“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.