First Set of the Season...

Aug 20th: Day two fishing, we made our first sets yesterday, four to be exact. The first was awesome. Ross our greenhorn skiffman, and me, have never made a seine set in our lifes, and here we are, spotter plane circling a big old school of sardines, in radio contact with Captain. Greg hollers down from the flybridge "cut 'r loose!!" Johna, the six year vet of the fishery, yanks the "bear trap" and sets Ross free in the skiff. Ross executes his turn, points directly off the stern and guns it. The net whips off the back deck, the corks making a popping noise as they peel over the stern. A minute latter and Greg is making every effort to get Ross's attention, who seems to be heading in the same direction as us, making a long narrow set...not desirable. Gregs incohrent screams fill the air, his blasting on the horn, Ross can't hear any of it over the roar of the "Elk Tuna." Thats our skiff, the Elk Tuna, powered by some old school bus motor, and she roars. It looks like someone once named it the elk, and then later was tagged with tuna, so thoes two words are faintly painted on the rear of the skiff in two different styles, but there's something catchy about the name "elk tuna", or just Tuna for short and so it is . Well we close up set numero uno, Ross circles around in the skiff, hands off the other end of the net, and we're all hooked up. My job is to stack the corks as they come down from the block onto deck, if there's a since to it i've yet to discover it. I just scramble around on a pile of cork, laying it out in broken figure eights. A perk to the corks is that they stack on the opposite side of the boat from where the net is being hauled, so the waterfall of loose sardines, jellies, dogfish and the likes fall over on Jonah, who stacks the lead line. When most of the net is back on board, I see some sardines frantically leaping at one of the corners of the net. There's some fish in there after all. As we pull more net on board, pockets of fish that got caught up in the web start spilling out over the block, I'm thinking how do we get these into the hatch? But we don't, that hundred pounds or so is nothing compared to the sixty thousand odd pounds still in the net. "Unbelievable" says Johna, he couldn't believe we were into the fish on the first set of the season. We got the net all "dried up" mean all the net is back on board except for the very end "the bunt" where are the fish concentrate in a thick frenzy. We lift a large pump into the netted up fish sitting along side of the boat and start pumping them into our hatch. Everyone's stoked, Greg can't believe it, Ross and I don't know quite what to make of it, except we both like what we were seeing. At one point, Ross, staring into the net, looking at the 35 tons of squirming sardines along side, chew in lip, says "I wonder what it would feel like to be in there...naked." I busted up laughing, what an honest thought. Well the next two sets were for nothing, and on the fourth we filled up the boat then ran back into Westport. Then the waiting game, we waited in line to pump out from 9:00 pm till 1:00 am. Greg took off for a walk, the three of us crew were on the boat when the stove started making some crazy noises, Johna cracked open the front and flames burst out. The fire was contained in the stove, but was much larger than the usual flame that heats it. Not sure what to do we watched it for a while, but there was quite a bit of flame and smoke, we thought there might be a stack fire. The stove stack started glowing and when Jonah peeked inside again a flame burst out right back at him, he grabbed a fire extinguisher and let at it. We were all exhausted, couldn't find Greg anywhere, and weren't really sure what to do. The flame was contained in the stove, but the dry chem fire extiguishers would only put out the flame long enough for it it re-egnite. The galley filled up with acrid diesle smoke. Jonah had turnd off the fuel to the stove when we first figured something was up so we though it would burn out. Eventually it did, sort of a strange episode, I don't think there was a serious threat of the fire getting out of the stove, but it got us a little riled up. One in the morning, and we finally got the go ahead to pull up to the pump. At around four-thirty, we were done pumping and tied up in position to ice up in the morning. P.S. we caught a couple of these gorgeous King Salmon early in the season.