Let's Go Fishin'

Nick Caught a Crab

My nephew is out fishing in Prince William Sound off Cordoba, Alaska. More photos here.

Putin Goes Fishing on Iturup

Vladimir Putin at a fish processing plant on Iturup - Gavriil Grigorov

This piqued my interest because my niece and nephew are in the fishing business. Those are some big halibut, but where's Iturup? It's an island northeast of Sapporo, Japan:

Iturup Map

Google Maps failed me. Pull up Iturup on Google Maps and it shows you the island, but no cities towns or roads. If you ask it for one of the three airports, it will show it to you, but then it won't shut up about it and there doesn't seem to be any way to turn it off. New and improved for your viewing pleasure, and for most people, most of the time it probably works very well. Not for me. I might have to start using one of the other free, online, maps of the world.

Wikimapia has pictures:

Not sure whether these apartment buildings are abandoned or not

Town

Iturup Airport with Su35 jet fighters

F/V Peccavi

F/V Peccavi

Ask Google about this image and we get a surprisingly complete report:

The Peccavi (CH 449345) is a traditional wooden-hulled French commercial fishing vessel and scallop dredger (chalutier coquillier) built in 1978 by the Servain shipyard in Granville, France.

Registered under the Cherbourg maritime district (Granville, France).

Specifications: Wooden hull construction with a length overall (LOA) of approximately 15.32 meters and a beam of 5.26 meters

50 feet long and 17 feet wide.

The Evil Lawyer - Netflix Series

THE EVIL LAWYER (2026) | Thai Legal Drama Official Trailer | NETFLIX
MovieDigger

Lawyers and judges in Thailand. Mek, a young lawyer working as a public defender, son of a judge, has a 'friend' who is the son of Anan. Anan is the head of the national police, or some such. A big shot in any case.

Our boy gets arrested for the murder of his 'friend'. His lawyer (his uncle) cannot find a way to get him acquitted, so he hires Jittri, the nastiest, highest profile lawyer in town and things start to get interesting. Jittri realizes the system is riddled with corruption, so she has no qualms about doing whatever is needed to get her client acquitted, including threats, blackmail and bribery. A guy they need to testify gets busted, so Jittri digs up a guy to take the fall for him. When Mek asks him why he agreed to go to prison, the guy tells him it has got to be better than working on the fishing boat.

Seems Anan has a fleet of fishing boats and he press gangs refugees (illegal immigrants) from Burma into becoming crew on his boats. If you survive working on these boats and get back to shore in one piece, you might get paid, but more likely you will be deported back to Burma.

8 episodes

King Crab

My niece with king crab

From Wikipedia:

King crabs or stone crabs . . . are found chiefly in deep waters and are adapted to cold environments. They are composed of two subfamilies: Lithodinae, which tend to inhabit deep waters, are globally distributed, and comprise the majority of the family's species diversity; and Hapalogastrinae, which are endemic to the North Pacific and inhabit exclusively shallow waters. 

King crabs superficially resemble true crabs but are generally understood to be closest to the pagurid hermit crabs. This placement of king crabs among the hermit crabs is supported by several anatomical peculiarities which are present only in king crabs and hermit crabs, making them a prominent example of carcinisation among decapods. Several species of king crabs, especially in Alaskan and southern South American waters, are targeted by commercial fisheries and have been subject to overfishing.

I liked this explanation of carcinisation:

Carcinisation is a form of convergent evolution in which non-crab crustaceans evolve a crab-like body plan. The term was introduced into evolutionary biology by Lancelot Alexander Borradaile, who described it in 1916 as "the many attempts of Nature to evolve a crab"

Overfishing can be a problem. From Google:

Alaska's commercial king crab harvest for the 2025/2026 season has a Total Allowable Catch (TAC) of 2.68 million pounds for Bristol Bay red king crab. For the Aleutian Islands golden king crab, the total quota is set at 4.19 million pounds.

First Catch of the Season

Nephew Nick delivering his first catch to Cordova, Alaska

Real Life

Whittier to Cordova, Alaska

My nephew bought a 30 foot fishing boat in Whittier and sailed it 100 miles across Prince William Sound to the happy summer fishing grounds around Cordova. Meanwhile, I went to Costco.

Puzzle of the Day

Dutch Fishing Boat

School of Fish

Giant Schools of Fish
360 Nomads

I'm reading A Flash of Green by John D. McDonald. The story is set in small town on the coast of Florida. On page 121 I run into this passage. This book  was written in 1962 and we've got a couple of grown men talking, so this event probably happened in the 1930s.

"I must have been about eight years old. It was a Sunday in May. There was a school of mullet in there like nobody has ever seen since. I'd say they were schooled up six miles long, a mile wide and ten feet deep."

"Say, I remember that! God damn! We gigged all day long until our arms like to fell off."

"Everybody did. Half the town was out there."

"And the fish house price fell off to two cents, finally, and then they wouldn't buy at all because they had no room. I remember we run a truck down to Naples, but it was a hot day and we had no ice, and the man down there didn't like the look in their eye by then. So we dumped 'em damn near the center of town and took off fast."

"The whole town here stank for a week. That was the last big school, the last one on this coast, Elmo."

 

Fishing Boat

Fishing Boat

Nephew is looking at shallow draft commercial fishing boat, presumably for fishing in rivers. $180,000 comes complete with a permit.

Do Fish Fart?

