All right welcome back to the podcast i have dave white here he's a retired commercial fisherman retired teacher and now an aspiring artist and a time killer and a cruiser on uh on boats thanks for being on here dave hey hi jeff how are you good good so it's kind of funny uh we were just talking off air your commercial fishing days and you mentioned losing fish and how that's frustrating So I guess there's a nice hook here.
What does it feel like, or what did it feel like when you were fishing to lose a thousand dollar fish? By the time I was halibut fishing, and that's when you get into the fish that can, can be that valuable. I had learned my lesson about losing fish and it, of course it's frustrating, but it's one of those things that you can't let it get under your skin because it, it, it just puts a different mood on the day.
And I learned a long time ago that catching fish, there's a lot to it, including, I don't know what you would call it, a little bit of magic or voodoo or whatever. But if you're in a bad mood, it doesn't help. It doesn't help. You primarily did gill netting and longlining? Primarily gill netting. And the longlining came a couple years after I started my gill netting, and that wasn't as long of a season for me. So yes, primarily gill netting. So when you bought your boat or...
You bought the same boat that you could then retrofit and you could use both. You just get the, so how did the, how did that, how did you acquire the first boat? Cause your family grew up fishing. So you'd been fishing for a long time. Well, so my family grew up sport fishing. I never really commercial fished. I did. I was, I always wanted to, and I was, I did get out on a commercial boat when I was 18 and that was not the best experience, but it didn't kill my, my desire to commercial fish.
So that I grew up on the water. I will, I'll, I'll, let's just say that. And with, I was always the, the fishermen of the family, but so commercial fishing came later when I wanted to mix it with my other profession of teaching. So I was much, it was, I was in my late thirties by that time. So when you're 18 in that boat that you were at, was that a Sane boat or Gildner? It was actually a long liner. We were fishing black cod in Clarence straight. So I got on with some goofballs, a small boat.
And it seems like the way, like when you, now it's like huge multimillion dollar boats, it looks like, and everything is pretty cherry. But back in the day when there was fish to be caught, it was just whatever you could do to get out there and set your hooks and go do it. Yeah. Well, I'm, I would, you'd be being kind to say that these guys were, these guys were pirates and, and I was lucky to get out of there with, uh, in one piece.
And of course I didn't make a single dollar, but, but, but that's okay too. I wasn't really in it for the money. I, I wanted the experience. So I had a buddy that was trying to pay off aviation school. So he was a year younger than me. And this was when I was, I don't know, maybe two or three years into my teaching career. And he came back and he was going to commercial fish and I'd never commercial fish growing up.
We went down to Colorado to visit relatives during the summer for these part of it. But, and so some of my friends didn't either. So, you know, new people that did over there on Prince of Wales, of course. So he comes up, he thinks, all right, well, commercial fishing, I'm going to make a ton of money. And he gets on this boat with a couple other people I know, and, it was just disaster. It was one of those boats from the 1920s, 1930s, and everything that could go wrong went wrong.
And they ended up not making any money. I think he ended up going back with like $500. It was just, it was like barely enough to cover the tickets. And he was anticipating, you know, 10, 15, $20,000, you know, one of those big summers, but hardly anything. And then a year later that boat sank. It was just. Yeah. I think the boat I was just telling you about also sank. And, you know, fishing, I would say that there's a spectrum of success in commercial fishing.
And when you ask somebody, is there a lot of money in commercial fishing? The answer is yes. Like you just said, it's going to depend on a lot of factors. What boat you're on, the person in charge of the boat, where you're fishing, if it's a good season. There's so many factors. But it really kind of boils down, especially with gill netting, because I was a one-man boat. And most boats where I fished were one-man boats. And so it really is up to you to what you want to get out of it.
And a lot of guys were extremely competitive. And I got sucked into that too. And that means you're going to be fishing. I mean, we had our nets in the water at before three in the morning. So you want to be setting the net in the dark. And also you want to be the first one on the good spot. So having the net in the water by three means getting up at 2.15. So it takes a lot of motivation to do that. And then there's guys that would come kind of idling out at six in the morning.
