There are certain
questions that, upon meeting a stranger, I frequently encounter. Often, when
I'm hitchhiking, I always (at least 40% of the time in America) get asked a
variant of the question 'Are you a murderer?' and even though the question
sounds grave it gives me a rush of adrenaline because I know once they ask that
question they've already made up their mind to give me a ride unless I royally
screw it up by answering 'yes, I was in fact planning on murdering you today
madam'. But that's not a question most get asked on a almost daily basis, how
should one answer such a forthright concern? Well, my ace in the hole answer to
the interrogation of my likelihood to murder is, likewise, 'Are you a murderer?' with a strong emphasis on the
you. That response has a 100% success rate and it has been used in all my
travels everywhere. It let's them know 'hey, this is a two way street and we're
both taking a little risk by uniting forces for the time'. But it's worth it
isn't it? I love the exotic, yet all too familiar now, taste of the unknown.
And for the people who pick me up, it seems like they do it because it throws a
little rosemary into what was shaping up to be just another salt and pepper kind
of day.
Another question I
get a lot, mostly in airports and abroad, is 'how do you afford all this
traveling you do?' to which I have two responses depending on how receiving to
new ideas someone seems. They are these:
- Traveling is free if you want
it to be
- I'm a fisherman in Alaska
Both of these
answers are equally true, but if I get the feeling I can convince someone to
travel then I tell them number 1, if they're just politely inquiring then I
tell them number 2, and if I tell them number two I follow it up with a 'no,
I'm not on Deadliest Catch' (because I'm, without a doubt, asked that question
even more than if I'm a murderer).
Now before I launch
into the topic of this blog I want to stress something to y'all out there,
number 1 is absolutely and completely true. Traveling is as expensive or
inexpensive as you desire it to be and if ever, under any circumstances, you
have any questions about traveling you can always come to me and I will do my
best to answer your concerns.
Now, with that said, answer number two often
raises a huge issue. I'm not saying I'm super interesting, because, really, I'm
not, but most of the time when I tell someone I work in Alaska on fishing boats
it perks their interest pretty quickly and they have questions. The only
problem is I don't have answers, at least not answers in a way that would take
less than 15 or more minutes for me to explain to someone. Especially if they
know nothing about boats or the fisheries in Alaska (which basically no one
does, but why would they?). Most of my friends don't even know what I do
because I've never truly explained it to them, it's just easier to say 'I'm a
fisherman in Alaska' and leave it at that, but that's not altogether true
anymore.
Hence the reason for
me to write this post. In this post I plan on explaining what exactly it is I
do in Alaska, what the boat I work on currently does, and what the fishing
started out doing is like. I may even give some short explanations of some of
the other fisheries in Alaska, because there're a lot of 'em. Yeah, you know
what? Let's do it like this, because I really like turning a blog into sections
as you've probably seen, let's section it into three: Trolling, troll
tendering, and herring/herring tendering (pounding). This is just going to be a
decent description of what it is I do in Alaska, it's not going to go deeply
into every single aspect of it. I'll warn you now though, if you're not into
that sort of thing it'll probably be pretty boring to you. But it'll be
interesting for the rest of you.
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Trolling
Trolling is the
fishery that I, back in 2012, originally came to Alaska to participate in. Back
then, like most people, I didn't know anything about Alaska's fisheries other
than it'd probably be cold and require plenty of hard work. I was desperate to
get away from college, at the time it was driving me crazy being surrounded by
the drab personalities North Texas has to offer. Not that everyone there was
bad, but for the most part they sucked. I was enrolled in summer courses at the
time, when a friend of mine suggested that I pursue fishing in Alaska, just to
get me away from the bureaucracies of the university. I humored her by
searching around on internet sites claiming to be the 'for sure' way to land a
fishing job in Alaska. I spent one good Saturday sending out emails to captains
and making calls to boat owners. I was looking at long lining, seining,
gill netting, crabbing, trolling, and many other fisheries I had no clue about.
