Commercial Fishing

[Skillet]

The offload went smooth, we sent a total of 65 kings (caught one on the stack-out) and some number of coho into the tender’s hold.  There was an interesting issue when we pulled into the back bay at Surge Bay.  You see the three boats in that picture below – they’re all tenders.  The center one, orange, is the Sea Lion and run by a great guy for Seafood Producers Cooperative.  That’s my Co-op, and where I was delivering.  The tender on the right is the Pavlov, and buys fish for AGS, or Alaska General Seafood.  There is a troller tied up to him in the picture, unloading.  The boat on the left, wayyyy in the background, that’s the Ginny C.  They buy for Sitka Sound Seafoods, or SSS.  The issue is they shouldn’t be way back there. It is really shallow… and they were aground.  I talked to my tender’s skipper and he said he was setting up his buying operation when they came charging by him, and before he could warn them about getting too far back there they drove that 65’ boat right up on the mud.  I suspect SSS didn’t get to buy many fish that day, at least until the tide came in and floated them again.
We offloaded, got my settlement paperwork, and charged out the Grounds that afternoon and evening.  It was smooth water by then, and we both got great naps in to charge our batteries for the next phase.

July 4 dawned with me dropping gear in on the East Bank of the Fairweather Grounds. In chatting with a few friends out there, the party never really got started, and was a steady 30-40 fish a day.  If a season runs 7 days, a freezer boat can put up between 210-280 kings in a week.  Those are respectable numbers, and I was behind the 8 ball in trying to achieve that.  So at that point, I would have stayed on 40 kings a day.  However, by the time I arrived, it had falled off significantly.  I managed 21 kings on my first day on the Grounds.  Not good enough, I wanted to either tune in my East Bank program or go looking for fish.
The fog had settled in, and the ocean was just a series of oily swells with no horizon to reference.  It is very hard to tell where the sky ends and the water begins in those conditions, so you can end up completely disoriented if you’re not tuned into your charting program.  It’s not really a problem for me since I’m always looking at my charts, but for crew it can be pretty unsettling.  They just can’t see land, and without any visible horizon reference for days on end I’ve seen men get a little tweaky out there.  Jake, however, was holding tough.  He is a Battleground, WA boy, and probably only 125# soaking wet.  A dry-waller by trade, he is tough as nails. Pound for pound, I wouldn’t bet against him.
I needed to keep Jake engaged, and make some money – so the afternoon of the 4th we went to a quiet spot I know about wayyyy out on the West Bank of the Fairweather Grounds.  It was a gamble to run another 35 miles out, but at this point I was into betting it all on black and seeing what happened.  Turns out that was a good call.

[Skillet]

July 5th, we started on my old spot that had paid off well the year before.  In fact, I had set my boat record of 118 kings in a day on that spot out there a year earlier.  Thankfully, the general area was holding fish again.  I didn’t have any boats within miles of me, and after a little searching we were in the fish.  Kings were biting on everything, but the spoons were really getting work done – which is my favorite way to fish kings.  I pulled off some flasher/hootchie rigs and added spoons, and we worked those fish for the whole day – setting a new boat record of 128 kings by dark. I don’t remember the number of coho but I believe it was in the 25 fish range.  I’d like to show you pics of the fun, but between fishing and running the boat Jake and I were tied up pretty much all day.  It was all we could do to remember to grab a burrito out of the ice and throw it in the oven.  We fell in the bunks after a 20 hour effort, glad for the opportunity to salvage a season.  By the end of the 5th day, we had landed 214 kings.  The beginnings of a respecatable effort.

July 6th brought some weather back to us on the grounds, though it wasn’t too rough.  That morning began just as the fish had left off the night before, and we had 50 by noon.  The bite, however, fell completely flat after.  I decided to shallow up and work the top of the West Bank area we were on, and focus on landing our lingcod and halibut bycatch until the salmon came back around.  Those lings out on the Fairweather Grounds are ridiculously large on average, and very aggressive.  They just don’t see much commercial gear, so attack anything that comes near.  Our average carcass out there is 12 pounds (head-off), and we had several pushing 40#.  Bonus halibut came on the troll gear as well, and we landed 11 halibut that afternoon, ranging from 18# to 101# dressed. At tide change, I returned to the salmon spot, but the fish had turned off.  I could still see masses of them on the sounder, but bites were slow and they weren’t hitting spoons like they were before.  We finished the day with 69 kings, a big pile of big lingcod, and 11 halibut.