And we all kind of teased them about having bankers hours, but, but I don't know, maybe those guys were the smart guys. Cause I kind of felt like I got burned out on it. That didn't mean that it was time to quit either. It was just, it was stressful for me. But anyway. Well, I think if you, if you love fishing, you have your own boat and you go out and you fish. If you want to make money, you go into commercial because there's going to be a lot more to it. It's going to be a lot more stressful.
There's going to be a lot more investment in it. So there has to be a money aspect because you can't go into debt to get the boat and buy the permit and then think, oh, I'm just going to, you know, we'll see what happens. Like you have, there has to be a money element. Other than what, if the math doesn't work out, then it's, it's not going to work out. Well, yeah, at least for the young guys getting in for sure. They, they have it in their head, how much they need to make.
And then of course you're subject to all of the question marks of commercial fishing.
You can be in the right place at the right time and you can have a perfect boat and all the gear but it but there's the ins there's the intrinsic factor that that just because you're at the right place at the right time doesn't mean you're doing the right thing and so there's like i said there's there's that little factor of the magic part that that makes the difference between the guy that comes in with half a boat full
and the guy that comes in with the boat full who they were fishing right next to each other all day so so when you started since you already started teaching you're into that career teaching and this happens to a lot for happens to a lot of teachers up here in alaska is that you have those summer months and there's a lot of free time and some people just love the recreation part but other people see it as an opportunity to go into business whether it be charter fishing or
commercial fishing so did you kind of know a lot of the stuff going into it and you decided to make the plunge commercial fishing anyway i knew enough to.
Fake my way into commercial fishing in order to be a commercial fisherman you have to wear a lot of hats so forget about fishing for a minute you have to be a navigator you have to be a and this is before like all the sophisticated gps type stuff you have now like the technology now is way better than it is that's true and and when i first got in i didn't have a gps i think they They were just coming onto the market. I had an old school radar and what we called a flasher that showed the depth.
That was about it. And of course now with GPS and sonar and all that, well, when I say sonar, I mean like fish finder and all that, like you said, it's much more sophisticated, but it still doesn't make it necessarily easy. But there's a lot of things that a commercial fisherman needs to know. If you have to hire somebody to come in and fix something that's broken, there goes your profit. So you better be able to know how to be an electrician, a carpenter, a plumber.
You need to know about ropes and lines, and you need to know about tides and weather, and you need to be able to fix things on the fly. And all of that before you even talk about knowing how to fish.
So because things are going to break that's not a matter of maybe it's it's they're going to break and you're going to need to fix it because missing a day is that's catastrophic even missing half a day so so those first couple years there had been enough positive days more than negative days so was there any moments that you kind of wavered on whether or not you're going to stick with this or, I remember actually being very excited.
There was an old, old timer, native guy that fished up here, and I was introduced to him, and he helped me kind of put my first net together. He was in his 70s. His name was Al Feller, and when it came time to go, I asked him if he would come with me for a week and just kind of help me get started. Oh, he wanted to, but he didn't think his wife would go for it. Well, a few days later, he called and said that he had gotten permission.
Nice. And he ended up coming with me. And the first day... I remember, I don't remember what the prices were, but I think we hit a hundred dogs. And that means we got 100 chum salmon that day. They're about nine, 10 pounds. And I remember kind of crunching the numbers thinking I've made like $500 today. And I, I thought if I could do this, if I can make $500 a day, I, I, that, that was my dream come true. So what year was this? That would be 99. Okay. 1999.
So I was always grateful for the money I got. And of course it got better from there, but anyway, I, yes, I like any job that there are things that would frustrate me and set me back, but loneliness and the grind of it all was probably the hardest thing for me to hang in there for. It seems like the, the trollers are the ones who kind of have, and the gill netters, They're just kind of out there because you have the smaller crews. And so there's a lot more of that solitude.
And some people, they come back and they're like really well read or they're artists or there's something, they have all that time alone. And there's just this, in order to wind themselves down, there's some sort of creative or artistic or intellectual something to get their brain off it. And they just love the sea for that. And the same fishery seems like a lot more kind of chaotic. You've got five, six people on there. And so there's a different way that it
seems like gill netters talk about fishing. Well, you know, for me. It was kind of the opposite of that i thought that i was going to have time on my hands, when so they call it drift fishing drift gill net and i just imagined drifting with not a care in the world being bored and it was not that at all like i said there's a spectrum of of effort that can go into the fishery. And I wanted to, like, like a young kid who, who is, you know, needs the money to pay the bills.
