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but an offshore industry worth
ten billion dollars a year.
But it doesn’t come easy.
Bringing the ocean’s bounty to your seafood section
takes masters of strategy,
gluttons for punishment, and a breed of worker
bold enough to take on America’s last true wild frontier.
How’s the old saying go?
Give a man a fish and you’ll feed him for a day.
But teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
Well, whoever came up with that,
it apparently didn’t stick.
Because it takes about 40,000 men and women
to feed all of us Americans
who never got our fishing lesson.
Together, we consume about six billion pounds of
seafood every year.
Enough to fill more than 100 container ships.
But getting that kind of bulk from the ocean to our
table requires a fleet of commercial fishing boats
operating day and night.
And in the great Bering Sea,
the world’s richest fishery, 7,000 of them,
are trolling an area the size of Alaska.
In search of the seafood needed to feed our nation.
But none of them come better equipped for the
job than America’s Finest.
This 260-foot vessel represents the latest and greatest
that commercial fishing technology has to offer.
An onboard processing plant,
freezers the size of football fields,
and enough space inside to store three million pounds
of freshly-caught fish.
But despite all the bells and whistles,
it still takes a crew of 50 to keep this
floating fish factory in operation.
All under the command of their intrepid leader,
captain Darin Vanderpol.
Our company’s given us the best tool in Alaska
to do our job.
Now it’s up to me and it’s up to my team and us
to perform with it.
We operate the boat 24 hours a day.
We never stop, ’til we’re full.
Naturally filling the hull with fish is always the goal.
But there are other factors, like weather,
food and fuel consumption that can force
America’s Finest ashore before they’ve hit their quota.
Something that happened their last time out.
Leaving this fishing vessel in the red.
We’ve got about a million dollars’
worth of overhead expenses.
So we have to cover that every single time we go out.
Last trip we came up short.
We didn’t get the boat full.
This trip we can’t do that.
We absolutely have to fill up.
If we do fill up that’s about
one point seven million dollars right now of,
product that we’ve put on the boat.
That’s what we need to keep the company in the black.
And that’s what we need for our guys to
make money on the boat.
On a typical trip, America’s Finest will stay out
on the water for about two weeks at a time.
And as it stands, they have just enough fuel
for another day or two of fishing.
Provided they don’t cover too much distance.
In that time, they have to catch another 90 tons of fish
in order for this trip to be considered a success.
But so far their yield, from a once tried and true
fishing ground, has been less than promising.
Yesterday was not on par with what we need to do to,
to reach our goal.
We have to do better if we want to get the boat full.
But we’re really targeting yellow fin.
That’s what we want to see.
This time of the year it’s almost like
trying to find a unicorn.
Captain Vanderpol’s quarry, yellowfin sole.
They’re a species of bottom feeding flat fish
similar to flounder or halibut.
And to catch them he’s using a method known as trawling.
We’ve got electronics like this,
where we actually have a, a sonar that goes down
with the net.
So we get an idea of what’s going in the net in real time.
After marking what should be their target species
by way of sonar, a 300-foot net is deployed from the
boat and allowed to sink to the sea floor.
There, forward momentum forces a pair of
underwater wings called doors apart.
Opening the net to its full 900-foot width
and swallowing everything in its path.
So far this morning they’re two hours into their
second tow and hoping for better results
than they’ve been seeing lately.
We’re gonna pull them up and we’re gonna see
what we have for the catch.
From there we decide what’s next.
If fishing’s good, we stay.
If it’s bad, we move.
But in a place where relocating means covering
hundreds of miles and spending thousands of
dollars in fuel, suffice it to say
it would be best to find the fish here.
Let’s haul this back and let’s see what we’ve
capture this tow and hopefully it’s a good one.
But as the net nears the boat,
Captain Vanderpol spots a more pressing issue.
We got something going on with the door here.
It’s not wanting to come up right.
Taken off on its own here.
Instead of coming up uniformly with the other one
like it should be.
I’m not quite sure what’s going on with that.
Even on a boat as advanced as America’s Finest
the trawling net can still take a beating
from the Bering Sea.
So all the captain and his crew can do
is deal with problems like these as they arise.
Hey Ale, you get me?
Yep.
Hey, it looks like we got something going on
with the port door here.
It’s acting squirrely coming up here.
Coming in way faster.
Might want to be back there when the doors come up,
take a look and see if we got something going on there.
While the deck crew investigates the squirrely door,
deep in the bowels of America’s Finest
the fish processing department is still busy cleaning,
packing and freezing the boat’s previous catch.
About 20 tons of yellowfin sole.
And it’s up to guys like Luis Sanchez to ensure
this highly-complex assembly line
runs both quicky and smoothly.
That is, when he’s not giving cameras the nickel tour.
Once rinsed and weighed, the yellow fine are
conveyed to a particularly sinister piece of
machinery known as the header.
After sorting the headless fish make their way
to the packing area, where they’re placed into pans
about 40 pounds at a time.
Finally the pans of yellow fin sole are ready to be
flash frozen, allowing America’s Finest to
keep them fresh until it’s time to head ashore.
It takes about two hours to freeze this
20 kilogram case of fish.
Here we have our rock injector.
What that does is separates the fish from this pan.
It’s a stainless steel pan.
It’s a system finetuned for maximum efficiency
and minimal waste.
But when working on a vessel as highly automated
as America’s Finest,
not all essential workers handle fish.
Some, like chief engineer Steve Sauer,
handle all the high-tech components that keep the
vessel fishing 24-seven.
But on a boat with this many moving parts,
that’s a job that requires near-constant maintenance.
I’m the guy that is responsible for all the
systems on the vessel.
This is one of the most modern boats out there.
Very complicated, we have a lot of systems on this vessel.
We are constantly doing engineer room rounds to
monitor each and every system,
and we got to check over every square inch of this
vessel every day.
Now we’re gonna go into the steering room.
On a daily basis we’re just doing our
normal engine room checks.
We’re gonna go ahead and check sea oil level of our steering.
Make sure everything’s good.
Next, Steve checks the backup generators.
Even though these generators aren’t running,
we still want to make sure that they have an adequate
amount of oil in them at all times.
So that they are ready to run in the event of an emergency.
We’re good to go there and we’ll continue with our
engine room rounds.
This is our bow thruster motor.
It’s biggest, biggest actual electrical motor
we have on the vessel, 650 KTM.
Inside this tube right here is basically a propellor.
And when we’re docking the ship,
they have control to push the bow of the boat to the
port or to the starboard.
And this is how they steer the bow of the boat
when they’re docking the ship.
This is our hydraulic unit.
Controls the pitch on the bow thruster.
I’m just doing checks to make sure nothing’s leaking.
Checking the integrity of all the hoses,
all the hydraulic connections,
just make sure everything’s tight.
Hey, Steven, are you down there?
Yeah, go ahead, what’s up?
Yeah, we got an ICMS alarm for a bilge alarm in
the engine room.
Okay roger, I’m on my way.