Chalmers update

Monday, June 2, 2008

Well it’s our 6th day here is Chalmers, and man it has been an ordeal. All day every day there is something breaking or going wrong left and right. The first day, on the first set the skiff caught on fire. That wasn’t the end of it though; after 4 or 5 sets Jamel and I switched places on the deck and in the skiff, and that’s where it all really started to go wrong. In our haste to switch places, we forgot to disconnect the block line from the net and when I set out in the skiff, the block line got tight on the block and I accidentally towed the boat back into the net. Andrew had put the boat in neutral by this point, but it was too late; web was caught in the prop and we were pretty screwed. After deliberating over it for a while we decided to beach the boat nearby and then at low tide simply wade down and work the web off. The problem is that while we were maneuvering the boat on the beach, Jamel got web caught in the skiff’s jet intake. Now we were really in a tough spot, so we waited parked everything, went to bed and waited for low tide to evaluate the situation. At about 3 am we woke up to try and fix our mess. The water was pretty cold, but not as bad as expected; maybe somewhere around 45 degrees. It was still too high for boots so I was out there in my flip flops trying to unhook the net from our boat. Eventually we got the web off of the prop without tearing it too much, but the skiff was a different story. It wasn’t really propped up on anything so we couldn’t reach too far under it, and in the end we had to cut out all of the pinched web. As disappointed as I was to have to cut the net, I was still pretty excited to get out of that water. God it was cold. After all this was done we went back onboard the Jonathan S which was now tilted at about a 45 degree angle because of the beach. It was interesting to walk on the walls to get back to my bunk; fortunately I had the bunk that had me leaning against the wall. Anyways that was our first day, but that wouldn’t be the end of our problems. It really didn’t cause us too much trouble because we got Jonathan to mend the hole in the morning and we were good to fish again.

The next few days we basically just had a lot of net trouble and some early season kinks to work out. It wasn’t fishing properly and we ended up dumping a lot of fish over the corks every time we tried to pull up a bag of them. Part of it is the new net, and another reason for it is the fact that we don’t have Jonathan in the skiff anymore, which means that all of the tows aren’t perfect. It was frustrating.

Today was a real bomb though. During our first set the skiff overheated and we had to pick the net up over the stern, which means no fish. Throughout the day we were refilling the coolant tank with water to serve as a temporary fix until we can fix the leak in the coolant system. It seems that when Jonathan was plumping the keel cooler he used plastic parts to connect hoses, and those pipes got deformed and started to leak after being exposed to so much heat. After that we had two really good sets with nothing going wrong, and then a big cloud of freon gas blew out if the boat. The pressure had gotten too high and with the numerous other things that we had going on, Andrew forgot to check his gauges. So we had freon all inside the boat and in the engine room, which thankfully got shut off in time to prevent any serious damage. It meant that we couldn’t refrigerate the fish hold water anymore, which is a pretty big problem. After we got the cabin ventilated enough, Andrew, Jamel and I went in and changed the oil in the main engine twice to prevent further harm to it, and after we all calmed down went to deliver the fish that we had onboard to the tender and had dinner. We actually think that we can still operate the refrigeration without any problems and continue to fish. Hopefully we can get some freon sent out on the tender soon, but luckily it turned out to not be too much trouble. It could have totally fried the newly rebuilt engine and pretty much killed our season, leaving Jamel and I jobless. Thankfully it didn’t get that far and we will live to see another day of fishing.

I really can’t complain about the fishing though. So far the fish have been coming in very strong for this early in the season, and in the 6 days that we’ve been here I’ve already made about $500, which is great considering the chum run hasn’t really started yet. Even with all of the screwups we have still managed to out-fish Jonathan up to this point, and I don’t plan on letting him jump ahead at all this season. I’m sure that the competition between our boats (the Jonathan S and the Cat-Bil-Lu) will make all of us wealthy people by the end of the season.

Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008

God I am getting sick of this weather that we have been having in Chalmers. For the past three days it has been blowing 30 knots, raining, and about 40-45 degrees. All of that combines to make it very cold outside and no fun at all to fish in. The silver lining is that we have done pretty well over the past few days, excluding today because all of a sudden the fish seem to have dried up. Everyone who was fishing around our spot today quit after a little bit, including us.

Instead of work we watched a couple movies and just relaxed all day, although I’m sure that it will not last for long. It is nice to get a day off to kind of recharge and refresh yourself when fishing everyday with no closures. Once pink season starts it will seem incredibly easy by comparison, with the openers being 12-14 hours with the waters being closed for at least a full day after that.