I, that was kind of me. And I learned right away that you can't take your eyes off. My brain was never on anything but fishing.
In fact, everything just like you, I would teach in the, in the school year and everything in my brain about teaching was displaced 100 i had to relearn it every year because in order to do well at fishing it was just constantly paying attention paying attention to the net the weather the tide the guy next to me the guy next to him looking with binoculars way down the line and and seeing if everybody if anyone was in trouble or if one guy's picking so there's a there's a lot of.
Timing involved in doing well.
And if you're just kind of daydreaming, you're going to be that guy who misses out on the, on the point what i mean is you want to be on the point that's where the fish are coming around and if you time everything right if you know when that guy picked and when that guy picked and when if you start picking now he hasn't been in the water as long as he's going to be able to pick the fish out of his net faster and get to the point so there's a lot it's kind of like playing
a game of chess almost and if you if you take a little snooze and you're not paying attention to what's going on around you, it, it really made a difference at the end of the day. Yeah. You were just on the gas the entire time because you had the teaching profession too. And there were times I know when you're up at the high school, cause you were elementary school for most of your career, right?
Yeah, that's right. There were times when I'd come into school and ask how the weekend was, you know, I'd just gone out hiking or hanging out or whatever. And you, there had been an open, so you're out halibut fishing. You didn't have any real time to do anything else. It was just gas. No, no. In fact, I, a typical halibut week, we'd try to, you know, maybe spring or late spring. We, I, I, gill netting started on father's day, which is the third Sunday of June.
And I, it would typically start fizzling out around the first of October. But of course I couldn't fish that long. I had to come back to the teaching about the first of somewhere around the first of September, but I didn't, I couldn't do any halibut fishing during that time because it interfered with the halibut. I can fish anytime. It's not like there's a season that opens up and you can fish until the season's closed. Halibut fishing is kind of like, they call it cues, IFQs, which is units of.
Of pounds. Best way to describe it would be halibut stock that goes up and down. And so they call it units that, that can be equated to pounds. It changes every year. So the nice thing about halibut fishing is you can go when it's convenient or when the price is higher or whatever.
But for me, it was because my summers were gill net, it was weekends and maybe, well, not really maybe spring break but that was pretty early there wasn't much to catch during in March so so a typical halibut week would be taking the boat to the plant the fish plant I fished for Phillips so I would go to Phillips they would load me up with ice and I would get my bait and which was typically somewhere around 500 pounds of humpies we call them humpies they're pink salmon.
And that was really the best bait to use. Okay, so I've got 500 pounds of humpies on board. That would be, of course, after work, after teaching all day. You run to the plant before they close, get the ice, get the bait, come back to my slip. By that time, you really need to go home and have dinner and call it a day. So the next day would be typically a Wednesday or Thursday. Probably a Wednesday, after work, I'd go to the boat and start baiting hooks.
And that was just chopping up salmon down to about a cube of butter-sized chunk of bait. And putting a chunk on each one of my hooks with leader, like we call them ganyons, but like a cord that went to a snap, and they go into a great big bucket.
So I might be able to bait up a couple of tubs, each tub maybe 250 hooks, I guess, and then they would go down on ice and then on thursday after work i would go do a couple more tubs because the set took four tubs so that would be thursday go down after work bait up 200 or 500 more hooks friday after work was shooting out if trying to get across to where we would make set so you're not going to set your a thousand hooks right in front of town so it was a two or three hour run.
By the time we got there, it was usually dark and my wife ended up fishing with me. So we would get out there in the dark and we'd start setting hooks and setting the hooks took about an hour and a half, I guess, to set a thousand hooks. And then we would run for our anchorage. So Saturday morning, early, get up, go out, start picking the gear. And so that would take about three and a half hours or so to pick that much gear. Then...
It would be heading to another anchorage, cleaning fish, rebaiting hooks, getting that set down before dark or in the dark. And then the same thing happens on Sunday. You get up early, pick the gear, run to town, get the boat tied up, go rest up for teaching Monday morning. After work Monday morning, it was take the boat to Phillips to sell the fish.
