F/V Kari Marie

F/V Kari Marie

My nephew is back to fishing in Alaska. This time he's onboard F/V Kari Marie, a tender as opposed to an actual fishing boat. As I understand it, the fishing boats catch the fish and then unload their catch onto the tender which carries the loads from several fishing boats back to the processing plant. This means the fishing boats don't have to spend time traveling back and forth, they can get right back to fishing.

Marine Traffic around Dutch Harbor Alaska

They are operating out of Dutch Harbor which is literally a stone's throw from Unalaska which is where the Alyeska Seafood processing plant is. Unalaska is in the middle of the above map, though it might be a little hard to make out. The map shows an area approximately 1800 miles across. As you can see, there are a bunch of fishing boats in the area, but given the scale they are dozens of miles apart.

The ship traffic we see here is only a fraction of the vessels operating in the north Pacific. There is a big stream of ships coming from Japan and other points in the Far East.

Dutch Harbor / Unalaska is only 35 miles southwest of the Trident Seafood processing plant on Akutan island.