Unalaska, AK – After leaving the Senate, Sen. Ted Stevens made few public appearances. Every four months or so, he might make a speech to Alaska Industry Support Alliance or show up at a fundraiser for Rep. Don Young.

One of these appearances at was at a United Fishermen of Alaska event back last April. UFA was giving Stevens its lifetime achievement award, and he was being inducted into its hall of fame. Joe Childers was the president of UFA at the time, and he says that support for the award was practically unanimous.

"When he got finished in the Senate, there was really no question that we wanted to do something to recognize what he had done for us," says Childers. "That was easy enough to induct him into the Hall of Fame. I don't think anybody objected to that."

The induction happened shortly after Attorney General Eric Holder had vacated the corruption convictions that had effectively lost Stevens his seat. While he may have been a controversial figure elsewhere at the time, Childers says that he was perhaps the most respected person at the UFA event that night.

"That Hall of Fame induction was happening during the Kodiak ComFish, and there was a lot of people in the room that might have been at odds with each other over the years -- and I don't remember any discord really with Ted Stevens," says Childers. "I mean there were people who may have objected to various things that he may have done at various times, and there may have been people who disagreed with him philosophically on certain aspects. But there was really pretty much a universal feeling in the room that he was a person who had really stood by the fishing industry for a long time and been a champion."

Childers says that Stevens shaped almost all of the regulations that led us into the federal fisheries we see today, and that he was still advocating for sustainable fisheries through the end of his political career.

"I know he was quite concerned, actually, as the champion of sustainable fisheries was the last thing he was really working on with Sen. Inouye, which was this international unreported and unregulated fisheries. Basically fish piracy on the high seas," says Childers. "He was very concerned about that at an international level."

And while Stevens will be sorely missed by commercial fishermen, Childers says, at least he's probably at peace.

"If he was going to choose a way to pass on, being in a Bristol Bay drainage up around Aleknagik with friends on a float plane wouldn't have been far off, I think. He loved Alaska, and that's a beautiful part of Alaska."