Updates From The Sablefish Grounds
Greeting from the Sablefish (AKA Black Cod) grounds! It's been a while since we've updated you all. These days feel very full: from seven in the morning until well after midnight, we're either toddler wrangling, hauling pots, cleaning fish, or all of the above! It's a delightful kind of busy, especially since it's broken up with intermittent trips to shore for hot springing, deer hunting, and mushroom foraging. Today, we're tied up to the dock at Baranof Warm Springs -- both to hide from weather, and to give crew a chance to glaze* the last few days of fish.
*glazing is the process of dipping each frozen fish into a slurry of cold seawater, to prevent freezer burn!
Since we last touched base with you all, we've wrapped up our salmon season, travelled cross-country, and made it back to Alaska in time to gear up and start sablefish fishing! Whew.
We'll rewind all the way back to September. September was such a fun month of salmon fishing! The fish were big, the waters were gorgeous, and thankfully, fishing was quite good. But around September 10th, we made the tough call to wrap up our coho salmon fishery for the year.
Storms were beginning to roll in back-to-back, and our coho fishing grounds were over 24 hours from Sitka (our home base for offloading). The boat was nearly full, we saw a gnarly storm system creeping across the gulf, and so we seized our moment: Hauled our hooks aboard for the last time, and steamed to Sitka! About a week or ten days earlier than we would have liked; but sometimes, trying to fish an extra few days can end up costing you weeks of time (hiding from weather, or attempting to fish weather, damaging equipment to due to poor weather, it all adds up!)
Some years, the risk to reward would make sense -- this year, it did not. We had a complete rebuild of sablefish gear on the to-do list, plus a quick family trip to Pennsylvania to celebrate the lives of Jess's father who passed away in 2021, paternal grandfather, who passed away this spring. Sidebar: Any Pittsburgh folks on this newsletter? We love your city! We cannot wait to return someday.
Back to fishing news: I can't recall if we shared last year, but sablefish 2023 was a... learning curve. Sablefish live deep in the water, and the area we fish can often rip with swift, strong tides and currents.
Long story short: A few days into our 2023 sablefish season, we lost ALL our brand new sablefish gear to the sea. On a particularly stormy day, we anchored up for the day, leaving our sablefish pots strung along the 2,500+ foot seafloor. When we came out the following morning to haul gear, there was not a buoy in sight. We spent two days looking for our gear: scanning the horizon with binoculars until we were crosseyed, and dragging the bottom with a large, jerryrigged hook in an attempt to snag a piece of it to haul to the surface.
Eventually, we had to count our losses (about $15,000 all said and done) and move on with the fishery. Always painful, but ESPECIALLY painful since that was our first season with F/V Fairweather, and we were still nursing our shipyard financial wounds. We were luckily able to borrow some gear to finish out that season, knowing that in 2024 we'd be starting from scratch again.
All that to say: we've been real tentative about where and how we set our pots this season. We learned a few things, too, about how to configure buoy line and buoys to prevent them from being sucked under the surface. If you're familiar with our shrimp fishery, sablefish works much the same (except much much deeper water and longer sets)! Pots are intermittently attached to a long length of line (called "ground line") that sits along the sea floor. Think charms on a charm necklace! On both ends of the ground line, there's a "buoy line", that goes from the bottom of the seafloor all the way to the surface. The surface end of the buoy line has multiple inflatable buoys and hard plastic balls to keep it on the surface regardless of tide and current. We set buoy lines on both ends, that way we can choose which end to haul from (and we have a spare side, should one end get sucked under). This is different from the "Deadliest Catch" style of pot fishing, where every pot has its own individual buoy line + buoy(s).
Back to the present: after Pennsylvania, it took us about ten days to get the new sablefish gear rigged and set up the way Caleb and Jake wanted. We finally set sail for the sablefish grounds last Saturday! Fishing has been just fine. Could be better, but could be slower too. Sablefish is a low-stress fishery for us, thankfully. Our permit allocates us a certain number of pounds each season, to be caught more or less at our leisure. This is a welcome change of pace after spot prawns, lingcod, and king salmon -- where the allocated pounds are caught derby style: first come, first served!
We'll be harvesting sablefish for another week or so, then head back to Sitka to offload and start winterizing the boat. It's been a wet and windy month, so we are thankful to be tucked into our (mostly) calm sablefish grounds, and it's many beautiful anchorages. We'll be Boise bound the last week of October, and will see you all in November! ❤️
With gratitude,
Jess, Caleb, & Monti
