Another opener

And it was a good one. Friday morning we ran around town collecting some last minute supplies, and then at around 2 pm pulled out of the harbor and anchored on our set the for the opener Saturday morning.

Saturday's opener was a good one, although the pound limit was fairly low at 40000 pounds. For those who may not know, an opener is a period of 12-14 hours when the waters are open for fishing. Otherwise it is illegal to have your net in the water. Anyways, our buyer is having problems with his cannery ships, but once we gets the issues worked out we should get higher limits and thus make more money every opener.

Anyways, about the fishing itself. Saturday really should have been done after our first set. Our net came up with about 60000 pounds of pinks in it, so we called the tender to come and pump the fish out of our net. When we get more than about 10000 fish in a set we will call the tender over to pump them directly out of the net instead of rolling them onboard and putting them into our fish hold. Anyways, the tender eventually gets to us and ties up. However, the captain is pretty new at this tendering business, and he starts towing us out into the middle of the river to get away from the shore. Bad idea. Our net starts flowing out behind the boat, and part of the bottom edge falls off of our deck, letting the fish swim out. We managed to fix the problem before all of the fish ran out, but our 60000 pound set was reduced to a 23000 pound one. I was pissed.

After that catastrophe, we had no choice but to keep fishing. It only took us 4 more sets to make our limit for the day, but I still wish it could've been done after the first one, mostly for the bragging rights. Around here, bragging rights are about as valuable as the money itself. The entire profession revolves around it.

So we delivered and ended up back in Valdez around 2 pm or so. Valdez is pretty boring. There is nothing to do around here, and it is not laid out well for people who don't have cars. Basically the only activities are to walk around and buy food at the store. Super lame. I'm actually looking forward to getting less time off on the day-on day-off schedule I imagine we will be going on soon, when the run of fish really picks up.

Today we got up at 12 and did some random chores and then groceries and laundry. It is nice to have clean clothes again, but I really didn't have many dirty ones after 3 weeks out. You realize that it doesn't really matter when everyone else wears their clothes forever too.

So tomorrow we should be heading out again to be ready to fish on Tuesday. I'm not sure of what our limit might be for this opener but I would imagine it would be at least 40000 if not more. More would be good.

-Jack