But soon the repetitive task of trying to describe myself in a light that would
put a neon sign over my head saying '==> FUTURE FISHERMAN HERE<==' bored
me and I promptly went back to playing zombies on COD. A few days went by and
when I heard from no one I forgot about the romanticized view of running away
to Alaska to make my fortune and travel the world, putting it off as a silly
fantasy that only happens in books, not real life. Until I got a call from Joe
Daniels, captain of the Sophia.
Joe needed a
deckhand within the next week or so, he'd just fired his last deckhand after
only a week of work and the first king opening was approaching fast, he said if
I could get up to Alaska I had the job. I dropped out of college that day,
moved out and drove home the next. I dug through hampers and drawers and tubs
in the garage in order to muster all the warm clothes I could. Then, with some
hasty goodbyes and apologies (to my mom mostly), I was off to a wild blue world
that I didn't have the slightest idea about.
So what is trolling?
What is power trolling? How does it work? How are you paid? When is the season?
All valid questions. Trolling is what it’s called when you're in a boat
dragging your hook through the water behind you in order to attract and catch
fish, so you're always moving see? Like if you're in a kayak and you throw out
a line before paddling around, dragging it behind you in case any fish in the
area feels like biting onto it. That's considered trolling, but on a much
smaller scale than what happens in Southeast Alaska. In power trolling, instead
of one line and hook, there can be hundreds of leads out at a time on each boat
that's out there, and there are easily over 1,000 trollers out there doing this
in the summer.
The beginning of the
season is July 1st every year. The end, September 20th, unless there is an
extension (usually an extension last for 10 days). On July 1st the king season
opens and trollers are free to fish for King Salmon, the prize of the trolling community.
A king can range from 7 pounds to normally 35 maximum (nowadays), but in the
olden days it wasn't uncommon to come across an 80 pounder. King sells for the
most per pound. More than Sockeye, more than Coho, and certainly more than
fucking humpies (typical pink salmon and the worst quality out there). That's
because Kings are the best quality salmon there is. The king season can last
anywhere from 4 or 5 days to a month, it just depends on how many are being
caught. It's fishing ye know? No guaranteed paycheck, a glorified gambler.
After the king
season closes everyone turns to Coho fishing. A Coho is of lesser quality than
a king, but it's still worth it for the fisherman to go out trolling for them.
Don't get me wrong though, trollers live for the kings. And there is a second
king opener for a certain amount of time later in the season, all dependent on
how many kings were slain during the July 1st opening. Trollers don't really
get excited for Cohos until the end of the season, around September, when the
Cohos start getting big. Around then they start to develop these harder heads
making it harder to kill them with the gaff, so many people begin to refer to
them as helmet heads around then.
Okay, so that's when
and why there are trollers. But how do they do it? Even though the trolling in
Alaska is done in what seems like large quantities the boats are still quite
small. They're normally around 15 meters or so with a crew of 1-3. So yeah, they're pretty tiny boats, but they
can come back with a loads and loads of fish. The largest day I ever had was
400 fish in a day, and the highliners (the best boats) can do much more than
that.
Normally the boats
fish a mile or two offshore. Typically they follow an 'edge', like a 30 fathom
(a fathom is 6 feet) or a 50 fathom edge. An 'edge' is where the water is a
consistent depth (like 30 or 50 fathoms) and since the boats are moving in
order to fish they just follow an edge. Why follow an edge you may ask? The
reason is because the gear (the hooks, the flashers, the lines, etc.) is being
towed at a certain depth, no more or no less. You don't want to tow the gear
too deep because you get caught on the bottom, which, as you can imagine, is
very bad. If you tow your gear too shallow you won't be maximizing your
potential to catch fish. And you want to catch fish. Also, fish tend to hang
out on an edge and some fish prefer different depths. Kings like to be near the
bottom, with Cohos somewhere in between, and not much for fish near the surface
other than humpies occasionally.
How the gear works.
