Even the ocean can get rough…

Wow..last night was a wild ride. Even my almond butter thought so! Sounds funky but it goes kind of like this... that almond butter has been sitting in top of my bed for the last few days and every time I have a crack at it, the contents always seem to be in the exact same position I left them in the day before. So I start drawing designs in the butter before I cap it to see if it holds, kind of a little fun surprise when I open it up the next day and find cutsie designs in my delicious tasty almond butter haha. But I'm telling you, that stuff doesn't budge! Its like glue, once its set and capped, it stays solid! Well...this morning when I opened up my tasty almond butter hoping to see that little birdie I drew flying off into an almond butter sunset, what I found was kind of a shocker. It looked a lot like gravity had made some erratic decisions and changed directions on numerous occasions, turning my neatly organized little jar of almond butter into an explosion of goo covering the entire container!!!
Bet you never thought a guy could write an entire paragraph on almond butter now did ya haha. Yep...sometimes I even surprise myself! Ok back to the story. So as I have been so accustomed to these unbelievable conditions where I peer out and it literally looks like we're floating on glass - even calmer than most lakes I've been on - I can't help but think I've been a bit spoiled. And the funny part is that early on in the day, the sun was shining and it was gorgeous out! I felt like a bear that's been in hibernation going months without seeing sunshine, finally emerging from the cave I have appropriately named 'Morning Star' only to find a spectacular, flat, sunny day. But the funny part is that when I see that sun shining, it makes me nervous for what's to come. The only other day that we've hit any kind of weather just so happened to be that dreaded Wednesday oh so any Wednesdays ago when earlier in the day, it happened to be sunny and beautiful. So it was only appropriate that the first thing I thought to myself when I saw those golden rays of light shining so glamorously off that glassy calm ocean surface was...if history repeats itself, which I'm assuming it has a good chance of doing especially out here on the Bering Sea, then I'm in for a little treat tonight. And lets just say I wasn't that far off...
Lets just say that octopus I ate last night found itself scattered in little bits all around the trawl alley haha. In fact..I think my journal entry from yesterday kind of goes like this:
  6/25/2011   2pm: A beautiful sunny day! The water is glass, I could float out here forever...
                      6pm: We just caught a huge octopus! Awesome! Ate some, yum yum!
                     10pm: Uh oh..running into some chop out here...
                     2am: That octopus quickly made its way out of my stomach and onto the deck just now... why oh why do fishermen have mustaches!!!!

 

The day starts out deceitfully calm….

 

Did I say glass? Yeah… I meant glass. Have you ever seen calmer water!?

 

 

 

Fighting boredom is a real battle out at sea. Trying to stay upright during an afternoon of jump roping on a rocking boat makes for a good challenge..

 

 

The octopus we caught! It was tasty going down…less so when it came back up…

 

 

 

Starting to get choppy out there…soon these waves were twice the size. Hard to believe that earlier in the day it was calmer than a lake out there.

 

 

 

Pollock. Is it really worth the sleepless nights and bouts of seasickness?

 

 

Yep…I think it’s worth it.

 

 

You might not believe it, but these birds are so common in Dutch Harbor that they are actually considered pests! It’s not uncommon to see twenty lined up on the boat railings back at dock where they feed on the discarded catch. Can anybody name the bird?

 

 

Fisherman hard at pla..errr.. work!

A fisherman’s life

The life of a fisherman is in no way comparable to that of a normal American with their 9-5 job. It’s a stressful world up here – the pressure a captain faces to find the fish otherwise he and his crew go home empty handed, the stress of the crew working out on deck in rough seas as waves crash over the boat walls and thrash them around. One slip and you plunge into the icy arctic where the survival rate is less than 10% for man overboard cases. It’s a dangerous lifestyle, not for the faint of heart, but what an adventure it is! Along with the danger of the job comes an element of excitement, one that you cannot find working in an office. Every step is carefully placed otherwise you lose balance and fall over in the pitching boat – every meal is a challenge to eat as your food slides from one side of the plate to the other – every shower you take your arms and legs are pressing against the walls trying to get as much contact as possible to avoid dancing around in there and falling all over the place. Life out at sea is a life unlike any other, and that’s the draw…it’s an amazing experience, one that you can only find on a boat.

The world of fishing is a pretty amazing spectacle – the art of going hundreds of miles out to sea to find small patches of fish in the wide expanse of ocean that surrounds you is an incredible talent that the captain has learned over decades of experience. Unfortunately there is a confidentiality conflict with me discussing the dynamics of my particular boat and its workings, but I can still give the general idea of how things work up here. In the pollock fishing industry (which is where I’m working now) trawler boats head out from port and steam anywhere from five hours to three days out looking for fish. These boats range from small, mom and pop boats about fifty feet long, to huge factory processors over three hundred feet long. My boat is a mid size vessel, about 150 feet in length, which is a great size because there is still a small enough crew (six of us total) that we’ve still got a homey atmosphere, but big enough to stand its own grand when the waves get pretty nasty. Don’t get me wrong, 150 feet is nothing when the waves start picking up and we are definitely getting thrown around out there, but its nothing like those smaller boats that are completely at the mercy of the sea.