So offload all the halibut run back to my slip at the marina wash everything this is tuesday afternoon scrub the boat all down and i maybe get to phillips to get ice and bait that same day but probably not probably wednesday so you can see how it just yeah no end there was no And somehow you showed up to school with a good attitude and taught freshman health. That's miraculous. That's right. You get used to it. So when you're fishing for halibut there, what was a good price?
And then what would be a good day? Because obviously you're not getting a thousand halibut. And then there's a bycatch element there too. I usually was happy if I got a dollar a hook. I'm sorry, not a dollar a hook, a pound a hook. So if I set, let's say, 950 hooks, if I had a thousand pounds for that set, it wasn't great, but it, you know, that was what we sort of targeted a pound a hook. You know, if you go offshore, you know, for weekend warriors, that was pretty decent.
And we ranged in price, ex-vessel price, what I mean, what I can get for a dressed halibut at the plant, oh, somewhere between $4 and I got as much as $7 at times. So somewhere in that neighborhood-ish. Of course, like gill netting and any other fishery, halibut.
In a perfect world you could predict what you were going to catch but it was never like that that's the big thing about fishing i mean i hear since i got out of fishing and while when i was fishing we would have a good year and that would you know you'd put that in your feather in your cap and then it'd be followed by two or three not good years and so it was it's not a stable industry.
There's highs and lows and i was one of the lucky people who had another career and that helped a lot but what's the difference between your your long line for halibut and then your gill netting for salmon so what was the the setup for that and how did that program differ from your halibut well so gill netting was way more competitive and there are certain areas that you could go to and certain openings. I mean, it's like, it's like, you know, the gun goes off.
So fishing started at noon on Sunday. That's, that's when the opening starts, at least in the district I was in area one. And I think it's pretty much the same throughout Southeast Alaska.
The length of the opening may change. We typically had four days, so we would fish noon sunday until noon on thursday so it's i don't want to say it was combat fishing but you know places like bristol bay that is almost like combat fishing that's wild yeah it's crazy and i hated that some people love it they there's areas that are more congested than others and you got Guys up close and, you know, oh, let's say if another boat was a quarter mile from you, that would be acceptable.
That might sound like a long ways, but it's not. Our nets are about a quarter mile long, so that's a little bit more than what we call a net length. Yeah. If people, the spacing of boats, we call it corking. If somebody gets too close, you're getting corked. Yeah. Okay. So there's a lot of politics like that involved. But so you asked what the difference was. So gill netting was fast and furious. Go, go, go. Make as much as you can. Try to get a few hours of sleep in.
And then, like I said, if you want to be competitive, you want to be on the spot, you better be one of the first boats out or the first boat out. And my philosophy, like if a guy beat me out, usually it was only by five or 10 minutes, I'd be right behind him going out. And the etiquette is he beat you. He didn't beat you to the spot. He beat you to the procession that goes out to the spot. And I never passed.
It's kind of like getting in the fast lane and going around somebody who got up earlier than you. I always kind of thought, yeah, you know, no, he, he, he's, he's first in line. Not everybody followed that etiquette. We called it our gentleman's fishery down there. So, but I kind of figured, okay, so he beat me by five minutes. I'll just get up 10 minutes earlier tomorrow.
That leads to leapfrogging with guys until finally you weed out the guys that aren't willing to get up at two in the morning, or sometimes even earlier than that and so i guess i couldn't help it my competitive nature got me out there and i was in with the the a group i guess and you know it so but but how far were you from the fishing grounds like that night before when you're talking about getting to the spot like are you like right around the corner anchored up in a bay and
then you just okay most guys i was one of the fortunate of people who had, I had a float dock and other boats tied there, but I was in control of the dock, which made it very nice.
Most guys don't have that. They have an anchorage, but yes, it's, it's, oh, typically 20 minutes of, from the time you either untie or pull your anchor of motoring out in the dark at, you know, half speed or even an idle, just kind of chugging out, having your coffee, getting your, you know, you can imagine you're, you're, you're a little bit fuzzy after only four hours a night for a week and, but you gotta be, you can't make mistakes. And so.
