared to the 1980s, when fishermen and employees of the town's cold storage facility brought a bundle of money and people to the town for the fishing season, Pelican now is almost like a ghost town.

The closure of the Pelican Seafoods cold storage facility in February was what some residents call "another nail on the coffin" of the town. More than 10 percent of the town's residents were employed by the plant.

"I don't know," she said.

Pelican, located 100 miles west of Juneau, got its start as a fishing village in 1938. Charley Raatikainen, a fish buyer who would make daily runs between the rich fishing grounds near Pelican and Sitka, where processors worked, decided to build a cold storage facility nearer to the fishing grounds.

He chose to build in Lisianski Inlet, and named his settlement Pelican City, after his boat. Like the boom towns of the American west during the Gold Rush, Pelican soon became a place for people to earn, and spend, money. Only instead of gold, Pelican was built on fish.

In its heyday, Pelican had about 300 permanent, year-round residents, said Wasserman.

"In the '80s, when fishing was really strong, this place was just hopping," she said. "The bunkhouses were full and the harbor was just plugged with boats."

But earning a profit at Pelican Seafoods has been a challenge ever since Kake Tribal Corp. bought the plant in 1996, said Duff Mitchell, chief operating officer for the Native corporation.

Kake Tribal decided to stop running the plant in late February because the company simply couldn't make money, Mitchell said. The company kept open its store, fuel docks and hydroelectric power supply, all of which serve all Pelican residents.

"We're operating everything that's profitable," Mitchell said. "... Kake Tribal is not in a position to subsidize Pelican's economy."

Tom Whitmarsh has been the chief engineer at the plant since 1975. As such, he is responsible for maintaining the facility, as well as the hydroelectric plant that provides all of Pelican with electricity. His job was the only one retained when Kake Foods announced the closing of the plant in February. Last week, another maintenance employee was hired.

"We're still providing services at this point, and I don't really see that changing unless they shut everything down," Whitmarsh said.

Although Mitchell is adamant that Kake Tribal will not shut down Pelican's utilities, some residents can't help but worry.

"Did you ever see a town die?" Whitmarsh said. "You start to wonder what would cause a town to die. Well, I can tell you one thing. If you lose your qualified people to run the infrastructure, that's where that can happen."

Pelican's economic decline started long before February, some local residents said.

Individual Fishing Quotas, or IFQs, were instituted in sablefish and halibut fisheries 1995. Before IFQs, fishermen had a several-day or several-hour opening to catch as many fish as possible. After filling up a boat with fish, captains would head to Pelican, sell their load and rush off to fill the boat again before the opening ended.

With IFQs, boats are allowed a catch of a set number of fish per year and are given an eight-month season to reach that limit. The system allows fishermen to treat their catch with care and haul the fish to whatever processor can pay the best price.

The result is the quality of halibut coming out of Southeast Alaska has gone up, said Chris McDowell, a fisherman who also works as a consultant for the McDowell Group, a research firm in Juneau. Most fishermen around Pelican now take their fish to Juneau, where it is flown south to fresh-fish markets.

The price of halibut has gone up from about 80 cents per pound in the 1980s to more than $3 a pound now, McDowell said.

But though many agree that IFQs have led to higher fish prices, no one can deny that the Pelican cold storage facility lost many of its customers as a result of the new system, said Deb Spencer, a Pelican resident.

To keep money flowing in the city without the cold storage plant operating, residents rely on cottage industries such as jewelry and art or carpentry to eke out a living, Wasserman said.

Some have turned to tourism, flying people to town on float planes and offering fishing and kayaking adventures.

But Wasserman would like Pelican's economy to rely on industries other than tourism, she said.

"We had everything wrapped up in this cold storage, and they went under and everybody goes under," she said. "I hope people in Pelican learned their lesson from that."

Wasserman, who is trying to figure out how to run her city on a budget that will be significantly smaller without sales tax revenue and fish tax from the plant, keeps a potential re-opening out of her calculations.

"I'm not operating like it's going to open again," Wasserman said. "I'm operating on what do we need to do to keep going without this."