July 7th was more of the same – slow again.  Some boats had seen me on their radar working the same area back and forth for two days and came up to help me out.  Generous of them, ya?  It was predicted to close that night per my convo with the bio a few days ago, and if people were catching like I was the previous two days it should have closed much earlier.  We were tired after all of the shenanigans of the season so far, and we were so far out that we couldn’t easily move in to another area that might be producing better.  So we stuck it out, hoping the kings would come back, and they didn’t.  I decided after a good effort that resulted in only 18 kings, and now a half dozen boats in my spot that I would run in a little early with better quality fish and beat the offload rush in Sitka. We had a total of 236 kings, 75 coho, 74 big lingcod, 11 Hali, and 45 round rockfish.  At this year’s high dock prices, we were hauling about $25-30K worth of fish in.  We stacked out at 8 pm and started in on the 25 hour run to get back to Sitka.

[Skillet]

July 8th, 7:30 am -  Jake is sleeping in his bunk forward, I’m making another pot of coffee in the galley.  The weather has really calmed down, and there is just a long ocean swell from the West as we go.  Making a good 7.5 knots average, we’re on schedule to arrive in Sitka at 9pm that night.  I have an offload scheduled at 6am the 9th, everything is coming together.  We had freezer trouble, pivoted to an ice trip, and saved the season.  I’m pouring water in my French press, feeling exhausted but good about everything, when I catch a glimpse of something that doesn’t quite fit the scene, off my bow on the face of the swell 100 yards away…
There is a lot of stuff floating the Pacific Ocean.  Kelp balls in that area, mostly, which themselves are harmless – but often there will be a piece of driftwood mixed up in the kelp, which is a problem.  Logs are a more serious issue, and they’re easy to spot in calm water because 95% of them have birds standing on them.  We get very good at identifying potential issues in the water.  Large kelp balls will basically stop you, and I generally avoid them all if possible.  The farther out you are, however, the less likely that is to be an issue.  So when I noticed the small amount of kelp just dimpling the surface, it didn’t cause much alarm.  I was just over 15 miles offshore, and still 60 miles to go to town.  Over 500+ fathoms of water, I hadn’t tuned my antennae to the hazards that are much more common closer to town. 
The kelp I noticed disappeared behind the swell that overtook us, and I was moving to the wheel to steer around it when I saw it suddenly reappear at the top of the swell I was now climbing and disappear under my bow.  It had a much more symmetrical look to it than kelp ever should, very unnatural looking.  I lunged to the gear shift to take it out of gear and just managed to get it to neutral as the engine started groaning.  I ran to the back of the boat to see what would come out behind me – and nothing did.  I started to realize I didn’t run over kelp, and it was still under my boat.  I couldn’t see anything trailing.  It was smack under the boat.  Not a good set of circumstances.

[Skillet]