Time is necessary. So about 20 minutes to get out and, you know, kind of figure out which way the tide is going and what the wind is doing and figure out how you're going to make your set. So, cause a lot of that fishing areas, it's not the best of water. It's usually like off points and areas that you couldn't just like hang out all night, you know, wasting all your fuel. You'd have to get a little bit of sleep, save some fuel and then get there early. Exactly.
That's how it was. You couldn't, you can't anchor out. I mean, And where the fish are is where the coast is exposed to open ocean. So that's where the bulk of the fish are going to be. Like when I was a kid, I always thought, when I fished with my family, we should go up this little nook and cranny and there will be fish up in these little obscure places. And it's not really like that. Yeah, that's the fishery over on Prince of Wales when you go out to the outside
and you can be in this nice little area. And so if there are some Kings that happen to come in, you can fish the inside waters, usually catch a lot fewer, takes a lot more time. Yeah. But once you get to the outside and that expose, like you were just rolling and sometimes it's nice and beautiful bluebird sky, but that picks up the wind. And so you just rolling and rolling and you just have to, that's for sports fishing. So you're in a much smaller boat, but yeah, you just got to get to
where the fish are and the fish are and there's more bait stacks up and everything. Yeah.
So what about whales? their whales can be a factor i was just thinking about that when sea lions and whales not so much whales at least for for sport fishing but sea lions taking fish and the sea lions are smart so they kind of figure out this is where all the sport fishing people are going to be and so once they hook a king salmon it's going to be you know incapacitated to a degree so it can just take off with the fish whereas you
don't really have that with killer whales but the killer whales do kind to move through and disperse some fish so what impacted whales have on on you not much as far as scaring the fish away sometimes when some killer whales would come through it was usually just that they were coming through and killer whales will scare fish away but humpbacks that was the majority of the whales that came through were were the biggest threat there was that.
They might put a big hole in your net, which happened to me several times. And when a whale, 50 ton whale goes through your net, it makes a hole. Yeah. So when I said earlier that losing a half day is kind of catastrophic, that was usually a half day. It felt like it happened all the time. It didn't even happen, say, once a season. But over my 20 years of gill netting, I probably had, well, I know how many incidents I had. I had seven whale incidents, none of which hurt the whale.
There were times when there was some mild entanglement that they're a powerful animal. They will, they can get themselves freed, but not without some damage. And so there was some damage to the net damage to the damage to the net. Although I will say one time a neighboring boat, I saw, I saw two boats coming and finally realized one was towing the other and got on the radio, which we almost never did, but they were friends.
And I said, is there anything I can do? No, just a little bit of, so you don't want to mention what's actually happening on the radio. But I found out later that a whale had been breaching its way down the coast. So in other words, like jumping completely out of the water, splash, maybe two minutes later, here he comes again, splash. And he would just worked his way down. I saw him doing it and he almost landed on my net and then kept working down till I couldn't even see him anymore.
Are still jumping out of the water about every two minutes. Well, one of those jumps had... He came up under this guy's boat and destroyed his rudder and bent his prop and he was out of commission. He had to be towed back to town. But anyway, so that, that would be an extreme situation. Nothing like that ever happened to me. Just holes in my net. And so that was usually about a six hour fix. Well, those nets are, are very small when you look at the, uh, or like fragile. They're fragile.
Yeah. When you look at the nets and there's always a couple of pictures that circulate, it seems like every summer, every couple of summers, maybe of the trawlers, the bottom draggers that end up with a killer whale. And those nets are way more substantial. They're massive nets. So it can hold a whale, whereas the fishing nets up top are a lot more delicate. How deep does a gill net run? Well, like you were just, so there's different sizes of mesh.
Depends on the species that you're targeting. Here in Southeast Alaska, we have five species. We've got the smallest of which are the humpies and the humpies, the, the, the pink salmon are the lowest there. It would be the lowest on the pay scale. However, when they move through, they move through in massive schools. So for saners, that's kind of what their bread and butter fish is for gill netters.
