Buy your own.

Back when I was commercial fishing practically every skipper pretty much ran his boat the way he wanted to and that was that. 

The crew really had little if any input. The entire success or failure of a trip season or even and entire career rested entirely on the shoulders of the skipper. Snowflakes today would probably call it slavery but it really wasn't. One could simply quit at any time.

One time I made an unsolicited suggestion and was given the answer, "Buy your own." It was in reference to the boat and gear.

At first I was annoyed that he wouldn't even open his ears but almost immediately saw what the deal was. The skipper had managed to finance a million bucks worth of boat and another million dollars in gear. (mid 1980s money here) I was free to do that myself if I wanted to.

I immediately saw his point of view on the subject and in typical smart assedry I flippantly replied that "I was going to buy a boat twice as big as his and split the entire gross up with the crew so we could all be rich and be surrounded by women in bikinis and high heels!"

The skipper laughed the loudest and he looked at me and said, "You do that, Pic!"

He was actually a kind soul because later when the gear work was done and the beer was opened he would take time out to show me on the charts where we were going to fish and why he chose those particular spots. The was very rare in a skipper. They generally never let anyone know where they were fishing if the spot was profitable. In return I was expected to keep my mouth shut.

Still, the decisions were his. He ran his boat the way he wanted and
that was pretty much the way it was.

A lot of other skippers were no way near as kind or as helpful. You were there as hired arms and legs, period.

Still, one has to realize that the skippers buy their boats with the intent of bettering themselves and if the boat they procured requires a crew then they create jobs. Creating jobs in turn creates wealth.

Some skippers go a somewhat different route. They buy a smaller boat and man it alone. Stay small and keep it all. One can make a decent living this way but making any real money requires a bigger boat and a crew. One does not take a 35 foot troller out into the Bering Sea or even into the open ocean for very long.

Anyway back to task. The skipper/owner is given the liberty to run his boat his own way, subject to the various rules and regulations set by law. It's his call as to where and how to fish and for what. He picks his own crew and also the crew picks him. It is an at will situation. The skipper can fire his crew and the crew is free to leave.

Skippers that make money generally have few problems finding a good crew. Skippers that don't play hell with a competent crew. They generally wind up settling for newbies and incompetents. 

Often times good crew members wind up becoming skippers by getting their own boats. They buy their own. I have seen this any number of times with varying degrees of success. Of course, being a good crewman does not automatically make one a good skipper so the weeding out process takes place. The new skippers either succeed or fail and the process goes on and on.

Failure can come in many ways. One can simply go broke and lose the boat to the banks. That's financial failure and is probably the best way to fail.

However in the fishing business the other failure is to lose the boat at sea. More often than not this means loss of life. Generally when a boat goes down it is with all hands. That's the ultimate loss.

Boats go down for a lot of reasons but most of the reasons entail money. Lack of maintenance (which costs money) is one reason. 

Pushing the weather is another. There are a number of reasons skippers push weather. It generally boils down to money. Boat payments have to be made and they don't stop because of bad weather. A skipper trying to make payments is likely to take a lot more risks than one that outright owns his own.

The other reason is out and out greed. Greed makes a man lose his sense of what is safe and what isn't. They generally are willing to take bigger risks for bigger paychecks.

From a crewman's point of view, the ideal skipper is a good fisherman and a free and clear boat owner who keeps his boat maintained and isn't too greedy. He knows that sometimes coming in broke ain't such a bad deal. He has enough in savings so he can afford to run for cover if the weather gets too dirty.

He also knows how to put fish on board and make money so as to be able to keep a crew happy.

Finding the ideal skipper is a hard job at best. Fishing is one hell of a way to make a living. As a former fisherman I can say that by the time I was 35 I had more dead friends than living friends. I attribute my longevity to nothing more or less than dumb luck because even the best skippers can run out of luck.

This often breeds strange bedfellows. I knew of a pair of men that went into a partnership of sorts. One of them had very little formal education. The other had graduated from the US Naval Academy at at Annapolis. They were quite a team. One had the incredible ability to make balky mechanical things work under less than ideal circumstances.The other ran much of the business end of things. It was somewhat funny to watch those two.

Still, I can honestly say that I can certainly see why someone would go into that line of work. It is one of the last fields of endeavor where a man can enter it and truly be his own boss and master of his own destiny. He doesn't need a formal education to be highly successful. It does draw an independent breed of person, though.







  













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