Trollers to Trawlers: A fishboat primer
Trollers to trawlers: A fishboat primer
Strolling the docks at Boat Haven, one might wonder if commercial salmon fishermen are teetering on the brink of extinction. Other than a few aging purse seiners and gillnetters, what’s left of the commercial fleet seems to be shrinking before our eyes.
But a few steps away, up in the boatyard, fishermen have been scrambling over aging wood or steel hulls, painting bottoms, checking fittings, preparing for the annual summer migration up the Inside Passage. 
Every year or so, we see another lament over the imminent demise of the Puget Sound salmon fleet. And each cultural obituary has proved premature. Salmon fishing, a Puget Sound industry still rooted in 19th century technology, has cruised into the 21st.
There are fewer boats, a consequence of declining salmon runs, environmental pressures, shortened fishing seasons, competition with farmed fish.
That makes it a tougher business. To make it, fishermen must fish smarter. They need boats and gear that can work a variety of fisheries – salmon now, crab later, then halibut or black cod. Most will fish Alaska waters, then come home to Puget Sound in the fall. And good fishermen will treat their catch better, cleaning and dressing the fish on board, catering to a high-end market.
But we still buy fresh salmon, caught locally or in Alaska, at record high prices. In recent weeks, the seiners have been growling back to life, lumbering out of the Boat Haven and steaming north for Alaska. Later this summer they’ll be back, spreading their nets in the San Juans or Puget Sound, or anchored next to the Hood Canal Bridge, waiting for the next opening.
As long as there are salmon swimming in Puget Sound, there will be fishermen anxious to catch and sell them. And you might as well learn which boat is which, and how they ply their trade. Here’s a glimpse at the salmon fleet.
The gillnetters: For decades, these were the mainstay of the salmon fleet -- small boats that are relatively economical to buy, operate and maintain. This year the state licensed 450 gillnetters, 200 of them here in Puget Sound. But most live on trailers, parked in driveways, awaiting the next opening.
The boats are typically under 30 feet, with fiberglass or aluminum hulls and cabins set forward to allow room for the net. One variation, the “bowpicker,” uses a stern cabin, deploying the net from the front to avoid fouling in the propeller.
The technology is simple. They use an aluminum reel, like a huge spool of thread, to deploy a net made of translucent nylon. The top edge of the net floats at the surface, forming a long, almost invisible fence that extends 20 to 30 feet down. The strategy is to set the net across a channel or tidal current, so that migrating salmon swim into the net and are snagged in the webbing.
Gillnetters usually work inside waters, often near the mouth of a river, where salmon are schooled up, preparing to move upstream to spawn.
Some years ago, gillnetters got a bad rap because of Asian fishermen who used enormous nets, sometimes 30 miles long, in the open ocean, snagging tuna and salmon and anything else that happened to swim by. But Puget Sound gillnetters tend to be a cleaner fishery with minimal waste.
The purse seiners: These are the most visible of the local fleet -- big 60-foot boats, many of them wood-hulled, with high bows and low, broad sterns for working the nets. Some 75 are licensed across the state, several of them here.
Seiners frequently fish the same runs as the gillnetters, often on alternating days. But they use a very different strategy.
The seine net is much longer, deeper and heavier. And it catches fish by enclosing them, like a floating corral. Fishermen scan the surface, looking for salmon jumping or finning at the surface. Then they use a powerful, aluminum power skiff to pull one end of the net off the deck until it extends perhaps half a mile across the water. The boats close the trap, encircling the fish at the surface, then reel in a line that closes the bottom of the net, like a purse. 
The seine boat then pulls alongside the net and gradually reels the net back in, shrinking the circle and concentrating the catch. The fish are harvested from the net either with enormous buckets, or hydraulic suction hoses.
The process isn’t romantic, but seiners often fish in fleets, and their huge circles of nets can create artistic patterns on a calm sea. Look for them this fall on Hood Canal or off San Juan Island.
The trollers: This is the gentleman’s fishery, favored by the loners and sportsmen who spurn nets in favor of catching salmon individually by hook and line. They fish the outside waters, so their boats are small – 30 to 40 feet -- and seaworthy, with cabins capable of sleeping one or two fishermen.
Trollers are handsome, traditional boats, many of them wooden-hulled with canoe sterns. When fishing, they resemble giant dragonflies, their trolling poles extended port and starboard like wings. Most trollers drag six weighted lines, two from the stern, and two from each of the poles. Each of those lines in turn drags several shorter lines, or leaders, baited with herring or lures – more than 40 lines in all. The lines are retrieved one at a time, using hydraulic winches powered off the engine.
Troll-caught salmon are valued because the fish are caught at sea, sometimes hundreds of miles from their spawning grounds. And each chinook or coho salmon is cleaned and iced on board.
Alas, trollers are also difficult to manage. They intercept salmon that may be from healthy stocks, or from endangered runs. Washington trollers catch fish headed for Oregon rivers; Canadian trollers catch fish headed for Washington; Alaskans catch fish headed for Canada; and vice versa.
But the fishery persists, with about 150 licenses – mostly at ocean ports like Neah Bay and Westport. Despite tighter regulations, their catch brings a premium price back at the docks. And when salmon season closes, they steam further out to sea to troll for albacore tuna, another moneymaker.
The trawlers: While the name is frequently confused with trollers, the boats and gear could hardly be more different. Trawlers are the steel-hulled battleships of the fleet, often over 100 feet long, dragging huge nets through the water in search of cod, pollock and other groundfish – not salmon.
Only a half-dozen are licensed in Washington waters, but we see Alaska trawlers plough through Admiralty Inlet in route to and from the Bering Sea, where trawlers reign supreme. The larger boats include processing plants belowdecks, where fish are butchered and flash-frozen for sale largely to Asia.
Trawlers are frequent targets for environmental protests, and there is reason to believe that bottom trawls, which target flatfish on the ocean floor, damage the marine environment and scoop up tons of unwanted “bicatch.” But the majority of the Alaska fleet uses midwater trawls that target massive schools of pollock and other groundfish; and midwater trawls are far less wasteful.
The longliners: While the other fisheries suffer, some of these fishermen have prospered – thanks to a revolutionary change in the halibut fishery.
Longliners are mid-sized, seagoing boats that catch fish by lowering a long, weighted line with hundreds of baited hooks to the bottom. The line is marked at the surface with a buoy, and left for a day or more. Longlines are used to catch a variety of bottom-dwelling fish, especially halibut.
Commercial halibut used to be a wide–open fishery, but inevitably too many boats joined the hunt, and it became unmanageable. The federal government finally instituted an individual quota system, awarding harvest quotas to seasoned fishermen based on their catch history. A few fishermen did very well, and hundreds more were frozen out of the fishery.
A number of the winners live and work here.
Crabbers: Crab, shrimp and other shellfish are caught mostly with “pots”, or traps, lowered to the seabottom and left for a few days. Shellfish can crawl into the traps, but can’t crawl out. Up north, where the popular “Deadliest Catch” TV show is filmed, crabs are caught from huge steel boats that do nothing else.
In local waters, however, crab is usually caught from smaller boats – seiners or other salmon boats trying to make up for lost fishing time. There are nearly 500 commercial crab licenses across the state, more than half of them in Puget Sound.
And, unlike salmon, there seems to be plenty of crab out there to go around.