It was chums. So anyway, we chums and there's a, there's a native name for each fish and then the standard name, I guess you would say. So there's starting with the humpies, there's humpies slash pink salmon, and then you've got sockeye slash red salmon. You've got chums slash dog salmon. You've got silvers slash coho salmon, and then you've got your king slash chinook. We almost got no kings, and if we did, it was in the first couple of weeks of the season.
There would be a few kings that we would get. Most of us, the largest net mesh that we would use, I won't say exactly what they are, but they would be actually small for a king salmon. We wouldn't necessarily target king salmon unless we were in a king salmon area. So king salmon weren't really a factor. They were sort of a little cherry on top of that because you'd get the good money for them, but there's just not enough around to make it worth targeting them.
Chum salmon, the dogs, we call them the dogs. That was our 90% of what, 80, 90% of what a gill netter is targeting. Back when I first started, sockeye were a high paying fish, but, and there was enough of them around to put a net on that would, that would target a sockeye size. Anyway, back to your question, depending on the mesh size. So if the mesh was bigger, legally we could fish 60 meshes deep.
So depending on the mesh size, if we fished say a six inch web, six inch mesh, we were somewhere around 24 feet deep.
And then if we fished a smaller mesh or a larger mesh we would be typically somewhere between say 21 feet and 25 feet would be a typical depth so that's pretty shallow really yeah pretty shallow and saners are much deeper than that they you know they their big sane goes much deeper but i came to find it was interesting i came to find that most of my fish and you can tell by the wear on the net were in the top half of that 22 feet or whatever it was almost all the damage to the net was up what
closer to what we called the cork line so yeah when we're trolling we were for cohos it's usually not very deep kings were mooching we go all the way down to the bottom and then and then come back up and that's why a lot more kings get caught in the trawlers for bycatch because they're on the bottom and they're just it's just horrible yeah is there a difference in price for type of fish because if.
A saner there might be a little bit more damage to the fish or if there's a gill net it might not that the fish scales might be disrupted so it doesn't look as good so would a troller maybe get a better price because the fish looks nicer than a yes for sure the troller so anytime that a fish is in a net and then from there into what we call a brailler bag they're kind of smashed together and it's not as quality of a fish as a troll caught fish that gets
dressed immediately So the guts are taken out and they're belly iced and they're treated more individually. And they're also not, sometimes it's the way that the fish are offloaded. So on a saner, there's so much volume that they use these giant, basically a giant vacuum. And they, maybe the, the vacuum hose that goes down into the fish hold might be about say 16 inches. So it just sucks the fish up and they go through this whole.
You know, system before they end up getting from point A to point B. And it doesn't, I mean, you know, the fish is going to bend around and it's not like a fisherman placing it into a tote and hoisting it up onto the, the fish buyers dock in a nice tote of ice. It's, so that's kind of the difference. And yes, there's a, the, the trollers will get a premium. They call it a premium, a premium for that. And then there's other things like I never had what we called RSW on my boat. I was an ice boat.
RSW is refrigerated saltwater. So these boats have more equipment on board to keep the fish hold very cold and salt water. So they don't require ice, which is less of an expense on the plant. And because of that, the plants would usually give the RSW boats, the refrigerated boats, a premium. Might be a nickel a pound or maybe even as much as a dime, which is a lot when
you're, when, when you have, you know, a 5,000 pound day or maybe more than that. So. But then you have the, you either go troll fish and you get a better price or you go sane and then you have so many more fish. So it's not like one is way better than the other, just kind of individual choice. Right. So what do you miss about it? There has to be maybe something. Yeah, there is. I, I miss the adventure of fishing. That's probably the thing I miss the most.
And when I say that, it's not always a good adventure, but something happened every day. I'm not sure something happened for everyone every day, but for me, something always happened. Even on a day when the fishing was horrible, it seemed like no matter what, even on the worst day, I'd get a little pop of fish somewhere. And that isn't really what I'm talking about, about the adventure. When I say something happened, it could be a lot of things.
It could be another fisherman getting mad at you and coming over and screaming at you.
