Field Trip

I got to go crabbing! It was so cool! We left here at 5 AM Tuesday, anchored Tuesday night at the mouth of Tenakee Inlet, and got back to town late Wednesday afternoon. I wasn’t allowed to help with anything because I don’t have a crew license, so I got to stand around taking photos and asking questions.

I left out the grosser images, but I’ll warn you about the fishheads…

Likely, everyone most people kind of know how this crabbing thing works, but I was pretty wide-eyed about it, so step by step:

The pots are sitting on the bottom, attached to buoys by lines. Each fisherman uses a particular color or type of buoy so they’re easy to recognize. The buoys also have numbers on them with the boat’s registration so the coast guard can identify them. They grab the line with a long hook and feed it through a hydraulic pulley system, which brings up the crab pot.

Then they sort through what’s in it.

Females go back, and so do males under the legal size limit. You can see the difference: In this photo, the smaller one is the male. The ones that are large enough will be at least 3 or 4 years old, so they’ve been able to reproduce. (With fish, they call the ones they can’t keep “shakers.” I’m not going to write down what they call the crabs they can’t keep, but if you can think of a way to refer to small things and a way to refer to females that rhyme with each other, you’ll have it.)

The keepers go in the hold. They’ll pack these up in ice gel and deliver them in Juneau—they’re on their way there now—where they get shipped to Seattle (I think?), put back in tanks, and distributed throughout the country.

They pick up lots of starfish (sunstars?) in the pots, too, which will eventually end up in compost later for the vegetable garden.

Then, they rebait the pot with a delicious mixture of salmon heads and tails, ground up herring and squid, sometimes an odd fish that has entered the pot on its own volition, and empty beer cans, which supposedly help set the thing.

And back in the water the pot goes.

We stopped to check their shrimp pots, too—personal, not commercial—and ended up with quite a haul.

So, they pull up lots of starfish and bottom-feeding fish like flounder, but sometimes they pull up some other things too. While I was with them, we saw an eel and a sea cucumber, but the most impressive was this guy:

He’s untangling it here to put it in a tub to give to the woman who runs the café in town. I’ve heard stories of otters getting stuck in the pots, too, but apparently that happens really rarely.

Here’s a video of the pot coming up and getting emptied and reset, if you haven’t had enough yet:

The whole trip was quite relaxed, actually, which I think is partly because the season is nearing an end so the catch is thinning out. From what I can gather, the pace of fishing has a lot to do with state regulations, which change often. I won’t get into too many details about Alaska’s fish and game regulations, but I’m finding them pretty fascinating. Because feedback, both from the fish populations and from the fishermen, is so quick, the policies can be really responsive to their effects. 

And, sometimes the results are pretty crazy. Halibut season, for instance, kept getting shorter and shorter until eventually the state cut commercial it to one 24-hour period. With no catch limit, it was a one-day halibut free for all. Here's a New York Times article about the madness. Between bad weather conditions, fatigue, and the rush, it would get pretty dangerous.

Speaking of intense fishing situations, I’ve been meaning to mention the big celebrity around town. The Time Bandit, one of the boats on the Deadliest Catch, has been in Tenakee since I got here. It’s off season for them, so they’re acting as a tender boat. One of the guys that took me crabbing spent a summer crabbing on one of the boats on the show (before the show started). For those of you who don’t know, it’s a reality show that follows a few fishing boats up in the Bering Sea, where between rough waters, heavy gear, and long fishing days, conditions can get pretty hairy. It’s next on my to-watch list now.