It works like this, on each boat there are two metal poles that stick out off
the sides at a 45ish degree angles, these are called the troll poles. These
metal poles hold out two metal cables each. Each of these metal wires is
connected to a hydraulically powered wheel, which spools or unspools the wire,
at the stern (back) of the boat. The cables are held out by the troll polls so
they are spread out dragging behind the boat and don't get crossed or tangled.
At the very bottom of each of the metal wires is a lead (the metal), usually
around 40-60 pounds in weight which ensures that the cables drag at the right
depth behind the boat. Out of these four cables there are two floats and two
heavies, one of each on each side of the boat. The heavy is the one held closer
to the boat and it has a heavier lead than the float (hence the name), the
float is held out further away from the boat by the float (hence the name)
which is basically a giant square of Styrofoam. And along these metal wires
are, depending on the depth the boat is dragging, probably 10 -25 leads (not
the metal). A lead (still not the metal, it's annoying how lead and lead are
spelled the same) is fishing line attached to a huge clip at one end and a hook
at the other, with a flasher in the middle. The clip is attached to the cable
as the cable is unspooled out of the stern and then the flasher and hook are
thrown out in the water in a way that they don't get tangled. The flasher
attracts the fish, it spins a certain way depending on the speed the boat is
trolling at which gets the attention of target fish, and the hook (usually with
some sort of fake bait on it) obviously catches the fish.
Alright, so a fish
bites the hook, how do you know? When a fish strikes it pulls on the hook
attached to the leader attached to the cable which is attached to a bell at the
bow of the ship. When you hear the bell ding-a-ling-ling you know that a fish
just hit, and the heavies and floats have different frequency bells so you know
which was struck. Each fish has a specific way it fights and struggles, so you
can tell, with some practice, if it's a king, Coho, fucking humpy, or even a
halibut striking the bomber (the leader attached at the very bottom next to the
lead). If enough fish strike one line, let's say the port (left side of the
boat) float, you pull it in with the hydraulics, taking each leader off the
line and coiling it as it comes up so that it can be thrown back out super
quickly, because fishing is all about speed. If fish are biting you better be
working furiously. You reel up until you find the fish that struck, at that
point you gotta pull the fish in by the leader with your hands, then once it's
close enough to the boat you grab your gaff and bash it on the head with the
back of the gaff. If you hit it in the right spot it dies instantly and you can
use the pointy end of the gaff to gaff
it aboard. If you don’t kill it instantly, well then, usually, you've got a
fight on your hands.
Once a fish has been
gaffed aboard you keep going about your business until you have a spare moment
to bleed it (by cutting the left gill). Then, after the fish is bled a bit you
clean it, gill it, and throw it down in the hold. The hold is basically the
inside of the boat, for trolling there is ice kept down there in order to ice
the fish and keep them cold. Holds are separated into bins for packing fish.
Once you've thrown your fish in the hold, and you have a chance, you jump down
there with them, shovel out a bin (literally tons) of ice, and then start
packing fish inside like sardines, filling their stiff bodies with ice as you
go so they keep as long as possible. Usually, on a ice troller, the fish are
allowed to stay iced in the hold for 5 days before the troller takes the fish
to the tender boat to sell. Once sold to the tender boat they can stay another
3 or 4 days (they're re-iced) before they're taken to the plant. And from the
plant I've no idea what really happens to the fish. Trollers get paid by the
pound and deckhands get a percentage of that (usually 12-20%).
And there you have
it folks, trolling in a nutshell. This description is only of the troll fishery
and kind of how it works. It's obviously much more complicated than that and it
doesn't go into any of the other many things that just come with general boat
work. You have to learn knots, which ways to tie up a boat, about the
stabilizers, the engine, electronics, etc., but that's what being on a boat
means. You learn how to improvise mostly, because what you have is what you
have and if you can't make it work then you're SOL. Even the most incompetent
captains know more than most of the people I've ever met out there in the real
world. But that's a sofapbox, so there you have it. That's how I started my
Alaskan career and I don't regret it a bit. I worked that first summer and,
though I didn't know it, I was hooked (pun intended). Even so, I took off the
next summer to hike the Appalachian trail, but the one after that I decided I
would try my hand at tendering. Which is how I found myself upon the Deer
Harbor II, under the command of Amber, the best captain ever.
