Rail Dumping!
Here’s what rail dumping looks like >
Arrived in Dutch at 0230 this morning, which just happens to be the time that the bars close! I thought this was a great “coincidence”, my crew, not so much! Offload began @ 0530. Amazing how much work you can get done when you schedule offloads and fueling around bar closures.
Everyone was up most of the night due to Channel Fever”, the excitement you feel as you approach port. Not quite so strong on this boat as the one I used to run where we’d be at sea for up to 80 days with no landfall at all.
Nonetheless, when we rounded Priest Rock and saw city lights, we knew the end of the trip was upon us. 2 of the crew were able to fly out this evening, I fly out @ noon tomorrow, VERY excited to see my family! (& my IF family too!), and the boat leaves for Newport OR sometime in the morning. Kenny, the engineer, flew his wife up for the 8/9 day crossing. Kenny, by the way, has been on the boat since August, with only a 10-day break at Christmas. Makes my 2 months seem not quite so bad.
Pics
the boat in storage mode, lots of hard balls & buoy line on the bow
Gareloi Island (& volcano w/steam plume) & an albatross in the foreground!
offloading hard balls & buoy line to store @ Adak
the boat in storage mode, lots of hard balls & buoy line
Jason & Tim enjoying their work at the dock @ Adak
Crewman Tim wearing a sweatshirt with “YUCK” printed on the front and “Young Urban Cod Killer” on the the back
Puffin
Sometimes birds get confused at night by our lights and land on the deck. This puffin actually laid an egg in the line bin!
That’s Kenny holding the bird and Don watching.
I would not want to get bit by that bird!
Day 11 of 11!
We set our last stored string @ 0600 this morning! The last 2 days we had beautiful weather, but building tides and strong currents. We had to do a lot of running around looking for buoys. If not for the tides, we would have been done much earlier, but we’re still 18 hours ahead of the deadline. We also spent the last 2 days rail dumping, and probably dumped about 30,000 lbs back. We ended up planning conservatively on our quota and will probably come in several thousand pounds shy. This is intentional, because going over our quota could lead to huge fines and lots of meetings with various Fish Cops that could really ruin my day. It’s a little anti-climactic, but it’s the way it is. Sometime I may try and write about the management policy surrounding crab fishing, but I have to have a clear head & a lot of time!
We’re all very tired, but excited to be coming home!
We have Gale Warnings, NW40, so we’re traveling on the south side of the chain. Our plan is to stop at Adak and offload lines and buoys, then head to Dutch, a 2-day run.
Adak is an interesting place. Built as a secret and highly restricted military base during the Cold War, it has since been decommissioned and given back to one of the Aleut Native Corporations. it’s an eerie place, having been designed for thousands of personnel and now housing a community of about 100 people. Adak is struggling to find a purpose. Seafood processing has had limited success there, but at the moment there is no sustainable industry.
When I fished out here in the 1980’s, Adak was highly restricted and top secret. It took many complex maneuverings for a fishing vessel to be allowed access to the harbor.Through the 1990’s that gradually lifted until the base was completely decommissioned sometime in the mid 90’s. Adak also plays a key part in my ascent to the wheelhouse, which is another story for another day!
I know of at least one Island Fitness member who was stationed on Adak for several years.
quota conundrum
As I wrote earlier, when I first took the boat in March, I was told I had 377,000 lbs of crab I was “allowed’ to take. 377K in 7 weeks, (3 trips when you figure with running time etc), is a bit daunting, but an exciting challenge. We brought in 121,000 & 128,000, for our first two trips which left us 128,000 lbs for the last trip. Then I learned we actually had 138 to catch, but several days into the trip, we received word we actually only had 95K left to catch, because some quota shares did not transfer (it’s a very convoluted & technical system)
Knowing that we had at least 120K in the gear, we knew that would mean we had to rail dump. You are in BIG trouble if you exceed your allowable quota, even by a few pounds.
This is further complicated because we’re fishing as part of a Co-op, so we needed to wait for the only other boat out here fishing brown crab to deliver. Two days ago we reached 95,000. Knowing that we still had at least 20K in the gear, we started dumping crab (ouch!) until we knew for sure that the other boat did not exceed their quota, therefore cutting into ours.
They delivered yesterday and it turns out they did exceed by a small amount. So now we’re faced with deciding whether we put more crab on board to try & reach our 98K, or call it good at 95. The reason being is that we know how many crab we have on board (21,602 to be exact) and we know the weight average is about 4.40lbs, but that’s an approximation. If the average is closer to 4.5 lbs, we’re pretty much at the number.
In the last 36 hours we’ve dumped more than 15,000 lbs!
bags & balls & which way they layin’?
On each end of a string is a buoy set up. The set ups are made “hard balls” & “bags”. The hard balls are rigid plastic floats, 45 inches in circumference, sometimes called trawl floats, because trawlers use them to keep their nets up. The “bags” are inflatable buoys, 60 inch circumference & bright red. We have 3 hard balls, a bag & a trailer, a small oval inflatable buoy called an “LD” for low drag, which, if they are, is not noticeable.
The hard balls always maintain their buoyancy, so if they get dragged down by the current (which they often do), they return to the surface quickly, where the bags actually get compressed, then slowly re-inflate as they return to the surface.