The boat’s momentum was still carrying us forward, but she was slowing down.  I was not convinced it was a net of some sort, and needed to be very careful about my next moves. I let the Diamond Lil basically come to a stop, and decided that the winged keel that I have down there might have caught the net before it got to the prop.  The rudder seemed to be free, and I went down in the engine room to see if the prop shaft was still turning while we were moving forward in neutral (indicating the net hadn’t wound up in the wheel).  It was turning, but seemed slow.  But too slow for how fast we were still going?  I didn’t know.  Blowing the net off of the keel with an aggressive reverse thrust could work as long as the net wasn’t in the wheel, so I decided on that course of action.
That was the wrong call.
I have been working this boat pretty hard over the 6 years I’ve owned her, and the gearbox was slated for a rebuild at 20K hours.  I had 17K on her at that point, so I know we were approaching the end of it’s service life. My Spot Prawn fishery is particularly hard on the gearbox, with about 25-28 near-full-throttle back downs a day to stop the boat precisely over the pot string. It wears things out, and that abuse came home to roost on this day.
I slipped the gear into reverse and pushed the throttle forward.  There is no sense in testing it gently – if it worked, it would only work with a large amount of prop wash to push the net off the keel.  In the split second the engine spun up, the net was wound up in the wheel and the helm wheel was ripped from my hands and spun to starboard.  The engine loaded up instantly, and before I could shift back to neutral there was a loud “bang” from the engine room and the load on the engine went away.  That’s a bad sign, that should have killed the main engine… I gently shifted to reverse again to test the load on the engine, and there was none.  I was in reverse, throttled up, and the engine was just acting like it was in neutral with no load on it.  I jumped into the engine room to see if the shaft was spinning – nothing moving.  I had blown out my reverse gear. I ever-so-slightly eased it into forward, and the engine loaded up immediately and died.  At least I still had forward gear… 60 miles from town, 15 miles offshore, and I had a net wound up hard in my prop and rudder.   I was adrift.
One of my friends was a few miles behind me heading into town as well, so I radio’d him to see if he had any ideas.  In the mean time, Jake was able to grab the end of the net and tie it up to the side of the boat.  Maybe Sean could come over and yank on it a bit to see if he could free it?  We discussed this, but decided the risk of damaging my rudder was too high.  The best course of action was for me get a diver out there, somehow.  I considered going under the boat myself, but I didn’t have the dive gear and the ocean swell would have made it a very dangerous operation.  I’ve dove on my boat in still water to cut line out of the prop, and it is sketchy enough.  I decided this is a job for the pro’s.  Sean stood by while I called in to Sitka and found a diver that was willing to take the job.  Diver Dave.

Once I confirmed that Dave was on his way, Sean started for town and I was left alone.  Dave had said he would charter a float plane and come out.  I never asked what that will cost, because this isn’t a “shop-around” situation.  You pay’s your money and you takes your chances.  Could I send him my coordinates?  I did, and advised him that I was drifting north at about 1 knot.  No problem, he’d be there in an hour on the float plane.

Three hours later, I get a very scratchy VHS call from the pilot.  He can’t find me.  I tell him I’m now two miles north of the location I gave him via the coordinates.  He says he’s looked all around the island and he can’t find me.  Island??  I’m 15 miles offshore of any island.  I tell him the coordinates I gave him are for 15 miles due west of Herbert Graves Island.  He said “I know, but that’s an impossibility”.  It’s not, I tell him, since I’m definitely out there.  “Well, I can’t land on the ocean in this weather, it would be suicide!”  I ask if he checked the coordinates before he left the airport with my diver, and he said yes, but they must have been wrong because he can’t land out there…  Instead of pointing out the idiocy of his logic, I suggest that maybe he can fly slow and low enough into the wind to let Dave jump out near my boat?  No can do, he’s heading back to town with my diver – and wants to know how he’s going to get paid for this trip… I tell him let’s worry about getting me a diver first, and we’ll sort all that out when I get back to town. 

At my request, the pilot asks Diver Dave if he would agree to jump on a charter boat when he gets back to town.  Dave is ok with the plan, so I call up a buddy that owns a charter business to charter his boat for the afternoon.  By now, it will be a 130 mile round trip from Sitka for him, and we’ve got weather coming this evening.  Can he do it?  There are a few communities in this world that will pull out all the stops to help each other, and Sitka is one of them.  He said his charter captain just got back to town and dropped off the clients – he’ll have the boat fueled and ready for when Diver Dave lands back in Sitka. 

[Skillet]

There are a lot of good people in this world, and I have been lucky to meet a lot of them.  His rescue charter mission wasn’t free, and I didn’t expect it to be – just the fact he was willing to do it was going above and beyond.

By the time Diver Dave arrived on the charter boat from Sitka, it was nearly 3:30 pm.  The weather was just starting to fill from the Southwest, and the boat was heaving up and down quite a bit.  He got his gear on and dove under the stern.  While down there, he got smacked by the boat coming down on his dive helmet several times, hard enough I could hear it ring like a bell.  I’m glad I didn’t go under there myself without any gear. After no more than 10 minutes under the boat, he had me cut free and we collected all of the net on deck.  He got back on the skiff while they waited to see if I had any propulsion in forward.  I fired up, put it in gear, and although it seemed weak, we were under way and heading back to Sitka.  The skiff throttled up and soon disappeared into the oncoming southerly chop.  The next few hours on his boat were pretty rough, since he was pounding into it in a light boat.  I was glad I was on my big steel tub.

