For those of us who like to fish for fun,
there are few things more gratifying
than cooking up your own catch.
And in a typical year in the U.S.,
those recreational fishermen will collectively bring in
about 350 million pounds of fish.
But those are rookie numbers.
To keep up with the pros on the commercial level,
every angler in the nation would need to up their
annual catch by about 25-fold.
Who’s got time for that?
Well, the folks on America’s Finest do.
But while they steam across the Bering Sea
in search of more fish.
Oh yeah.
Deck boss Ale Apelu is learning why
they haven’t been filling the net.
That’s a big hole.
Deck to bridge.
I got you, go ahead.
Okay, Captain, we found the problem.
There is a big hole on the body of the net.
Good ten feet hole.
So, we gonna go ahead and fix it right now.
Okay sounds good.
Well I’m glad you found something
there that’s causing our problem.
All right, get her fixed and let me know
if you find anything else.
Copy that.
Fortunately any fisherman worth his salt knows
their way around a little net mending.
And with the next tow just 30 minutes away,
there should be just enough time to get this
trawling net back in the game.
But they’ll have to divide and conquer.
Uh, you sew from this side,
and I’ll sew from that side.
And then we’re gonna,
we should meet up in the middle.
Every time you sew,
we got to make sure it’s the right side mesh.
Mesh got to be even with the original mesh.
All right.
You good?
Hold on, hold on.
Down.
Ah.
Stitch this.
Okay.
Right now we just got done going through the whole net.
We’re gonna pull it forward, stack this up,
get it ready for the next haul.
While Ale and the deckhands prepare the
mended net for launch, further up chief engineer
Steve Sauer is taking the opportunity to see
if a winch that’s been giving them issues lately
has taken to his latest attempt at fix.
We’ve got a communication issue with the encoder
on the spooling gear for the port trawl winch here.
All right, come outward just a little bit.
We changed the ethernet port to where
the communication’s coming from.
But we’re just gonna wait for him to set back out
so we can watch it and make sure everything’s good.
All right, go ahead and try and wind it up.
And then you know, never-ending game of
keeping the boat rolling.
Okay so it’s good to go?
Yeah, it looks like it.
But while wrapping up the encoder issue.
I’m gonna close up the encoder.
Steve spots an even bigger problem.
Oh, well that’s swell.
What is that?
The cotter pin for this end of the brake band
is gone and the washer fell off the pin’s walking out.
We don’t want it to walk out and lose a brake band.
That would be bad.
By bad Steve means that they lose the
ability to stop the winch.
Which would simply unspool until it ran out of cable.
So Steve will have to do what he does best,
fix it on the fly.
Little bit of a tricky spot.
I guess it’s a good thing that other thing happened.
’Cause then I got down there and saw the other thing.
All right, we’re good.
We got the washer back on, we got the pin moved over
far enough to get a cotter pin in it.
And so now it’s secure again.
All right that’s the fun and challenging part
about the job, is having to do stuff on the fly.
Keep the boat fishing.
Because if we don’t have gear in the water,
we’re not making money, so.
But we’re all good now.
Below deck in the processing department
freezer technician Luis Sanchez is preparing for
what will hopefully be the boat’s next big score.
Well, I got to defrost this freezer.
And that means conducting some critical maintenance.
Every 24 hours we defrost the freezers.
In order to keep them running.
They just get frosted up and then they stop working.
So I’m turning on the hot gas so in a few minutes
we’re gonna see this freezer defrosted.
That’s it.
If little precautions like these aren’t taken on a
regular basis they could cause a domino effect that
would bring the whole assembly line to a halt.
But not on Luis’s watch.
Every position here is very hard.
I mean everybody’s working 16 hours a day.
I come to this job, it’s like whoa, it just...
I have to do stuff that
I’ve never done in my life.
There’s muscles in my body that hurt that I never
felt pain, I mean I never felt in my life.
I told my wife well only five years
I’m gonna do this job.
But, you know what, I just can’t leave this place.
We all treat each other like family.
But like most families, even this operation can be
a little dysfunctional at times.
I‘ll shoot you an estimate