One of the responsibilities for the last guy on watch is to find the buoys on the first string we plan to haul. Usually I’ll designate an end, such as “Find west end of Heartbreak” or “Find the shallow end of Devil’s Tower”., but if I’m at all uncertain of the weather or the current, I won’t designate an end. In this case, the crewman will call me when he locates an end and & I’ll ask him “Which way are they hanging?” or “Which way they layin’?” Possible answers are “with the wind, with the current, into the wind”, or simply, “to the north, south east west” etc. With this info, I know which way to haul.
This was written on Day 9 of 11 (Thursday 12th). At the time we had 11 strings left, now we’re down to 6. So we’re jamming through the gear, have 6 (out of 66) strings left and the tides are really getting big. We have beautiful weather, but we’re battling the tides. We’ll definitely finish on time, if not early, but not without a battle!
“Fishing’s a young man’s job…”?
When I first became a deckhand, I was hired as a “Greenhorn” in 1980, at the age of 26. At that time, I was on the older side of average age for deckhands. There were kids skipping graduation out of Ballard High School to go King Crabbing and making $100K in 3 months. Those were some of the stories that brought me to Kodiak, Alaska, looking for a way to work hard and raise some money for Graduate School.
By the time I became a captain, at the age of 29,(this is a great story for another day) the boat owner at the time said to me, “Fishing’s a young man’s job. I think I’m gonna retire and give you a shot…” He was all of 39! The average age of my crew through the late 1980’s was in the mid twenties.
When I took a trip on Patricia Lee in 2006 (C/P Patricia Lee is the boat that I was first hired on in 1980 and later was captain of until 1999), I was amazed to find most of the same crew that worked with me through the 1990’s, their average age approached 40.
Here I am in 2010, and the average age of my crew is 44! In fact, the ages of my crew are as follow: 33, 39, 44, 49 & 56! I’m 56 and I don’t think I could work the deck anymore!
I’m also surprised at the lack of recruitment for the captains chair. The crop of young men that became captains around the time that I did, are still the captains. I don’t see a lot of younger guys working into it. I’m not sure why that is. The rewards are still substantial for a full time captain. This explains part of the reason why I still get these invitations every year or so.
Today is Day 8 of 11. We’re well on track for putting the gear into storage, we’ll probably finish a day early, and would have been on track for our original goal of 138,000 lbs. Since then, our quota allowance has been revised lower, to 98,000 and we’re pretty much there. We’ve put a lot of crab on board in the last 36 hours. This means on the next string, we’ll be dumping the pots at the rail, a new experience for me.
We’ll get the final word on our quota allowance tomorrow evening, and there should be plenty of crab in the gear if we’re allowed to take more.
gear
“A string of gear is anywhere from 25 to 45 pots attached to a groundline, which is 1 1/2” diameter line. The pots are 80 or 100 fathoms apart (a fathom = 6 feet), so the strings stretch for 2 – 3 miles. There’s buoys at each end. The pots are 6X’s, 6 1/2x’s & 7x’s (6’x6′, “x’ = “by” etc) The other boat I used to run also works with 8x’s and 10x’s! Pots generally weigh about 100lbs/foot, so a 6x can weigh around 600lbs, etc.
We name our strings. Not so much out of affection, but different strings have different personalities. Sometimes we’ll name them after a land feature, such as “East Cape” or “Oglala Pass”. In Oglala Pass, we have “East Oglala Pass” & “West Oglala Pass”, but we’ll further refine that to “EOP” & “WOP”. (WOP usually outproduces EOP, but this trip they both hit) “Snake Canyon” is named because the set ends up looking like a snake on the plotter. Sometimes we name a string after a personality trait, such as “Heartbreak Ridge”. Heartbreak Ridge was so named because it can be really good or really bad (a heartbreaker!). Really good because when it hits, it’s mega crab, and bad because if you miss, you get nothing, plus the type of terrain lends itself to pots getting stuck on the bottom, & the potential of lost gear.
I have a string which spans the Eastern & Western Hemispheres! We fish on both sides of the 180 longitude, so in West longitudes and East longitudes. The 180 line is technically the International Date Line. When I was a deckhand fishing out here many, many, many years ago, we used to say that we could go into tomorrow or yesterday, depending on which way we crossed the line. It could come in handy for days such as Thanksgiving, which is one holiday I always seemed to be out here on. The name of the string that crosses the line is “180 E/W”. Then we have “Near East”, “Far East” & “Farthest East” as they relate to the island.
Some other names are “Suicide Canyon” named because if you set it incorrectly, you’ll lose the gear. Then there’s “Rats” for a set off Rat Island & “SWAMI” for SW Amatignak Island & “Hot City”, because the 1st time I set that string, during a particularly slow trip, it came up with about a 50 average!
We’re Day 7, fast approaching the low quota number, so hoping for some good news (good news = larger quota) some time in the next day or so, or it’s rail dumping.”
a good sign?
“Among the MANY superstitions of fishermen & mariners is if an albatross crosses your bow at sea, it’s good luck.
We’ve had albatross criss-crossing our bow all day. Even one the rare Black-Footed Albatross (3 of which are shadowing us today) crossed our bow.
They are incredibly beautiful flyers.”
Island Fitness 