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Tendering
Tendering is both
less and more complicated than trolling at the same time. To put it extremely
simply, the tender boat is the middle man. Tender boats go out to where the
fisherman are fishing, the fishermen come to the tender boat, and then the
tender takes the fish off the fishing vessel, as well as giving them back ice,
groceries, fuel, and water. Then the tender runs to town, drops the fish at the
plant, restocks, and goes back out to the fishing grounds. Back and forth, back
and forth, all season long. And there aren't just tenders for trolling. There
are tenders for nearly every type of fishing out there. It just so happens the
tender boat I work on does troll tendering and pounding (herring). Tender boats
are a much larger vessel than the
fishing boats because they need to be able to take and pack the fish from
multiple trollers.
But, now, in a
little more detail. I work on the Deer Harbor II. She is about 100ft long, 30ft
wide, 375 tons, and properly she is called a scow. Made in 1942 for WWII she's
a wooden vessel. My captain is Amber. Her pa is Hans. The dog is Gordon. For
the salmon tendering season we usually run between Sitka and Mite cove. Sitka
is where the fish plant is, Mite cove is where the fishermen are. It's about a
7 or 8 hour run on the outside and a 13 or so hour run on the inside (we have
to take the inside if it's too rough outside). Depending who's aboard me,
Amber, Hans, and sometimes other people will take shifts driving the boat. The
crew for salmon season is 4-7, and the rest of the crew who aren't driving are
usually cleaning or relaxing on the way in or out of Sitka.
But running (that's
what we call traveling) is the least of our work. Running is our down time. The
real work is getting the fish aboard and then sorting and packing them while
keeping the other million things we need to be aware of in mind. How do we get
the fish aboard? Basically we use the booms (like a crane) to lower giant
basket things into the holds of the fishing boats and they pitch their fish
into the basket one at a time. When the bucket is full we pull it out, put it
on our boat, sort the fish by type and weight, and then repack them
respectively in these giant cooler things called totes. This can take a while,
especially because boats can have upwards of 1,000 fish. That's where most of
our day is spent, taking fish from fishermen, sorting, and packing them. We
have a forklift and pallet jacks to move the totes of fish around because they
can weigh around 1500 pounds. Really simply put that's all we do, but on top of
that there're usually a plethora of other chores and tasks that need doing in
order to keep a vessel going. And there is always, ALWAYS, something to be
cleaned.
All of that is what
we do yeah, but what we really do is something different. Something strange,
hilarious, daunting and difficult to describe. Looking at what we do and trying
to explain it is like trying to explain an inside joke to someone. If you aren't
there when it happens it isn't funny. Though my attempt to explain this may be
futile, I'll still try for y'all.
What we do isn't
just packing fish and tying up boats and running all over Southeast. If someone
were looking at us from an outside perspective, then ,yeah, that is all we do.
We pack and de-ice and re-ice and run run run and at the end of the day there are
fish on the dock that weren't there before. That's what people think we do. But
nah, that's not really what we do. What we do, what we really do, well, it's
like this. We wake up sometime in the early morning, maybe it's 6 or 7,
sometimes an earlier 5 or even 3 if we need to do something crazy like catch
the tide. We congregate around the galley table, everyone gets some coffee and
we sit there drinking it laughing about the previous days craziness or about
the shit we're about to go through for that day, and then once we're all about
half way through our coffee we basically pull straws on who gets to poop first,
each of us trickling down to the head at some point or another. And we all
laugh about it because potty humor gets to everyone and nothing is private on a
boat, especially since the plumbing goes directly out under the back deck and
into the ocean. So sometimes you can just be sitting out there looking at the
beautiful mountains meeting the ocean along the coastline and when you look
down at the water right below you can know what that guy had for dinner a
couple nights ago. After the morning poopathon we go about whatever ridiculous
thing it is we're doing that day. Whether it be buying fish until 3 in the
morning or running around in the skiff cutting kelp off the beach lines.
