It has been a while since I have last posted a blog and I apologize for that. Let me give a quick update on what has gone on and what is going on now. We finished up with cod and caught a respectable one million pounds of fish in sixty days and change. Then we came into town and converted the boat over to king crab, which is what we are fishing for now.

Crab is by far my favorite fishery. The best way to describe crab is utter chaos. Eight hundred pound pots are flying across the deck at thirty miles an hour, waves are washing over the side of the boat as it pitches back and forth from twenty degree rolls, everyone’s running, everyone’s screaming, utter chaos. We started the season out well, we started right on top of the crab and we were catching between eighty and a hundred crab in each pot. The fishing has slowed down some now, as the crab has moved and we have to go looking for them. So that’s what the boat is up to.

My specific job is the coiler man. What this entails is that I throw a hook at the buoys marking our pots, load the line into a hydraulic block that pulls the pot from the ocean floor, and then run the line into a “king coiler” which coils the line in a nice bundle, after the pot is up and on the launcher rack, I tie the line up and get the pot ready to be stacked. Each cycle of pulling a pot, stacking it, and getting ready for the next one, takes about three minutes. So basically my job breaks down to throwing the hook two hundred times a day, tying four hundred knots, and picking up one hundred and ten pounds of line four hundred times a day, as well as helping out sorting or other jobs when I have free time. So that is what the average day is for me. If you have questions send them as comments and I will get them emailed up to me and answer them. ~Paul