Once the captain makes the call, the boat drops the nets and depending on how good the fishing is, they can be in the water from anywhere between one and fifteen hours. Depending on the size of the boats, the nets can hold somewhere from twenty tons of fish up to several hundred tons. Once the nets are full, they are pulled back on board where they are dumped into holding tanks, then re-set to start the process all over again. When all the tanks are full, the boat heads back to port where the fish are offloaded to a giant factory. This is where things get interesting…the factory uses huge tubes that they lower into the holding tanks and these literally act as giant vacuums, sucking the fish out at a rate of about one ton of fish per minute! The fish are sucked up onto a giant conveyer belt where workers will sort through the catching, removing unwanted like jellyfish and skates, as well as damaged product that will be used as fishmeal. Part of my job description involves monitoring the offload process so I get to meet all the fascinating characters that work up in the factory. The diversity is unbelievable, these workers come from anywhere and everywhere – many from islands like Guam and Fiji but also from southeast Asia, south America, Africa and even some eastern Europeans. They’re a lively bunch, and all working hard (12 hour shifts, 7 days a week) to earn a living, and it’s an awesome time getting to know them.

So what is it that I do on the boats? basically all the fisheries in the USA are monitored for overfishing and there are permits set and fish caps and things like that to make sure we don’t overfish. Well, the only way they collect that data is by sending people like me out on the fishing boats to actually collect the data first hand. So the overall goal of my job is to keep an account of the activity that goes on, what kinds of fish and how many are caught. I also collect biological data to assess the population dynamics of the fish. Whenever my boat pulls up the net, I have to get three samples (one at the beginning when they start dumping out the bag of fish, one in the middle, and one at the end). For each sample I gather three buckets of fishies, each bucket holding about 50 fish and weighing nearly 40kg. Then with each bucket I count all the fish, identify each species and weigh them all. Next I have to sex and measure a certain percentage depending on what species we’re catching. Then with some fish I have to do maturity scans, that way we can determine the maturity of the fish in the population, and also I get to collect otoliths (which is really cool). Otoliths are two little bones in the skull that help the fish orient itself in the water, and I’m not sure what kind of data they collect from the otoliths, but that’s not my job I just get to collect them which is the fun part. That’s basically it, it’s not too complicated and it’s pretty interesting seeing how these fishing boats work in the real world. Before heading up to Alaska I figured it would be a good thing to know where your food comes from, in this case the fish we eat, so that’s where my inspiration to come up here and work on these boats started. I also think it gives me a different kind of respect for both the fish and the fishing industry, this way I can see how much effort it takes to catch these little buggers and understand how they came from the sea to my plate!

 

My boat, just after pulling into the docks and beginning to offload. You can see the yellow cranes holding up the giant vacuum tubes that suck the fish out of our tanks.

 

Pulling up the nets

 

Dumping the fish from the bag into the tanks

 

Inside the factory

 

Sorting the catch – a big jellyfish here.

Dutch Harbor AK

      After finishing our three week intensive observer training course, the twenty of us graduates dispersed into the wind. We would get word of who went to what boats and who flew to which ports, but ultimately it was an anxious waiting game as we sat around for that phone call that could come at any moment telling us where we would ship out to. After a week in Anchorage, I got the call and flew out to Dutch Harbor – a small Aleutian island notorious for its history in the fishing industry. As a central hub for the majority of fishing activity in the Bering Sea, nearly all of the four thousand inhabitants of the island are somehow involved in the industry – whether it be working on boats, on-shore factories, or transportation of product. Nearly 75% of the workers are seasonal and from any number of countries making up one of the most diverse work forces imaginable

After the five hour flight in on the small propeller plane that makes its rounds to Dutch (including two stops along the way to fuel up) we landed on what looked like a dream come true after spending the last month living in the city of Anchorage. The island is blanketed with mountains up to 2,500 feet tall – just what a kid like me who’s been stuck in the city for the past month has been waiting for! With peaks literally everywhere, there’s plenty of opportunity to hike around and explore the island for the few days I’m here.

  The weather is almost always a cloudy, misty, gray scene not unlike that of Ohio (ugh) but it’s manageable, especially considering the fact that I can finally get some elevation! Not sure I could survive in a place like this permanently as I am a big fan of sunshine, I can definitely enjoy myself here for the three months or so that I will be in and out of the harbor. And that’s all for now, its time for me to get the last few hours of use out of my legs before I head out on the boat tomorrow morning and hit the high seas!

 

Moose give the best kisses!

 

 

Hiking around Dutch Harbor

 

 

A view from the top of one of the peaks – the plant where the boats offload is visible in the center

 

Hiking around Dutch

 

 

What a beauty!