Departure and first day of fishing

May 31 (Saturday - Dutch Harbor) and Sunday, June 1 (fishing day 1) –

I’m not sure if this is uniquely Alaskan, but if you ‘ring the bell’ in a bar you’ve just bought everyone in the bar a round of drinks.  This is the first time I’ve seen a sign warning that however.

In town, I saw a bag of Doritos for $8.50 at one grocery/supply store.  At the Safeway, they were ~$6.50.  That’s more than Juneau, but not a lot more (for the regular, not-on-sale price).  Other food and product goods were similarly high, though surprisingly, good food could be found at restaurants the same price ranges as in Juneau, or even cheaper in some cases.  

 

Abandoned building near the airport.

We moved onto the boat Saturday, mid-morning.  The first few days of getting used to ‘fishing boat smell’ are tough.  The smell makes me gag.  And it’s pretty much every boat – even ones that are pretty clean (like this one).  I think I am more sensitive to boat smells than the rough seas.  The smell of yummy food cooking in the galley mixed with the smell of the business end of the boat is worse than fishy smell alone. 

Leaving dutch harbor, looking back towards port

 Departure – delayed!  Didn’t leave dock until ~8:30 pm instead of ~noon on Saturday.  It’s a 14 hour steam to first site, so we didn’t get on station and start setting gear until 2 pm instead of 6 am.  That means we didn’t finish up until 8 pm and ‘dinner’ was at 9 pm.  The departure was late because a critical plate sealing the reduction shaft was broken.  After some creative and effective welding (and a lot of time cooling), the fix seemed good.

Leaving Dutch Harbor, looking forward towards the Bering Sea

Fishing day 1:

Birds getting a free ride

We only tagged one sablefish all day  We only caught ~5 all day.  We did catch a lot of skates and Pacific cod though.  There were 10-20 killer whales eating fish off the line…sometimes they were within 8 feet of the boat.  

Some of the whales were very young.  The killer whales pick the fish off the longline…sometimes you only get a pair of lips left on the hook.  We think the younger ones were ‘taste-testing’ several different species because we’d get giant grenadier bitten in half coming up.  Generally the whales have expensive taste, they like sablefish and turbot and halibut and leave the rest alone.  We didn’t catch many sablefish, but we did have a lot of bait-stripped, straightened hooks, so that is evidence that the whale had picked the fish off.

One of volcanoes making up the Aleutian Islands.

It’s incredibly scenic out here.  The weather has been good…so good you forget you’re on a boat.  Some sun this afternoon, and some nice views of the volcanoes.

Pink beak and yellow head is the short-tailed albatross, the other big bird with the yellowish beak and white head is a laysan albatross.  The small brown birds are northern fulmar.

We also saw a short-tailed albatross today.  They are endangered and this is the first one I’ve ever seen and a lot of birders come to the Aleutians to see them.  The laysan and black-footed albatross are much more common and we saw dozens of those (today and throughout the trip).