Springtime on the coast means many people spend time in the boatyard prepping their fishing boats for the season. It’s a lifestyle that they depend on to survive. KSTK’s Colette Czarnecki stopped by the Wrangell Marine Service Center to get a glimpse into the close relationships between fishermen and their boats. In the first story of KSTK’s series “In the boatyard” she first visited the Norcel, a wooden purse seiner that vessel owner Amy Schaub has spent the last 16 years with, fishing for salmon in Southeast Alaska.
Amy Schaub
She’s a fishy boat. She’s a classy lady too.
I’m Amy Schaub. I’m the owner and operator of the fishing vessel Norcel, which is a wood purse seiner.
I live on my boat, She’s blue and white.
It’s built in 1950 and so I haul it out every year for inspections and maintenance and zincs and bottom paint. The rest of the year, being a wood boat, it has to be kept in the water, otherwise the planks will shrink.
There’s a lot of bronze hardware, nice cabinetry, nice framework, like, a lot of original wood. The construction is really good. The materials are really good. Just really sound built, and she’s in really good shape.
Fixing her up
Today I’m doing whatever I can to get done while it’s raining, which is not much, but tomorrow it’s not supposed to be raining, and so I hope to put a lot of paint on. Prior to this, we’ve been sanding and prepping, checking zincs, which are a sacrificial metal.
I just needed to tighten up some of the planks. And so it’s really great to have all the guys here in the yard with different specialties be able to help me out.
You just start doing one repair, and then it ends up to be a larger repair, but this time around, it’s as we call a shave and a haircut, just some zinc, some paint and a little tune up.
Fishing in Southeast
I’ve been on it for 16 years. I crewed on it for five years. I bought it from my skipper, Steve Huestis. This is my 11th year owning it.
I have a salmon permit for purse seining in Southeast. I spend a lot of time fishing in Sitka, Ketchikan and Craig; also in Wrangell and some of the other smaller communities,
It’s built in Poulsbo, Washington, a Norwegian town. Norcel – “north seal” in Norwegian, it doesn’t translate, but that’s what I’ve been told. It’s fished the North Pacific, longlining and all throughout Alaska and Washington state. But since I’ve owned it, it’s only been fishing in Southeast.
I have a total of four crew, so a skiff driver, engineer, cook, deck boss, and other than the skiff, everybody hauls gear, no matter what their role is.
From tall ships to shipwright to returning to the water
I’m a first generation fisherman, so nobody else fishes in my family. And I started working on tall ship schooners when I was about 21 or 22, which are tall ships that are like the Pirates of the Caribbean, the big sail training ships and research vessels. So I did that for several years, and then I became a shipwright. I went to a boat building school in Washington.
I wanted to become a boat builder because we broke our mast, and we flew some shipwrights in, and they repaired it and made us a new mast in four days, which I thought was really cool. After being a shipwright for a few years, I missed being out on the water because I would be working in the shipyards, and so I wanted to get out on the water again, but I wanted something different than a tall ship sailor, and so I started fishing.
She’s a good boat. I have a great crew, and I have a lot of fun fishing here in Southeast.