That would be an adventure. you know and believe me there were i had plenty of those days or sometimes i was that guy you know like hey what are you doing so close where are you corking me for get you know yeah you're right on top of me so that would be an adventure well just the weather too southeast like you're not dealing with just beautiful flat calm like you're picking in brutal weather it's rolling it's pitching it's raining yeah but you're
also sweating so you got rain gear on but you're all it's just gotta be horrible you know it got if it gets too bad i was so that's another one of those factors how much of that are you willing to put up with because most guys would if it got to let's say 20 knots and and you're pitching around pretty good you're hanging on on deck and you're, you start to realize, you know, anything could happen. And more importantly. Gear could break, equipment can break.
And is it really worth getting a few more fish if I get, you know, a backlash on my reel and tear a big hole in my net, that sort of thing. So a lot of guys, including myself, when it got too rough, there came a point where it just didn't make sense to keep fishing. There was this one guy, I don't want to get into too many stories, but I was pretty stubborn about going in. I wanted to be like the last guy. And there was a guy down the beach that we called him the prospector.
He was just a crotchety old guy that nobody liked. And including me, we didn't really get along until later in my career. And I understood him and respected him. I don't know if I'd say we ever got along, but he was stubborn. He would, he would fish no matter what. And I felt like I was ready finally to go in. It would just always end up being me and him, me and him out front. And, and I'd look down and there he'd be. And I'd think, I want to go in, but I feel like I have to be out here.
If something happened to him, even though he was a jerk. Yeah. Brutal. Yeah. So usually it was the two of us out there kind of waiting for one guy to tuck tail and go, but yeah.
Did you ever have to respond to anything? any calls or emergencies constantly i mean little stuff so you can kind of see when something is going sideways with another guy we rarely talked on the radio so it was almost always you know you see something happening so let's say somebody's because you catch more fish when you're close to the beach so it was all about being literally right on the rocks with your net seeing you know just tempting fate constantly and that
could go sideways and the tide could change and the tide could be brutal i mean it just you just wouldn't believe sometimes we'd get on the outer end of our net and start towing and trying to keep the net off the beach and you'd be full wide open trying to trying to get that net off the beach it's amazing what the power of the tide but there were times when i'd get a hold of another guy's net and help him get off the beach or.
Sometimes what we call getting web in the wheel a guy will you know you're fishing around your net all the time and it happens you get you get it you get sucked up into your prop and then you're pretty much out of commission and so usually that involves some kind of towing and assistance, there was that would be one of those adventures I was talking about it wasn't a daily occurrence but, there were opportunities to help others a lot.
And we did do that a lot, even if it was somebody that had just corked you, you know? Yeah. There's that basic level of understanding that as much as you might dislike certain people, at some point the code kicks in and you got to kind of help people out. Yeah. One of my favorite times of the day was when the tender showed up on the horizon. When I say the tender, that's the boat that we would offload to pretty much every day. I mean, the plant wants the fish as fresh as possible.
So the tender would make the rounds and basically typically go back to town after two or maybe three days, but they want your fish every day. So they would make the rounds and down where I fished, the tender came about seven usually.
And most guys are are either already quit by then or really ready to stop fishing because you've been you've been at it since three in the morning and you're tired and you haven't really talked to a human face all day and so that was another reason that seeing the tender was that was your one chance for human interaction i guess because you don't talk on the radio that's that's a no-no So anyway, you'd see the tender coming and that meant the end of the day is near.
And then it was kind of a thing where, all right, so I could, if you see the tender coming, you could pick your net, which takes about half hour, 45 minutes, depending on how much fish you have. But there's gonna be other guys waiting for the tender. So I always kind of thought, I don't wanna be waiting around. To unload my fish. I might as well be waiting around out here fishing, making more money. So I was usually one of the last guys to unload.
It just made more sense to me rather than kind of waiting my turn, you know, positioning myself. It was sort of, you didn't cut in front of another guy, but there's a line of boats waiting to unload, especially at the end of the day like that. So that, but that was one of my favorite times was unloading.
