Setting and Hauling Halibut Longline - Alaska Commercial Fishing

Okay, hey guys, good morning, so we're heading to the ship. I'm going out looking for

halibut

today. A small shot of the port. It's pretty empty at the moment, once the salmon fleets went out

fishing

, so they baited us yesterday. So we'll run out and get our gear ready and then we'll probably come back into town for a while and do some chores around town, some projects we'll go out and get our gear out later tonight. Yes, it seems like a good day. like a sunny day, we'll get down and get excited and we'll be on our way, okay guys, so we'll get ready, uh, room here, let's get our bait wire and everything else, let's get our line of buoys and buoys. ready to go, it's not much, just a couple of nuts to hold our blasting table on, so we've got our casting tubes, our basuka, but you can see a really simple assembly, just engage the gear on our reel and more. three lines we just hang our buoy you just make a ready to go which one okay guys getting the hooks ready for the fire start by throwing this bird bag oh okay guys so we'll draw a line of three here, that's five. on our land line here we have markings h25 fathom interval the yellows are 25 the red is 50. give us an idea let her go here it's okay it looks good yeah it's okay so far I think keep the birds away I think that now we have that we have a boom, I mean things are different now than before, yeah, so it would definitely be low if we took it off the mask, a little safety feature here, it was just a line guide to prevent the line overflows. the deck and also give them some resistance to hook on, so the spacing in these tents is try to aim for about 16 to 20 feet, very depending, yeah, so we're doing about three and a half knots right now, maybe a little closer to four which is about to speed up guys you better go check things out yeah so top 10 sets takes probably 15 to 20 minutes set again just depends on the speed

setting

, okay guys, so we just have a couple more line shots to lay out. the set we're filming for about a mile and a tenth of this will be and the death toll will probably be 55 to 73 74 fathoms so just spreading it out covering some touches trying to see where the fish are yeah okay. cut it right there, okay, this is like 75, okay, it's probably okay, okay, so, okay, we're going to have some more hooks, we just have a little bit of bait left in that bag, so we'll get that rhythm going.

I've got a couple more sets to throw in and yeah, hopefully I'll start catching some fish, so the brake strap on these anchors broke, that's this little piece of cannon here and that's for you, in case May your anchor truly recover. stuck on a rock or whatever you're plowing like this into the ground so if you're pulling this line right here that break strap is going to break and you're just going to drag it right out like this so I'm just going to release these barbs so we break that breakup. Last year's strap didn't make it to replace it, so I'm going to do it real quick, real easy, I'm going to push the new barrel through it all, I guess you can test the film here first and then this barrel goes over to this smooth ring just a quick.

Nail hitch, nothing special there and it's like new, all good guys, so we have our ground closure, you can see, I've already cleaned the deck, removed the setup table and line guide, so we will finish tightening. Lift the rest of this deck gear and prepare the reel for transport, stop winding level. I'll show you that once we get to that, so yeah, we'll let them soak, probably about six hours and uh. come and pick it up in the afternoon and we'll pick it up from there, very good guys, so we calmed down a little bit on the way back, we went into town to do a few things while we waited for our gear to soak, so I hope that's the case.

We'll calm down a little bit, it makes it easier to work when it's really windy and pushes us around, so we'll pick it up once we hit the ground. Alright guys, we'll set up our wind level, very quick and easy setup. stay and over here in the front take your line just pass it like this yeah ready to roll let's do this ambition let's go so now a decent little start guys a couple of fish nice fish also open nice fish the man um wow so we've been asked if these are angler fish several times in the comments, they're not, they're just giant sculptures, yeah, giant giant sculptures, they look a lot like an angler fish for sure, but he's absolutely yes, these.

They have no market value to us so let's go, it's usually a good

halibut

around those guys, they're in the same area, come on, making sure my eye is good, it never hurts fish, stable fish, guys, the black cod He can't keep them, so we'll leave him. let them go, it won't be pleasant, I really didn't think that stickleback dogfish had no market for them here, mostly, mate, bye, I'm just cutting their gills off here, carrying them over here behind me, I've got my measuring table , making sure It's legal size fish here, put your nose up here, kill here, 32 inches, legal halibut, yeah, so I take care of hitting the hooks that will reveal some and shake some fish when I have time, but it really has to do it. pay attention when we are in holly because here we are outside the stern, so if a tangle arises and the boat is moving, you run the risk of sucking it into the propeller, so you must pay a lot of tension and, in addition, every time that you turn your back looks like a Big fish appears, yeah, get 'em, so yeah, it looks like a good one, here's a good Oliver, guys, so my drivers, oh, someone's old mooring line, it's beautiful, a Time, good fish guys, just about to reach the end of the anchor set.

That's good, nice. put on a really nice nice fish put on our bowie line clean these guys put ice on them and move on to the next one alright guys got the halibut all clean see a nice nice fish yeah that's a good grade last one set, yes. So dad went ahead and threw out the cod while I finished cutting them up, so now we're going to go ahead and take weights, we'll take lengths, actually, yeah, we'll measure them and then we'll get a net weight that we'll use to calculate our quantity. that we can keep it is debited from our ifq, so yes, for those of you who don't know how our fishery works here in Alaska.

We are under an ifq system which is an individual

fishing

quota, so we essentially own the catch rights. this fish every year, every year, after the attack is established, how much can be taken out of the water sustainably, then they publish the numbers and calculate how many pounds we can harvest, yes, so we must be careful to measure our fish and get an exact weight so we don't exceed the amount of weight we can harvest on our permit, we have an allowance of 10, if we go over 10 percent then we can face fines and we will also have to lose that excess so it is important let's be precise, so here we just have a scale on deck, we'll measure each fish, write down the length and then I have a spreadsheet on my computer inside with a breakdown of how many pounds of fish would weigh for that length and it's pretty accurate, if we have heavy fish that's going to be five to eight percent more, sometimes a little more, so we're pretty careful towards the end, but that's where we are, yeah.

We'll size these guys up and go from there 38 38. Brilliant 37 So these are just going to go into a puddle of half-melted ice and they're not going to get hit or anything like that, yeah, it's just making noise because it's empty there, yeah 41. 35... six 40 pounders, uh, if you want something good, okay, so yeah, so we'll go count these looks like we got there, uh, you.