We pulled into town at 02:30 on the 9th.  I didn’t have reverse, so I had to gently ease up to the pilings that I’d be unloaded at and bounce off in such a way my deckhand could get a wrap around one and stop us.  We napped for a few hours, then offloaded at 6 am.  At least the fish made it to town, and we made a paycheck.  That would all be spent -and more- in the coming weeks on gearbox repairs, but at least I had it to spend. When leaving the offload on my way back to may slip, the boat barely made it into gear.  I just made it to my slip, semi-crashing against the dock to stop, and tied her up.
As soon as everything cooled, I took the gearbox hydraulic controls apart to see if I could ID the problem.  There was metal shaving everywhere.  I cleaned it all up the best I could, regasketed and sealed it, and once the sealant was dry fired it up to see if I had improved the situation.  That was a no.  Reverse was still out, forward was weaker yet, and there was a helluva racket coming from the gearbox. 
The gearbox manufacturer quoted me a 5 week leadtime on a brand-new gearbox, and 4 weeks for the parts to rebuild.  I ordered the new gearbox, and waited.  That was on July 12 (they are in England, and getting the US Authorized dealer to factory communication going took a minute), and here I am in the early hours of Sept 2nd, still waiting for it to arrive. 
I should see the gearbox soon, and when I do I’ll have just enough time to swap it before I go for Spot Prawns on October 1.  That means my salmon season has pretty much been a bust this year, but here’s hoping the spot prawns come through and I can stop the bleeding.  I am very grateful I had a good king opener, since that helped fund the repairs. 

There you go, foks, that’s the quick and dirty of how the season has been going.  In the meantime, I’ve worked as a charterboat deckhand, worked on my house in WA, and been busy building a wholesale market for fish from my processor friend up in Sitka.  With @ctwiggs1 and @7mmfan help, I had a great fish sale at Mason Jar Farm in Enumclaw last weekend, and will be moving that model forward to do a small regional buy in Marysville on Sept 11. We’re going to be partnering with a local brewpub, 5 Rights Brewing, along with Warpig Smokehouse to put on a bit of a fun event that people can come pick up fish at.  We’re still going to do the big December buy, don’t worry – but if you wanted to get some fish early,  I’ll be posting that in the Sponsor classifieds tomorrow.  Even if you don’t buy fish, it would be fun to see a lot of you guys turn out for a quick BS session over some beer and brisket!
That’s about it for now, I’ll be sure to keep you all up to speed on the repairs as they progress.

Chris

[Jake Dogfish]

Great read! Thanks for sharing, hope you have better luck on the prawns. 

[Sitka_Blacktail]

Looks like you got some trawl web, eh? 

Some years are like that in the fishing business. In bought a brand new Kodiak 454 LSX before the season started and fought it for 3 months. The wiring harness came with 18 guage wire which caused some problems. Kept getting low voltage warnings and melting relays. After getting towed to town, the local shop changed it to 12 guage, but I kept melting two different relays.  This was happening to everyone who bought that engine this year. It was soon almost impossible to find the relays. The shop I bought the engine from is a Car Quest dealer and they searched the whole country and got the last dozen Car Quest had in the country.  After getting towed in by a tender again, Some more wiring was changed and connections cleaned and tightened and melted relays sent to Kodiak so their suppliers could try to find the problem. That seemed to fix the problem on most of the boats that had the same engine, but I kept melting relays. I probably went through close to a dozen. Finally after talking with a couple friends that had the same issues on other engines including a diesel, They said they had to take the relay panel off the top of the engine and put them in a cooler place and that seemed to fix their problems. I ran that by the local mechanics and they ran it by Kodiak and finally they decided to remove the two relays from the panel and wire in larger, 40 amp relays. (The engine came with 20 amp relays)  So that was done after getting towed back to town the third time and finally seems to have fixed the problem. I've gone three openers and a couple pleasure cruises with no more issues, but I still don't completely trust the engine, especially now during silver season when the gulf weather can be brutal.  If the engine died at the wrong time it could be a death sentence.  So I am trying to get through silvers in the safest manner I can.  Basically staying on the inside of the barrier islands. Fishing has been much below an average year so far this year so I've decided to try one more week and if it doesn't pick up, I'm done for the year.  We are only fishing one day a week and that doesn't cut it. 

