Alaskan Waters
By Jim Oltersdorf

Page 1
The murky and boiling water rose above the 48 foot fishing long-liner, dwarfing it. Measuring 1,600 feet deep, this is no place to be foolish or to take chances. The 17 year Norwegian veteran of those very seas knew it would be in the best interests of all crew members as well as the boat to do a 180 degree turn and make a run to the nearest cove for protection. It was a long 30 miles.

Alaskan waters can be some of the most dangerous in the entire world. Those seas can go from a flat as a pancake to a witches brew of churning foam within minutes, help sometimes being hundreds of miles away. A life jacket is a joke in waters that hover at 34 degrees Fahrenheit. Survivability in those frigid temperatures is about 20 minutes. Not a place for the faint of heart.

Some of the richest fisheries in the world lay in the cold, deep waters of Alaska. Whether it’s the delicious halibut, salmon, black cod, pacific cod, pollack, flounder, sole, turbot or arrowtooth flounder the fishermen are after, these waters produce some of the best tasting fish man has known. But the dangers lurk behind every wave for those souls that venture into this prime fishing real estate.

They fish as deep as three thousand feet for cod and hook halibut as deep as fifteen hundred feet in the Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea. Icy blasts of the arctic winds tear at their faces and hands to bring these fish to the dinner plates of the world making it one of the best paying jobs when the catch is good. Some of the larger operations can make more than three hundred thousand dollars for less than a week of labor. Deckhands receive a share or percentage which is usually seven to ten percent of the earnings. It takes about five years to train a deckhand but they usually get a full share before the five years are up. The boats that pay their crews well usually keep year after year the same crew and the ones that don’t, have a high turnover of crew members.

The next morning Captain Harold Kalve, born in Bergen, Norway, pointed the boat towards the hundred-mile journey to the Continental shelf. This 48 foot long-line boat named the Rocinante (pronounced rosen ante) is configured with a set of buoys attached to a buoy line. The length of this is about one and a half times the depth of the water you are fishing in which terminates at an anchor.

The ground line (fishing line) is usually three-eighths of an inch, which is attached at the anchor and is broken into sections (skates), commonly eighteen hundred feet long. The operation for this trip was running six skates on the set, then this terminates at the other end of the anchor line and buoys. Skates could be called stuck gear, where the hook is tied a gangion and then is tied directly to the line. On the Rocinante the captain used snap gear where the hook is tied to the snap gear which is physically pinched and put on every eighteen feet or so.

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