Alaska summer 2019, fishing for salmon. The above picture of Valdez small boat harbor was taken on the 4th of July this past summer. I wish I could say that most days out on Prince William Sound were blue-bird sky days such as the one above, the reality was that sure there were day’s such as the 4th but the grey far outweighed the blue. Now, I’m not complaining, far from it as it was a great summer in Alaska.
We arrived in Anchorage on June 7th and quickly made our way to Seward where the Aquanator spends the off seasons. What is an Aquanator? It’s a boat or to be more specific it’s a 79ft. long vessel that in a former career was a troop transport landing craft which has been transformed into a commercial salmon fishing tender.
What is a commercial salmon fishing tender? Long story short; wild salmon are caught as they return to the fresh water streams where they were hatched from, depending on the species they will return after spending 2 to 5 years in the ocean. There are two types of commercial fishing vessels used to catch the salmon; seiners and gill-netters. Both type vessels use long nets to catch the salmon, however the similarities end there. On a “good” year a seiner may bring in over 2 million pounds of salmon while a gill-netter may bring in 100,000 – 200,000 lbs. What’s the difference? Size of vessels and crew and cost. A gill-netter’s vessel is much smaller than a typical seiner and is often crewed with one or two individuals verse 4 to 6 on a seiner as well as a seiner using an additional vessel called a skiff to deploy and control their net.
Gill-netter loading a net
The net on a gill-netter is spooled off the bow (front for land lovers), the salmon swim into the net and are caught when their gills get entangled in the net. Once enough fish are caught the fisher-person (there are all female crews) hauls the net in while pulling each individual fish from the net storing the catch in brailer bags which themselves are in iced bins. Gill-netters mainly fish for the “money fish” which I’ll discuss in a later post.
Seiners; here is a video of an “opener” for seiners, after watching the video I’ll let you do the math as to why seiners cost more and catch more fish. An opener is a set period of time that the state of Alaska allows commercial fishing. These openers can be anywhere from 24 to 48 hours long and are limited to specific geographic areas.
OK, so a seiner has the equipment to catch a lot of fish. Now once the the gill-netters and seiners have the fish what’s next? Well that’s where the Aquanator (AQ here on out), comes to the rescue. Being a commercial fishing tender the AQ is able to take the fish from the gill-netters and seiners and transport them to the processor as most of the fish are typically caught in waters far from the processor. And not just transport them but to also cool them down to 34F so they stay fresh. So how is this accomplished? Basically one of two ways we either use the boom on the AQ to hoist the fish from the gill-netters which store them in brailer bags or we use the AQ’s fish pump to pump the fish off the seiners. Let’s take a look at the seiners.
The above picture is the AQ’s fish pump which is a large “vacuum” and “pumper” in one. The blue hose coming off the top is the vacuum end, the fish get sucked up into the large steel tank once the tank is full the fish then get pumped out the lower right side up to the fish slide. Notice the pump and pipe contraption in the front, that’s a brand spanking new set-up which we ended up installing mid-way thru the season (separate story).
Check out the smiles on the crew members faces in the above picture, notice all the fish on the deck. They’ve caught so many salmon that their fish holds are full with the excess ending up on deck, a very good catch indeed. This is when the AQ quickly (actually immediately when a seiner gets a catch such as the one above) comes to the rescue pumping off the fish and getting them into 34F refrigerated sea water ASAP to keep them fresh. I don’t recall the exact amount of fish we pumped off the above seiner but based on the picture I’d estimate it to be 50-60,000 lbs of Wild Alaskan salmon. The AQ can hold 90,000 lbs in each of its two fish holds for a boat total of 180,000 lbs (two years ago we transported over 200,000 lbs one time due to us being within shouting distance of the processor).
The fish are pumped up from the seiner thru the AQ’s tank then up and over to the fish slide where they are sorted, weighed and deposited into the fish-holds (the AQ can pump approximately 45-65,000 lbs of salmon per hour).
Once the fish are loaded aboard the AQ the next step is transporting them to the processors dock. Depending on where the fishing took place the trip to the processor can typically be anywhere from 3 to 18 hours. Once at the dock the processor pumps the salmon off the AQ into the processing plant where they are cleaned, frozen and packaged. The entire process is quite impressive; the fish are cooled to 34F almost immediately after they are caught, kept cold during transport and flash frozen at the plant.
Up next, life aboard the Aquanator, Alaskan scenery and a 2019 summer round-up……..