Cause it meant I got to see how much money I made I got to talk to my tender and they were always nice people and then most of the time they had a little treat for you a muffin or whatever you know and you know you'd ask him well how are things up the line you know and they can't really say oh it was great fishing up the line they can't say that because the guys up the line are going to say why are you don't be telling up people exactly
how they did yeah yeah but anyway you know if something had happened or oh such and And so got mad at this other guy. And there was the gossip of the day, I guess. So when you sold your boat, was it good riddance? Or was there a little bit of, man, I'm going to miss that smell of diesel? I was sad to sell the boat. I actually didn't want to sell it. My wife and I wanted to just enjoy boating. And not that I didn't enjoy commercial fishing. but I didn't really need to
anymore. And I wanted to be with her more. I missed her gill netting. She didn't, she couldn't break away from work. She had a job too. And so it was the loneliness was hard. And so I. We would look forward to beachcombing or setting a crab pod or just recreational boating. And so part of me wanted to just keep the commercial boat and use it for that. And that didn't make sense because it was worth much more as a commercial boat and it wasn't comfortable like a pleasure boat. So yes, we sold it.
And thankfully I sold it to a guy here in town. I see the boat all the time. It's tied up right behind me. Sometimes I take stuff over. Like I, I had a extra Ray core filter that I didn't need anymore. And I thought, you know what, I'm going to give it to that. My old boat, I needed a second filter. So I, you know, that sort of thing.
And, and, and he's, I know that he, he's a young guy and I really liked, you know, helping helping the younger guys i gave the float that i had the dock i had i gave that to a young guy and those guys actually fish together now and anyway i i was happy to help some of the younger guys coming in and this was sort of a story like that i sort of helped him get his get the boat and i knew it was a good boat and i can he's doing great and so that's that took the sting off
of and i've got a i've got a boat that we love now it's similar in size yeah you've taken me out duck hunting on both of them the first one definitely had a commercial industrial sort of feel to it really rugged the this new one is luxury what's the how long was the previous one and what are the size difference okay so the my first boat the royal mint i bought in canada and brought it here to the united states and fished it for the whatever 20 21 years it was 37.
Seven, I'm trying to think here, was about 13 and a half feet wide. A good, spacious platform to work on. I had a nice big bed. I had a little galley. It was a nice, comfortable boat compared to a lot of the other boats that I was aboard. The new boat is slightly longer. I think the new boat's 40 feet and maybe another, about the same width.
But like you said it's not set up commercially the half the boat on the commercial boat is set up is dedicated just to fish hold and deck space and deck equipment this boat doesn't have any of that so there's much more room inside and it's more comfortable it's a it's nice and warm and yeah have you taken all the way up to glacier bay or you've got at least a like sitka and around there, right? Yeah. We went from Ketchikan to Skagway.
That was the longest trip. Last year, we went to Sitka and back. We will be going this summer to the Glacier Bay area. You need a permit to go into Glacier Bay. Sometimes it's just better to just charter a flight to. Fly over the glaciers and see all of that, but it's beautiful country. And I've been, my wife has seen a lot of Southeast Alaska. She grew up in commercial fishing families, but I'm taking her places that she's never seen before that I experienced when I was a kid.
So I kind of had that in my blood and always wanted to get back to it. So. Nice. Go up to Huna, go on the zip line. Go to Huna, go on the zip line. Have you been on the zip line? I did not go on the zip line. Man, that looks terrifying. It's the the longest zipline in i think in the world is it world yeah i wasn't sure if it was i know it's the united states i don't know if it's like north america and world it seemed like.
Probably some crazy country but and there's this huge gondola that goes up and to the top of the mountain and then you zipline down and we tried to get there in time but we missed it it would they were closed for the day and then we were moving on so we were basically in different place every, every, every night. So keep the boat moving. Yeah. Really jealous of, I'm not at all jealous of those Mondays when I would come in from those weekends and see that you'd been out there and your shoulders
out of socket from, uh, from fishing. But now seeing those pictures of your, of your summer adventures, that's pretty sweet. Maybe it's awesome, but hard earned. You've definitely deserved it. So, but, uh, thanks for being on anything else to add or anything you want to share uh you know just i i i do miss commercial fishing i but like for me it's it's the adventure continues so and i have lots of friends that still commercial fish and.
It's i wish it was a more stable industry but that's the question marks is part of the this part of the game you know so yeah it's it's 20 years of my life that i wouldn't trade for anything but I'm having a good time now on the next chapter. So awesome. Well, thanks a lot, man. Appreciate it. Yeah. Thank you, Jeff.