Tag Archives: in the Bering Sea
Alaska pollock trawlers are feeling pressure over salmon bycatch, so this reporter went to see for himself
Bering Sea factory trawlers scoop up tens of thousands of pollock at a time, and pressure is intensifying to avoid catching salmon as populations of chum and chinook have plummeted in recent years, causing closures for subsistence harvesting. The trawlers are not entirely to blame, warming oceans due to human-caused climate change are almost certainly a factor, but they have drawn the ire of salmon advocates from Western Alaska to Washington D.C. This is a 341-foot vessel that I went out on, the Northern Hawk, with a crew of 129 people. And most of them work below the deck in a fish factory that, basically when the fishing is reasonable, operates 24 hours a day. Then there are these incredible fillet machines that will fillet 180 fish a minute, and the job of the human is basically to just feed the machine 24 hours a day. And it’s kind of mind-numbing work. Your hands move constantly to make sure the fish are positioned correctly. >>click to read<< 07:40
A struggle to dodge salmon in pursuit of a massive pollock bounty
Onboard the F/V Northern Hawk — Some 400 miles northwest of Dutch Harbor, Bering Sea pollock congregated in spectacular fashion. In the wheelhouse of this factory trawler, Captain Jim Egaas scanned a sonar displaying a dense red band that represented millions of fish in a school that stretched for miles. He could see the pollock up close on another screen that relayed images from an undersea camera stitched in the mesh of a quarter-mile-long net. The video feed showed swarms of them deep in the funnel-shaped trap. Once pulled on board, the tail end of the net bulged with more than 220,000 pounds of tightly packed pollock. A crewman 
unstitched a seam. Raised by a powerful winch, the net spewed a silver avalanche of fish into below-deck holding tanks to await processing in a plant primed to operate 24 hours a day. Egaas was in hurry-up mode. Even before the last of this catch was shaken from the webbing, he called for crew members to unfurl a second net from a giant reel. “I like what we are seeing. We’re on the stock,” Egaas said. Photos, video, >>click to read<< 15:42
Why would a pediatric neurosurgeon go crab fishing in the Bering Sea?
The fears and anxieties associated with my role as a pediatric neurosurgeon are those related to my patients’ lives I have put at risk during the past 20 years. The last decade presented an opportunity for me to learn something from the commercial fishing industry about life circumstances where we experience fear and anxiety. In 2009, I was privileged to work on the F/V Miss Colleen, a commercial salmon fishing gillnet boat in Bristol Bay, Alaska. Then, in the fall of 2019 and winter of 2021, I was fortunate to be a deckhand on the F/V Saga, a commercial crab fishing boat in the Bering Sea profiled on the Discovery show Deadliest Catch. Both experiences had a profound effect on me and taught me how to switch from a “my life is at risk” mentality to one focused on preventing mistakes from happening through teamwork and effective communication. It occurred to me that there is no room for error in both the health care and commercial fishing industries. Both giving a patient the wrong medication or going overboard in rough seas can lead to death. >click to read< 18:08
Alaskans question fishery management as snow crabs disappear
The state, which has long dominated U.S. seafood production, is reeling after the Alaska Department of Fish and Game last week canceled the winter snow crab season in the Bering Sea for the first time in history Oct. 12. The department said the population of the popular snow crabs had dropped by nearly 90 percent from 2018 to 2021, plunging from 8 billion to 1 billion. In both cases, NOAA Fisheries said the declines were likely the result of climate change,,, Crabbers, however, said they had been led astray by inaccurate data and poor management decisions. “It’s going to be really devastating to kind of make ends meet and go forward here with our business,” said Gabriel Prout, 32, who runs a family fishing vessel business in Kodiak, Alaska. Last year, PEER filed a complaint under the Information Quality Act, alleging that NOAA Fisheries had paved the way for a collapse “by engaging in sampling bias and data falsification” that inflated population estimates and led to years of overfishing. >click to read< 16:59
Into the ice: A crab boat’s quest for snow crab in a Bering Sea upended by climate change
Aboard the F/V Pinnacle in the Bering Sea. Through the wheelhouse window, Capt. Mark Casto spotted a white line on the horizon. The edge of an ice floe was illuminated by bow lights piercing the morning darkness of the Bering Sea. He throttled back the engines. Soon, the Seattle-based crab boat began to nose through closely packed pancake-like pieces and bigger craggy chunks, some the size of boulders, which bobbed about in the currents and clanged against the hull. Casto grabbed a microphone to relay a change in plans to the deck crew. Pull the pots up and stack them aboard. They would search for crab somewhere else. “Where the hell did that ice floe come from? … We’re retreating. It’s a hard word to say,” Casto declared. photos, video, charts and grafs, >click to read< 17:50
Fisherman Nate Iszac caught a ‘Real-Life Sea Monster’ in Alaska, and they’ve become social media sensations!
A fisherman‘s unusual catch has been dubbed a ‘real-life sea monster’ by social media users after photos showed the beastly fish’s huge, gaping mouth and razor-sharp teeth. Fisherman Nate Iszac, 39, caught the bizarre fish in Alaskan waters earlier this month,,, Iszac, from Oregon in the US, poses in several images with the fish,,, He said: “When we saw it there was a nervous excitement in the air. After being found on 9 March in the Bering Sea off Akutan Island, Alaska, the animal has been identified as a wolf eel. Iszac confirmed he always puts his creatures from the deep back into the water, and that the wolf eel swam away unharmed. photos, >click to read< 08:36
Life on an Alaska Crab Boat
I grabbed the rails and prepared to vomit. My half-digested bowl of Honey Bunches of Oats would soon be fish food.,,, With a mix of curiosity and stupidity, I said yes to a week on the F/V Silver Spray, one of just 60 boats that harvest crab in the Bering Sea in the dead of winter. Preparing for the worst, I packed a backpack full of warm layers and wool socks, and emptied the local pharmacy of seasickness medications. The weather report for the week ahead was best described as bleak to downright grim. photo’s, >click to read< 06:34
One dead after South Korean fishing vessel sinks off Russian coast
One person was killed and the fate of more than 50 others is unknown after a South Korean fishing vessel sank in the Bering Sea off the coast of Russia’s far eastern Chukotka region, officials have said. Read the rest here 08:15