Friday, June 6th, 2008

God I hate that kid Jesse. He is the deckhand on Jonathan’s boat, and he really screwed us over bad. Yesterday, sometime around midday, Andrew decided to be nice and bring Jesse aboard to try and train him somewhat, because he has been struggling on Jonathan’s boat. So Jesse and I switched and I stacked corks for Jonathan one set (a lightning fast pickup I must say) and then watched as the Jonathan S took their turn. The tow was fine, but as they closed there was a confusion with the towline exchange between the crew because Jesse didn’t hand Jamel the line he needed as he gave Jesse the bunt end of the net. In his panic, Jesse dropped the towline that he got from Jamel and it fell overboard, straight into the prop. So there was the Jonathan S, with something stuck in the prop yet again. After evaluating the situation Andrew, Jamel and I decided that the only choice was to spend another night on the beach and to get the line out once low tide came around. So we positioned the boat on the beach, waited a few hours for the water to recede, wound the rope off without having to cut it, and got off around midnight. All in all, the beach part wasn’t bad. What really hurt was the fact that the fishing got really good about as soon as we got on the beach, and we could do nothing but watch. Jesse ended up costing the boat probably somewhere around $2000, in which case means that I personally lost $200. Jamel and I spent all night discussing what should do to him, but nothing we came up with seemed like it would be what he deserved; I’m sure we can think of something though.

On the plus side, the sun came out today for the first time in almost a week. The rain lasted for a good 6 straight days before the streak ended, and God are we glad to have a reprieve, however short it might end up being.

On a comical note, Jamel was remarked today and about how something smelled funny. It turned out that the odd smell was my clean shirt and deodorant. You know you have a good job when the smell of something clean is out of the ordinary.

Monday, June 9th, 2008

Christ yesterday was rough. We started at 4 am and by about noon the wind had picked up and the waves were about 3-5 feet where we were fishing. It was pretty hardcore with everything swinging around (including me) and the skiff bobbing up and down, and yet was still fun even though I was afraid that something was going to break the entire time. I did almost get hit a by the rings few times and Andrew almost dropped the leads on me, but thankfully I was able to avoid it all. Eventually we decided that the fish had gone away enough that it wasn’t worth trying to catch them and break something, so we sped off to deliver our fish. Our delivery put us over 21000 pounds for Chalmers, which at 55 cents a pound finally pays off my plane ticket up here and my ticket back. So from here out is pretty much all profit; if I had to I could cut ties right now and not lose any money.

I turned on my cell phone yesterday and by some sort of weird occurrence I had service and was able to call out, which I couldn’t even do in Cordova. I got to call Megan for a few minutes and find out what her plan was, and to learn that an apartment finally opened up at the place we’ve been looking at this spring, so I should have a place to live this fall when I make it out to Oregon. I’m pretty excited about that, because I was kind of worried about finding a place to stay if this apartment didn’t pan out. It should be a nice enough place to live; it’s right on the southern border of the OSU campus and which will allow me to walk to everything I have to do on or around campus, which will be really nice considering the way that the price of gas is going up. I’m really excited about it.

Today wasn’t bad because we kept up our poundage average without having to do a lot of sets. I think we started at 8 when it opened (the waters are closed here from 8 pm Sunday to Monday at 8 am) and did about 5 sets total. What sucks is that there are a lot of boats starting to show up and each set has about 6 boats on it all day now. So I think to kind of counteract this we are going to try and start fishing all night rather than all day, when there is little or no competition and we can just do set after set without a big wait in between. Hopefully it’ll allow us to catch more fish while also working more hours. It’s what Jonathan has been doing the past few days and so far it’s worked for him, so it should work for us to.

Tuesday, June 10th, 2008

Today was…unbelievable. We started around 10 am after fishing until around 3 am last night and got into the long line on our Stockdale harbor set. After several primary and second-out sets we decided that we’d do just one more and then go deliver. Unfortunately, during the one last set the refrigeration once again blew freon into the engine room. The difference between this time and the first time is that this time we had our net in the water and no way to haul it in without turning the engine on. So we sat there for a few minutes until another boat, the Tor, came and offered us assistance by pulling our net over their block and back onto our deck. It’s was such an awesome thing of them to do for us, people who they don’t know at all and aren’t even fishing for the same cannery. Some people are just nice like that I suppose. Anyways, once we got all of that done, we motored into the nearby bay quickly, shut the engine off and changed the oil. Then after the oil change we go to start the engine again so we can deliver the fish we had onboard…and the starter doesn’t engage. There we are with the anchor down, fish onboard, a boom that keeps walking to one side and no way to start the main diesel. Jamel and I ended up bringing in the anchor by hand, which was a chore to say the least. After that Jamel towed us into cell phone range with the skiff and after calls were made to arrange for a new starter he towed us over to the tender. We straightened out the boom by hand (another chore) and eventually delivered, which was interesting because we had no hydraulics at all and had to rely on the tender to manipulate the pump for us, which is never a great thing. I swear that these tender guys are so dumb that they make almost all of the bad crews from last year look good.

So now we are unable to fish for at least a couple days, until we get a new starter motor. At least we will have time to get the boat squared away on some of the little things that need to get done, but I really wish that we could be fishing instead. The fish are really starting to come in now, and we can’t catch them! At least Jonathan had to run to town for fixes of his own, so he can’t get ahead of us while we’re out of the game.

