2021 Bait Herring Season: Commercial Fishing Alaska

[Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] welcome aboard the fishing vessel anthem it's fall in alaska and that means it's time for the 2021 bait herring season before we can head out there's a few last minute jobs to do first we need to get our skiff in the water once that's secured and the crew is all on board we make some finishing touches on the gear and untie [Music] so [Music] yeah i'm sam hoy i'm from texas and uh i've been in commercial fishing for about 55 years my job on the boat here is the skip man i'm nathan shaw i've been fishing for most of my life almost 12 years probably now done salmon sanding gill netting tendering stacking leads on the boat this for this herring trip super stoked i'm sam butch i run the anthem for bait herring i've been fishing bait herring for 29 years maybe that sounds better than 30. it might be 30. my job is to keep the crew safe preserve the vessel and gear and fill it up with herring that's a lot of fish man you [Music] ah all right i'm gonna give you a real quick rundown of how we make the set and what that's like the skiff which you just saw us launch is attached to one end of the net when we let her go that skiff starts towing that way and the net starts flying off the back of the deck and we drive in a big circle in the big boat and ideally get the herring right in the middle of that and then the skiff comes around and we reconnect to it we just make a big circle and then that yellow line on the leds right there is kind of like a drawstring on a backpack but it's on the bottom of the net it just cinches the bottom of the net together and when that happens you'll see the rings come up over the side right here and that means whatever is in the net is secure we've got it and after that it's just hauling the rest of the net in stacking it up waiting till we get to the end of the set then we take this bad boy right here it's our pump and we uh set it right inside the net with all the fish we pump them through this uh blue tube goes up in the dewatering box over here on the table and in the tank all right let's see if we can make it happen oh [ __ ] [Music] there we go [Music] you owe me a beer double that works huh what do you think of that beautiful yeah make a shot pretty quick i'm gonna just do a little look around if i get the guys ready you can undo the skiff so that's ready to launch all right sounds good [Music] now i just got to get the skiff in the water that is the next step [Music] shooting away from us when we set so when we set they're gonna they're gonna loosen up the deck winch a little bit release you real quietly just put it in gear don't be rubbing it up or anything just nice and reverse and then forward not any revving it up just going to try to quietly get going they'll probably react to us but it might just give us a little more time to get a do a big quick look because i just don't have a lot of direction let them go [Music] that's all the herring here's the net so all that fish is right out here and there's a band of them coming into the net like that yeah see how we should be seeing it back in here [Music] he thinks they might have pulled out of the net a little bit okay [Music] okay what do you think nate did we get him i think we got him he's not so sure it's a little bit pinched okay so [Music] yep oh [Music] um you good [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] hey uh frank once all the herring is in the tank we let the end of the net go stack the rest of the net get the line staged for the next set and reconnect the skiff to the pancake [Music] okay [Music] let him go when you're ready [Music] and he's off all right time to do one last set to uh fill this up i'm gonna put this away so i can focus we got her done with our second set had just enough to top us off so we are loaded with herring right now and we have like a four or five hour run back to town to offload when we get there i'll be sure to show you what that's like and how we do that yeah i hope you're enjoying this video if you are please like and subscribe it really helps a lot leave a comment if you have any questions about this stuff i'd be happy to answer your questions and yeah thank you so much for watching i really appreciate it cheers [Music] good morning it is like 2 a.m or 1 30 in the morning right now we're just pulling into town um we've got everything set up for the pumps to go in so i'll keep you posted we're about to pull up to the cannery and start offloading [Music] [Music] and while we wait eat some honey nut cheerios secret to success and that's it that's how it goes we're finished pumping we've untied and we're headed back out to do another trip all this fish so it's bait herring and it's different than the row herring season which happens in the springtime all of this fish is used locally in kodiak and is sold to crab fishermen pot fishermen that are fishing for cod and tanner crab and also longliners that are fishing for halibut and black cod and everything like that so that's what all this fish is used for but yeah stay tuned we've got a few more trips to do i will probably run the highlights of that right now [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Max Kobuk

Views: 168,246

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Id: h9K2JLduw_Q

Length: 15min 19sec (919 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 05 2022