“Back to my roots”: Family fish business returns to Sandpoint

SANDPOINT — When Lyf Gildersleeve was a student at Sandpoint High School, he never saw himself working in the fishing business.

While his parents operated the Flying Fish Company, named that because his father flew fresh fish from Seattle to Sandpoint every week, Gildersleeve wasn’t keen on carrying on the family business.

"In this high school yearbook, it had an interview with me or something and it said I wanted to be an astronomer,” Gildersleeve said. “It was just the family business and that was that, but I was never like ‘Oh, I want to be a fishmonger.’”

However, after spending a year in Ecuador as an exchange student with a shrimp farming family at 16 years old, Gildersleeve found an interest in raising fish. This led him to pursue a degree in aquaculture at the Harbor Branch Ocea