Daily Archives: July 7, 2021

Gig Harbor’s iconic F/V Shenandoah is listed on the Washington State Historic Register

Gig Harbor’s historic fishing vessel Shenandoah has won a berth on the Washington State Historic Register. In a vote taken last Tuesday, June 27, the state Department of Archaeology and Historical Preservation agreed to accept the 97-year-old purse seiner as an “historical object” worthy of preservation. “With this listing it, becomes eligible for more potential grant funding.” The 64-foot Shenandoah was build in 1924 at Gig Harbor’s Skansie Shipyard, during what historians now call the “golden age” of purse seiner construction. (It was named for a popular airship, not the river.) The Purse Seiner Shenandoah is a classic example of a wood-hulled Puget Sound purse seiner from the early to mid-twentieth century. >click to read< 22:02

Chief worried that harassment by ‘fish cops’ of First Nations could lead to violence

Chief Allan Adam, grand chief of Justice for Treaty 8 nations, says he’s tired of his people being “portrayed as criminals” for hunting and fishing, as is their right to do, without provincial licenses. He also says he’s tired of “fish cops (that) are more racist than the RCMP.” Last month, the Sovereign Nations of Treaty No. 8 launched a campaign introducing incident report forms in an effort to capture every time-past and current-that members have been “harassed, racially profiled, or discriminated against,  while expressing (their) inherent harvesting rights” by the RCMP, Fish and Wildlife officers, Conservation officers, sheriffs, government employees and others. >click to read< 19:46

Scottish fisherman – “cheaper and quicker” to export to Asia than France because of Brexit rules.

Jamie McMillan hit out at the “waste” caused by UK’s withdrawal from the single market, which means three hours of paperwork every morning to get his shellfish to the EU. Since Brexit, a single delivery by McMillan can need more than 80 pages of forms,,, McMillan said: “It’s just madness. It’s a waste of paper, a waste of time, a waste of environment, a waste of cost.” He has 22 employees but is worried Brexit could cost them their jobs, because his sales are down 40 per cent since Brexit. He had turned to Asian markets to save his business. >click to read< 18:02

Fire on fishing trawler forces it to drop net at sea, becomes target of Greenpeace vandals

The fire broke out in the engine room of the Talley’s ship Amaltal Enterprise on July 2, while the vessel was trawling more than 35 km off the coast of Greymouth, the company said. The ship was towed back to Port Nelson, where it became the target of an early morning protest on July 6 by Greenpeace activists calling for an end to bottom trawling,,, The fire was extinguished swiftly by Talley’s on-board fire personnel, and the authorities were immediately notified.,, No evacuation of the vessel was required, and none of its 45 crew needed medical attention.  >click to read< 13:41

Athearn Marine Agency Boat of the Week: 42′ Bruno & Stillman Tuna/Longliner, Detroit 671N

To review specifications, information, and 22 photos, Federal swordfish hand gear permit with larger baseline available,,, >click here< , To see all the boats in this series >click here<11:52

Book Release – “Two Tales of Old Kodiak”: The “Wreck of the Rustler” and “Confessions of a Seal Hunter”

Steve Descloux, a US Navy veteran who has worked in the commercial fishing, construction, and aviation industries in a myriad of roles such as welder, fabricator, equipment operator, small-plane mechanic, and airline instructor and resides in Starbuck, Washington with Diane, his wife of forty-eight years and a calico cat named Brindle, has completed his new book “Two Tales of Old Kodiak”,,, Let this author take you back with a couple memories to an earlier, wilder Kodiak, Alaska, when the seafood industry was booming and the town never went to sleep, when trappers were popular and often sold most of their prime furs to the locals and tourists, when the churches and the bars ran neck and neck in number and the congregation was always greatest in the latter. >click to read< 10:42

Survivor: Salmon Edition

In 2020, COSEWIC designated seven chinook populations in southern British Columbia as either endangered or threatened. Much the same is true in the Columbia River watershed in the northwestern United States, where chinook populations may have lost more than one-third of their genetic diversity. More worrying still, the rate of young salmon returning as adults to rivers from California to Alaska over the past half-century has plummeted to one-third of earlier levels. It’s a picture that puzzles many researchers. A myriad of variables impact salmon survival and it takes time and research to untangle them. Land use, from mining to damming and irrigation, for example, has affected chinook stocks in the Pacific Northwest at critical life stages, but it can’t be blamed for what’s happening in the northern latitudes. >click to read< 09:05

On the Brink of Extinction: DFO salmon closures sink dreams of Pacific fishermen

Geoff Millar’s livelihood is on the brink of extinction after DFO closed roughly 60 per cent of B.C.’s commercial salmon fisheries. The closures, DFO stated, will last “multiple generations” of fish to save tumbling salmon populations. The decision leaves Millar, along with hundreds of other commercial fish harvesters on the B.C. coast, in despair and in difficult financial straits. “These closures have absolutely devastated us,” affirmed James Lawson, a Heiltsuk fish harvester based in Campbell River, B.C.,, “We’ve been forced into a corner, and the only option is retirement, that seems to be DFO’s goal.” >click to read< 07:35