About a year ago, I wrote a post I called Longlining 101 to explain how we longline for halibut and sablefish. This past weekend, for the first time in what seems like forever, I got out on our boat, Kingfisher, for a day of pink salmon seining. I took loads of photos, so I thought I'd take this opportunity to give you a little primer on seining, if you're interested.
Let's see, where to begin? I guess with the basic equipment. First, there's the seiner, the big boat in the mix. Kingfisher is 50 feet long. In Alaska, seiners are legally limited to 58 feet. Seining also requires a smaller boat, the seine skiff or jitney. Ours is about 20 feet long. The third critical element is the seine, the net we use to encircle schools of salmon and scoop them up...hopefully. Oh, I suppose I should count the crew as critical, too. Thane has three additional crew members, two to stack the net as it's brought back on board the boat and one to drive the skiff. Of course, they all have other duties, too, but those are their primary jobs. Rowan's also been spending a lot of time on the boat this summer, too, helping out and learning how to work the deck.
Okay, I imagine the next thing you need to know is the process. Wait, first I should probably describe the net. Technically, it's called a purse seine because we purse up the bottom of it with a big drawstring (the purse line) which captures the fish in a big bag that can, if it's small enough, be lifted up on deck. Along the top of the net is the corkline, a thick line strung with corks like beads on a necklace which keeps the top of the net floating at the surface. Webbing (I won't get into all the different web types in a seine) hangs below the corkline and is held straight down in the water column by the leadline, another thick line that has a core of lead pieces. The purseline is strung through big rings along the bottom by the leadline. The entire net is about 1/4 mile long, and is stacked on the deck of the siener when it's not fishing.
Now, the process. Salmon tend to congregate into schools as they swim around points of land. Not surprisingly, fishermen set their nets off of points in order to intercept those schools when they're most concentrated. Although there are always exceptions depending on the circumstances, generally the skiff holds one end of the net near shore and the seiner has the other end further out. Before making a set, the skiff is tied to the back of the seiner with the net attached to a towpost in the skiff. When he (or she; there are a few female captains) is ready to make a set, the deck crew releases the skiff to start towing the net away from the seiner toward shore. The seiner tows its end of the net away from shore until the full 1/4 mile is stretched out in a big arc whose opening faces the direction the fish are swimming so that they swim into the net. Depending on how the fish are running, the captain usually holds the net open for about 20 minutes.
Once he decides to close the set, the skiff and the seiner start driving towards each other, making a big circle of net. After the skiffman hands off his end of the net to the deck crew on one side of the boat, he goes to the other side and picks up a line he can use to control the movement of the seiner. The captain can no longer drive the seiner because there's too much risk of getting the net wrapped up in the prop - a real fiasco that would be!
The deck crew, including the captain, starts simultaneously bringing in the net and pursing the purseline. The whole operation is managed with hydraulic equipment that does the heavy lifting and pulling. The purseline is wound around a deck winch that pulls it in while the net goes over a power block hanging from a boom over the deck. As the net comes out of the power block, the crew stacks the leadline on one side of the deck and the corkline on the other. By the time the first part of the net (the lead) is in, the seine is pursed up and the fish can't go anywhere.
If the net full of fish is small enough, it can be lifted on board and emptied into the fishhold. If it's bigger, the net will be lifted a little at a time and the fish spilled onto the deck and pushed into the hold. The hold is filled with seawater chilled to just above freezing. The fish float in the water and are instantly cooled to a safe temperature for holding. Properly cared for seined salmon are about as good as they can get.
Okay, we have the fish onboard. Now what? If necessary, the crew will keep making sets until either the boat is full or time has run out for fishing that day. Either way, the fish will be delivered to a tender for transport to a processing plant. The tenders are bigger boats, usually ones that crab fish during the winter, which are capable of holding several seiner-loads of fish. If you've ever watched The Deadliest Catch, those are the boats I'm talking about. In fact, Rowan had her picture taken with one of the starring DC crews and got all kinds of souvenirs from them, although she had no idea who they were.
The tenders have fish pumps on deck, essentially giant vacuum pumps, to suck the fish out of the holds. On this day, our sets were so big that we could never bring them on board. Instead, we kept the bag of fish hanging at the side of our boat and the tender came alongside and sucked the fish right out of the net. As the fish are sucked out of the hold or net, they go into a weighing box on the tender (fishermen get paid by the pound) and then down a chute to the tender's holds. If necessary, they can be sorted by specied on the open-topped chute (also called a sorting table), but this is pretty unusual for us. We mostly target pink salmon, and rarely catch reds or kings.
That's about it. This post just gave a very basic overview of seining; there are innumerable permutations that can change how it goes, but they're way more than you need to know unless you're planning to captain a seiner. Nonetheless, if you have any questions, write them in a comment and I'll do my best to answer.