But the strain on your brain when you want to be fishing but you are missing periods in the heart of the season with break downs is wearing on you. Especially when I bought a new engine to avoid those kinds of things from happening. But that's commercial fishing.

[Sitka_Blacktail]

Chris, I don't see the photo you mentioned of the tenders. Pretty sure the Sea Lion is the old Alaska Packers tender I worked on out of Cordova when I was 18. Also delivered to them for many years. And the Pavlov is it an old blue scow of the same style as the Sea Lion? If so I delivered to them for many years also when they tendered for Morpac. Morpac, Alaska Packers and New England used to have what they called the Co-Op in Cordova. Alaska packers didn't process any more in Cordova but still had a big tender fleet. Morpac was just getting off the ground and processed frozen fish, but only had a couple tenders. and New England had the canning lines and a few large tenders. If you fished for one of the three co-op canneries you could deliver to any of the tenders of any cannery and you'd still get your check from "your" cannery. I started with APA and later switched to Morpac as they were more willing to lend money to help a young fisherman step up with a new boat.

[nwwanderer]

Waiting for parts, a long time, seems the norm these days, hang in.  Thanks for the report

[Taco280AI]

Three hours later, I get a very scratchy VHS call from the pilot.  He can’t find me.  I tell him I’m now two miles north of the location I gave him via the coordinates.  He says he’s looked all around the island and he can’t find me.  Island??  I’m 15 miles offshore of any island.  I tell him the coordinates I gave him are for 15 miles due west of Herbert Graves Island.  He said “I know, but that’s an impossibility”.  It’s not, I tell him, since I’m definitely out there.  “Well, I can’t land on the ocean in this weather, it would be suicide!”  I ask if he checked the coordinates before he left the airport with my diver, and he said yes, but they must have been wrong because he can’t land out there… 

So he knew your coordinates, exactly where you were, the conditions, and ignored them all and flew somewhere else, then wants to be paid? Wow.

[Skillet]

Looks like you got some trawl web, eh? 

That's exactly what it was. Been drifting around for quite a while, it was pretty slimy, loaded with a tiny shrimp of some kind, and there were three dead dogfish caught in it. That pic is one of the first pieces that floated up with the diver down.

I really feel for you on the engine wiring and relay issue.  That would be very frustrating after investing all that time and money looking to increase reliability.  I'm glad you pushed through and got it right, but I don't blame you one bit for holding off going outside until that engine is 100% bullet proof in your mind. That part of the gulf you fish is no joke this time of year, and getting back under tow in any kind of weather would be a challenge. Isn't there a well known story of a boat that was having electrical problems out there in really bad weather, and a CG chopper crashed trying to save him?  And he made it in after all?

[Skillet]

Three hours later, I get a very scratchy VHS call from the pilot.  He can’t find me.  I tell him I’m now two miles north of the location I gave him via the coordinates.  He says he’s looked all around the island and he can’t find me.  Island??  I’m 15 miles offshore of any island.  I tell him the coordinates I gave him are for 15 miles due west of Herbert Graves Island.  He said “I know, but that’s an impossibility”.  It’s not, I tell him, since I’m definitely out there.  “Well, I can’t land on the ocean in this weather, it would be suicide!”  I ask if he checked the coordinates before he left the airport with my diver, and he said yes, but they must have been wrong because he can’t land out there… 

So he knew your coordinates, exactly where you were, the conditions, and ignored them all and flew somewhere else, then wants to be paid? Wow.

Oh ya.  And he got paid by the diver for that sightseeing tour, too.  I ended up splitting the cost with the diver.  Between the diver's bill, the aborted charter flight, and the chartered skiff, that episode cost me $3175 for 15 mins of dive time.  I think I need to get a big-boy set of dive gear and find a place on the boat to stow it.

[ctwiggs1]

If you guys have specs on those wiring harnesses and just need some AWG changes, I'm happy to help.

[Skillet]

Waiting for parts, a long time, seems the norm these days, hang in.  Thanks for the report

Thanks NW

You think the leadtime for a new gearbox is bad - try getting some cardboard boxes to sell your fish in! 

[Skillet]

If you guys have specs on those wiring harnesses and just need some AWG changes, I'm happy to help.

This is a much bigger offer of help than it may seem at first blush! 

Good on ya, @ctwiggs1