PETERSBURG-AK A crowd gathered on the dock at Icicle Seafoods in Petersburg Friday afternoon to welcome the Robert M. Thorstenson to town. Icicle re-named the large, floating processor after the company founder this winter. Bob Thorstenson Senior passed away last summer. He was part of a group of Petersburg fishermen who decided to buy the towns major cannery when it was facing closure in 1965. Their new company later became Icicle Seafoods and expanded with processing plants throughout Alaska and the Pacific Northwest.Thorstenson’s namesake is one of Icicle’s five floating processors. She was originally built in 1980 as a small cargo ship and was later retrofitted as a seafood processor in 1992. She was formerly called the Stellar Sea.
At 315 feet long, the newly-named Robert M. Thorstenson, or RMT, dwarfed the entire waterfront Friday at Petersburg Fisheries, as visitors remembered the company founder, took tours onboard and listened to the high school band. Matt Lichtenstein has this audio postcard:
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