Just one of the silly things we do
Trying to write this
now I'm realizing the task I've set out on is impossible, I just can't explain
what it is that we really do because somehow everything we do we find
hilarious. Hysterically hilarious and hilariously hysterical. We laugh at the
fishermen, their rain gear, and their boats. We laugh at tie up lines and knots
people tie and how, no matter what you're doing, it's possible you could come
out of it with soot all over your face for no reason at all. We laugh at Gordon
(the dog aboard), oh sweet baby Jesus do we laugh at Gordon and all the blank
stares and pitiful glares he gives us. How he spazzes out over a reflected
light or the deck hose. We make fun of each other for anything and everything,
the way someone puts a hook on or packs fish in a tote or breaks up ice.
Laughing at each other for being tall or short or anything any of us wears or
how we don't shower but maybe once a week and how I fell in my own trash hole
thrice in one day. We just laugh, at absolutely everything. And I could never
explain how these things are funny, even though I try, I can't because you
really do gotta live it to understand it.
One last question
I'm frequently asked about the boat is 'do y'all eat a lot of fish on the
boat?' to which I respond 'I eat better on the boat than I ever do in the real
world', mostly because Amber is the best cook there is. She can make anything
out of anything, and it always taste amazing. Seriously, nothing on land could
compare to how I eat aboard the Deer Harbor. It's damn good.
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Herring/herring tendering (pounding)
Pounding is the
spring season. It's a really strange and interesting fishery. It's a seining
fishery. Seining is a way that fish are caught, basically using a giant net.
The seiners go out and catch these herring when they show up. But it's not
really about the herring, because they're harvesting roe on kelp (the eggs).
They have to go out kelping and find the best kelp they can. They're looking
for large blades, then, once they've gotten the kelp they need (each permit is
only allowed a certain number of blades), they build a pound to hang the kelp
in. After that they sein the herring, dump them in the pounds, and try to get
them to spawn. After 5 days they release all the herring from the pens, harvest
the roe on kelp, and bring it to us, the tender. We give them salt, brine, and
empty totes for them to pack the roe in. Then they give us product back and
wallah. Simple as that.
Seining
Pounds
Harvesting
They seine down near
Craig and we take the roe on kelp up to Petersburg after we've gotten all the
product from the fishermen. It's about a 14 hour run between the two towns. We
want them to get as much product as possible because we're paid per pound they
bring in. Mo' totes is mo' money. Herring season is nice because it's much more
relaxed than salmon. It's not go go go all the time and even though I spend a
month up there for it I really only work for 3 days.
What herring season
is really about is getting the boat in order for salmon. It's about learning as
much as I can about the boat while it's a small crew (me, Amber, and Hans) and
everything isn't super hectic like it is in the summer. Trying to learn how to
change the oil on the mains, kuba, the 6, and noisy. Learning how to drop and
pull the anchor, how to just do everything I can really. Herring season is
about spending some quality time with Amber too because we really do have a
good time together. I can't even count the times I've cried laughing during
this month up here. It really is just having a good time with some friends and,
even though shit gets done, in the end, it was just us goofing off on a boat to
make a bit of money to see the world with. And I like that.
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There you go guys.
That's at least a general outline of some of the things we do. Like I said, I
get questions about the boat A LOT, but it's hard to explain if you've never
seen it or lived aboard a boat for a long period of time before. I love it up
here though. The Deer Harbor II is an amazing vessel and it's great being able
to work with Amber, Gordon, and Hans. So hopefully this answers some of the
questions that've been posed to me over the years and if you have any specific
questions feel free to ask me.
Be happy,
Beacon
