It's running out

July 9th:

Another typical Valdez day. Boat chores, spend too much money on food, and use the phone/internet. On the plus side we did end up getting the go-ahead to fish tomorrow, so we took off from the dock in the afternoon.

-Jack

July 10th:

Ok, it is becoming extremely difficult not to gloat too much. Once again we were the high boat of the co-op. We did a mere 3 sets and came up with an extremely massive amount of fish. During the 5 openers of the co-op, we have been high boat 4 times now. Considering how this boat is dwarfed by some of the boats around it, that is superb. We are fishing on the second-smallest boat in the fleet and are the most productive and maybe the hardest working, although there are some friends of ours in the fleet who work very hard as well.

Anyways, the fish are rolling in but our limit remained at its previous level. I thought one of the absent cannery ships would be back in action by now, but it must need an extra day or 2. Once it is functioning properly our buyer will be about to handle a much larger capacity of fish, and our daily limits should rise. We will see.

Total poundage for us/co-op: 145000/780000

Total poundage bought from us: 311000

-Jack

July 11th:

I’m not sure I really want to write much about today, because that would be a reminder that it actually occurred. We did 3 sets, but had to drop 2 of them because they were not big enough for the tender go out of its way to come over and pump it out.

The truly unfortunate part of the day was the general lack of fish around. We still managed to get our limit, but the run of fish has significantly dropped off. You can tell how far along the run is by the percentage of females. As the female percentage rises above 30%-40%, it shows that the run is dropping off. A few days ago it went from 35% to 55% overnight; yesterday it rose up to 69%. The evidence is pointing to the Valdez run ending soon, and us moving to a different location. We might end up fishing about 3 hours out of Cordova, so every now and then we would be able to run back into town. All I know right now is that we will be back out fishing in the Valdez arm again tomorrow, and we will see where the fish take us from there.

Total poundage for us/co-op: 10000/760000

Total poundage bought from us: 351000

-Jack

July 12th:

It was another just day in Valdez. We headed out of the harbor in the early afternoon and did some work on the net before we called it a day.

-Jack

July 13th:

We managed to survive Friday the 13th without any big problems. I though after our first set that it was going to be a rough day, but it turned out alright. The first set of the day-which is usually a good one because of the buildup of fish overnight-came up with like 6000 pounds of fish. Sounds like a lot, but it really isn’t when the co-op is trying to reach 700000 for the day. The next set was an improvement, and the third was our best of the day. After that we were told by our great leader to go anchor up and eat lunch, so we obliged.

At maybe 3:30 we pulled the hook and started constantly getting new information which sent us running back and forth across the Valdez arm looking important but not doing anything. The waves had picked up to a 2-3 foot chop when we set again, which made the whole process very bumpy. We did another 2 sets in the waves, dumping one of them and keeping the other that was a meager 5400 pounds. It was all we could do though, because the opener had ended and we couldn’t set again if we had wanted to.

After watching a few waves come over the stern while we were picking the net up, I decided that we should have a TV show following the seine fleet called Slightly Unsafe Catch. It would be way more extreme than Deadliest Catch.

Total poundage for us/co-op: 55000/700000

Total poundage bought from us: 388818

-Jack