Valdez

Thursday, July 10th, 2008

Well it has been quite a while since I updated. Valdez has been good; the run seems to be a bit bigger than forecast, although it is still well below last year’s. That was expected though, since the fish seem to come every other year. What it means is that next year should be another really good year while the one after that will resemble this year, and so on.

We have actually been doing pretty well so far though. We are a decent amount above the fleet average in terms of fish caught, so you can’t complain about that. One thing we can complain about, though, is that the price is only .25 per pound, which is robbery considering what the canneries sell the product for. Another thing to complain about is that during 2 out of the 4 openers we have gotten so far our buyer has ordered all of their nets out of the water because of capacity issues at the processors. It really sucks because those days we were doing really well and could have made a really good day out of it but had to stop. We did manage to have a 66000 pound day once, which was great. Anytime you make 1700 dollars in 14 hour period is a great thing. Out of the 4 days that we have fished, we have had 28000 pounds, 66000 pounds, 40000 pounds, and 32000 pounds, which puts us at 166000 for all of Valdez. Combined with our Chalmers earnings, we have already grossed over $100000, which means that I’ve already made $10000. I’m pretty excited about that because that is the number that I was aiming to have at the end of the season, and here I am sitting on it with 2 months of fishing left.

We haven’t had any major breakdowns thus far, although one is probably looming around the corner. There have been minor things of course, but nothing that we couldn’t fix easily or work around. Jonathan, on the other hand has had a breakdown every opener thus far. He actually has yet to fish the entire 14 hour period that defines an opener. It seems that the Cat-Bil-Lu is not quite the dream boat that he had in mind; it is actually kind of a worn out old boat. It doesn’t help that he worked the equipment hard in Chalmers, but it is definitely having more than its share of maintenance problems. His engine controls went out, he got web in the prop, and his skiff lost all of its towing power. In the few sets that he has managed to get in, he has only caught 50000 pounds so far. He’s pretty down about it all, but there is only so much you can do to prevent breakdowns on a boat that you don’t know. Bill could predict everything because he had worked on all of it, but Jonathan doesn’t have that luxury.