Wednesday, June 11th, 2008

Bored. I really wish the starter would come soon. There’s a chance that it might come tomorrow, but if not then the next day. Meanwhile, we’re losing thousands of dollars as we sit idly and do nothing while the fish are swimming.

Sunday, June 15th, 2008

Today was a good day. We got up later than usual (around 5:30), put the net in the water and got a great set to start the day. From then on we fished straight until it closed at 8 pm, with a few boats joining in every now and then. After it was all said and done, we ended up delivering around 8200 pounds today, giving me something like a $450 dollar day. That is absolutely sick for Chalmers; I didn’t expect to get that much on a single day here. One can only hope that it keeps up for a while, especially considering that today was probably the halfway mark for our stay in Chalmers this summer. Andrew predicts that Valdez won’t open until about the 4th of July, so we should have plenty of time to try and have a bigger day than today.

It is kind of scary that we are only at the halfway point for Chalmers though. Pinks are going to seem so easy by comparison, with the 12 hour openers and day-on day-off fishing. When you have a whole day to recover it’s not that hard to go super hardcore for 12 hours of fishing, but here when you expect 5-6 hours of sleep after going hardcore it can be harder to get into the right mindset sometimes. Speaking of pinks, we are starting to get a lot of them in our sets here. By a lot I mean around 10 per set, but for the middle of June that is fairly unheard of. Andrew thinks that it might be a sign of another big wild fish run, and I have to agree that it certainly points in that direction. We’re all pretty excited about that development, and we’ll have to watch over the next few weeks here how the situation develops

The other night we did something interesting and fished throughout it. We started around noon and sat in a line of about 6 boats until 7, and then everybody else quit and we cranked out sets until 3 am. It was creepy because the sky was actually getting brighter as we quit. There were points where seeing the skiff on the beach was difficult, but it never got to the point where we couldn’t see what was going on. This was all like 9 days before the longest day of the year, too! I can’t really remember what it was like when I was up here last year for the solstice, so I’m kind of excited to see how light it is at 1 am, which seems to be the darkest point of the day.

Andrew and I have been experimenting a lot amount on deck in terms of stacking the net. I think we have finally found an easy way to stack it without getting a lot of leadline flips. It seems that all of the new web that was hung into the net over the winter, it doesn’t stack quite the same as it used to, but I think that Andrew and I have solved that now. Our first experiment had me under the net as we brought the lead in, which I decided wouldn’t do at all once we start lots of jellies. So therefore I suggested our current method and it seems to work perfectly fine. Only time will tell where we end up.

Monday, June 16th, 2008

Well today sure had a good start. Jamel and I got up around 7, although Andrew had been up since 4, and had some breakfast before fishing opened. We were first on the set, which after a closure usually means a buildup of fish, even if the closure is only 12 hours long. So we were first in line for the buildup set and it was a great one; our best so far this year with 256 fish in it. I know that because I pitched every one of them from the deck into the fish hold. After that we kept getting 100+ fish sets until our final one, which ended up being about 15 fish. It ended up being a pretty easy day with only 6 sets.

We’re starting to get really organized and quick about picking up these days. The net is running in and out really smoothly every time, with a small exception at the end where we run out of purse line sometimes; that’s a fairly easy fix though, once we get some time to do it.

Tuesday, June 17th, 2008

Well today we got up around 4:30 am, did one set, and quit. We were a bit late getting started and as a consequence we missed the morning shot of fish. Then later on we were lazy and didn’t even go out for the afternoon. So we spent the day eating and sleeping with a movie thrown in. It was a nice break, but not a great way to make money.

Saturday, June 21st, 2008

Well crap. Maybe I’m just bad luck or something, but for the second year in a row we sunk the skiff. There are no pictures this time, but trust me it looked exactly the same as last year, with the skiff held up by our picking boom with the console and engine well underwater. Fortunately this time the engine wasn’t underwater for nearly as long, because it went down right next to a point where several limit sized boats were fishing, and one of them, the St. Zita, came and just picked it straight up out of the water. It made a really good case for getting a big boat.

So anyways we were on our way back to town anyways, because on our last set we actually broke the tiller on the skiff. That’s actually why it sunk, because when we were checking out the damage we removed an inspection hatch to look into the jet. However, in our frustration we forgot to put it back on, so once we started towing it back to town water started flowing through the hatch and it went down. The damage isn’t really too bad though; a lot better than last year. Water didn’t get too far into the engine, so besides the fried wiring it should work fine. We should be ready to go tonight and leaving again tomorrow morning, which is fine with me because I don’t get paid to be in town and every day we miss out there is another 200 or 300 bucks that I’m not getting. I’ve already made about $3000 so far, so this season is getting off to a pretty decent start.

We shouldn’t be out for too long this time though, because Valdez should be starting sometime around the 4th of July, if not a little earlier.

-Jack