Fishermen do not get paid an hourly wage. They are paid a percentage of the catch and that is the way it is.
It's a pretty good deal when the fish are jumping aboard and over the course of a year you can make a pretty good living at it if you stick with it.
Still, there simply are no guarentees and you have to know which skippers are successful and which are not. You can wind up busting your hump for weeks or even months on end and come in broke.
I remember making the better part of a pretty good year's pay in about 60 long hours once. That was a pretty good hit.
The price of halibut was high and we hit a pretty good mother lode. I was in fat city for a couple of days untill I paid my debts off and even then I had a pretty good chunk of change left over.
Several months later gill netting for roe herring wasn't really a very good deal. I busted my ass for six or seven long weeks for sixteen hours a day and damned near got killed a couple times for about $400. I didn't gripe.
The last trip involved crossing Shelikof Strait and bad fuel. It was a circus and we managed to get across just before a pretty good storm blew up. I ought to write that story up sometime. It was an Indiana Jones hanging by the nails escape movie.
I didn't gripe when we came in once with a lousy catch and after my share of expenses found out I owed the boat about three or four hundred bucks. I stayed on and things got much better. At the end of the season I was in pretty good shape financially.
The boat I did well on that halibut was fairly reasonable with the way the owner divvied up things. My share was 10% of the catch and there were five of us. That accounted for 50% of the income. The boat got 50% which is fair.
I listened to one guy gripe about the boat taking half the catch once and the guy next to me told the whiner that if he didn't like it, then HE could find a way to finance what was then a 3/4 of a million dollar boat and another half million in gear and HE could pay the insurance and HE could take charge of things.
Like a lot of people, he seemed to have big ideas for someone else's money.
People seem to forget that part. Boats are not free and if the boat doesn't get paid for the owner generally loses it. The money has to come from somewhere.
There is another thing that is not understood and that's what is being offered to the fisherman. He's not being offered money for his time. He is offered to be a part of a risky venture where he is given an opportunity to be a part of the venture.
While he may not make a dime for an entire season, he may very well make thousands in a single week or even in a day or two. I knew a couple of guys involved in a Joint Venture with the Russians that made over a grand a day. I also knew a few guys that barely kept themselves fed for an entire season.
The owner has put up a pretty good pile of money to buy into an industry that is little more than a crapshoot and there's an awful lot of risk involved. He's entitled to
A lot of boats are skipper owned and the ones I fished on generally were skipper owned.
I saw a couple of guys come up for a season and it was interesting watching them. They had heard somewhere that deckhands could get rich in a summer. One of the guys was a whiner and the other was a pretty good man.
The whiner thought you were guarenteed a good summer income and kept wondering why the skippers didn't guarentee anything. The other guy realized he had gotten into a crapshoot and simply decided to ride it out.
The whiner went back to working in the supermarket. The other guy that decided to tough it out did just that and at the end of the season had a pretty damned good hit and went back to college in somewhat good shape.
He was also invited back by his skipper the next season. It was the season after he finished college and he decided to go fishing that summer figuring he's do better there than at an entry level job for his degree. If I recall, he made out like a bandit by doing that and got a pretty good launch before he embarked on his career.
To find out why the blog is pink just cut and paste this: http://piccoloshash.blogspot.com/2009/12/my-feminine-side-blog-stays-pink.html NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED IN THE WRITING OF TODAY'S ESSAY
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