For about two months every year, P.J. Hill takes leave of his job as an economics professor at the University of Alaska Anchorage for a commercial setnet fishery off Kodiak Island.

“I enjoy the diversity; it's a change of pace,” Hill said. “I laugh and say it's my vacation, but it's really incredibly physical. The guy who fishes right next to me is a professor of finance at Texas A&M University.”

Alaska's waters attract a cross-section of residents - both Alaskans and those from the Lower 48 - who take leave of their regular jobs to fish commercially, according to a report featured in the November edition of Alaska Economic Trends, a publication of the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development.

These part-time fishermen “vacation” from such jobs as educational and health services, natural resources, mining manufacturing and construction.

Down in Bristol Bay, where millions of wild Alaska sockeye salmon return each summer, much of the commercial fleet is made up not just of full-time commercial fishermen but business executives, school teachers, economists and others, many of them leaving desk jobs in an office environment for the wild and physical challenges of the sea.

Even those who work in the fishing industry take time off to fish, like Kodiak's Bruce Schactler, a food aid coordinator for the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute. He takes leave of his job for about three months every year to fish commercially for salmon and herring.

Based on an analysis of active fishing permit holders and their adult crew members, more than half of all resident Alaska fishermen relied on wage and salary jobs in addition to their fish harvesting work to earn a living in 2006, said labor economists Andrew Wink and Jeff Hadland, and research analyst Brian Laurent.

“That's a higher rate of multiple job holding than for Alaska wage and salary workers in general, where only about 32 percent held multiple jobs in 2006,” the economists wrote in the report.

Permit holders and crew in 2006 earned $126.5 million from their wage and salary employment, the economists said. Since some fishing seasons are so short, many fishermen who use those permits tend to work regular wage and salary jobs most of the year, and supplement their income with a fishing operation.

Other fishermen may work multiple seasons, or work in longer-running fisheries and are less likely to supplement their fishing income with a wage and salary job on the side.

The economists found that of some 7,000 active fishing permit holders in Alaska in 2006, at least 2,876 of those had Alaska wage and salary employment in 2006 in addition to their fish harvesting jobs. For those permit holders with social security number information, gross fisheries earnings exceeded $285 million in that same period, while wage and salary earnings were $71.5 million.

Some 45 percent of the permit holders who could be tracked had some wage and salary employment in 2006. For permit holders who had no reported wage and salary employment, average gross earnings from fishing were nearly $65,000. Permit holders with wage and salary jobs had average gross earnings of $20,997 from fishing, while their wage and salary earnings contributed on average an additional $24,872.

More than 60 percent of permit holders with wage and salary employment earned more in their jobs than they grossed with their fishing operations.

The economists found the comparison telling, even though gross fishing revenue isn't directly comparable to wage and salary income. Those gross fishing revenues also are calculated before accounting for crew shares, fuel costs, permit fees, insurance and all other costs that go into a commercial fishing operation.

Permit holders with some non-fishing employment were likely to work year-round. In 2006, nearly 55 percent of those with some wage and salary earnings were employed in all four quarters. More than 60 percent of the permit holders with second jobs made more than $10,000 in wage and salary earnings in 2006.

Older permit holders were less likely to have a second job. The average age of those with wage and salary employment was 44 years old, while those who fished exclusively were an average age of 48.3 years old.

The economists found that permit holders with a second job most often found work in the sectors of educational and health services, government, trade, transportation and utilities.

In addition to permit holders, some 8,400 people fished as crew in 2006. In general it was more difficult to track wage and salary earnings of crew than permit holders, since more than a third of the crew had missing social security numbers. Even so, matches were made for 5,525 crew members and their wage and salary employment were tracked.

Crew members tended to be younger and more likely to have had wage and salary employment than permit holders. More than 3,300 crew members earned roughly $55 million in wage and salary employment in 2006, an average of $16,389. About 40 percent of those workers were employed in wage and salary jobs in all four quarters. Crew members were more likely than permit holders to have a job outside fishing, as 60.7 percent had wage and salary jobs that year, the economists said.