Wild Alaska Pollock

Picture of nephew Nick wearing this T-shirt proclaiming the wonders of Wild Alaska Pollock shows up on my screen and I'm wondering what is this nonsense? Search and I find this on the Port of Seattle website:

Separately, because consumers are starting to look at sustainability in more ways than fisheries management, the Wild Alaska Pollock industry funded a study to determine what the carbon footprint of Wild Alaska Pollock actually is when compared to other proteins. The study, conducted by the world-renowned consultancy Quantis International, looked at several key impact categories such as global warming potential, energy use, use of land and water resources, and waste outputs. When the results were released, it showed that Wild Alaska Pollock is not only good for you, but good for the planet too!

The findings concluded that Wild Alaska Pollock fillet has an impact of 3.77 kg CO2-eq per kg of protein, significantly lower than comparative statistics reported for other protein sources.

• Wild Alaska Pollock: 3.77
• Chicken: 12.50
• Pork: 19.65
• Plant-Based meat: 20.83
• Beef: 115.75

I'm suspicious of anyone making disparaging remarks about cows, so I'm going to call it bullshit. However, lets see what diesel produces, because diesel is what fishing boat use for fuel, and they burn it in thousand gallon lots. Burning one gallon of diesel will produce 10 kilograms of CO2. Burning three pints of diesel will produce 3.77 kilograms of CO2. So fishermen are burning three pints of diesel for every kilogram of fish fillets they produce.

As for fish farting, the answer is mostly no, but some, like herring, do.

 

Fishing for Privacy

Stolen entire from Schneier on Security

 

Online Privacy and Overfishing

Microsoft recently caught state-backed hackers using its generative AI tools to help with their attacks. In the security community, the immediate questions weren’t about how hackers were using the tools (that was utterly predictable), but about how Microsoft figured it out. The natural conclusion was that Microsoft was spying on its AI users, looking for harmful hackers at work.

Some pushed back at characterizing Microsoft’s actions as “spying.” Of course cloud service providers monitor what users are doing. And because we expect Microsoft to be doing something like this, it’s not fair to call it spying.

We see this argument as an example of our shifting collective expectations of privacy. To understand what’s happening, we can learn from an unlikely source: fish.

In the mid-20th century, scientists began noticing that the number of fish in the ocean—so vast as to underlie the phrase “There are plenty of fish in the sea”—had started declining rapidly due to overfishing. They had already seen a similar decline in whale populations, when the post-WWII whaling industry nearly drove many species extinct. In whaling and later in commercial fishing, new technology made it easier to find and catch marine creatures in ever greater numbers. Ecologists, specifically those working in fisheries management, began studying how and when certain fish populations had gone into serious decline.

One scientist, Daniel Pauly, realized that researchers studying fish populations were making a major error when trying to determine acceptable catch size. It wasn’t that scientists didn’t recognize the declining fish populations. It was just that they didn’t realize how significant the decline was. Pauly noted that each generation of scientists had a different baseline to which they compared the current statistics, and that each generation’s baseline was lower than that of the previous one.

What seems normal to us in the security community is whatever was commonplace at the beginning of our careers.

Pauly called this “shifting baseline syndrome” in a 1995 paper. The baseline most scientists used was the one that was normal when they began their research careers. By that measure, each subsequent decline wasn’t significant, but the cumulative decline was devastating. Each generation of researchers came of age in a new ecological and technological environment, inadvertently masking an exponential decline.

Pauly’s insights came too late to help those managing some fisheries. The ocean suffered catastrophes such as the complete collapse of the Northwest Atlantic cod population in the 1990s.

Internet surveillance, and the resultant loss of privacy, is following the same trajectory. Just as certain fish populations in the world’s oceans have fallen 80 percent, from previously having fallen 80 percent, from previously having fallen 80 percent (ad infinitum), our expectations of privacy have similarly fallen precipitously. The pervasive nature of modern technology makes surveillance easier than ever before, while each successive generation of the public is accustomed to the privacy status quo of their youth. What seems normal to us in the security community is whatever was commonplace at the beginning of our careers.

Historically, people controlled their computers, and software was standalone. The always-connected cloud-deployment model of software and services flipped the script. Most apps and services are designed to be always-online, feeding usage information back to the company. A consequence of this modern deployment model is that everyone—cynical tech folks and even ordinary users—expects that what you do with modern tech isn’t private. But that’s because the baseline has shifted.

AI chatbots are the latest incarnation of this phenomenon: They produce output in response to your input, but behind the scenes there’s a complex cloud-based system keeping track of that input—both to improve the service and to sell you ads.

Shifting baselines are at the heart of our collective loss of privacy. The U.S. Supreme Court has long held that our right to privacy depends on whether we have a reasonable expectation of privacy. But expectation is a slippery thing: It’s subject to shifting baselines.

The question remains: What now? Fisheries scientists, armed with knowledge of shifting-baseline syndrome, now look at the big picture. They no longer consider relative measures, such as comparing this decade with the last decade. Instead, they take a holistic, ecosystem-wide perspective to see what a healthy marine ecosystem and thus sustainable catch should look like. They then turn these scientifically derived sustainable-catch figures into limits to be codified by regulators.

In privacy and security, we need to do the same. Instead of comparing to a shifting baseline, we need to step back and look at what a healthy technological ecosystem would look like: one that respects people’s privacy rights while also allowing companies to recoup costs for services they provide. Ultimately, as with fisheries, we need to take a big-picture perspective and be aware of shifting baselines. A scientifically informed and democratic regulatory process is required to preserve a heritage—whether it be the ocean or the Internet—for the next generation.

If you are using a computer for anything you want to keep private, you need to realize that any sufficiently motivated individual will be able to discover your secrets. So it is best to consider how likely it is that someone would target you and how much damage they could cause if they got it. Would such a security breach embarrass you, or would it ruin your reputation in your society? Would such a breach empty your checking account, or would they steal the title to your house?

Bodkin Series| Netflix

Bodkin | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

Working on a story for the Guardian, our girl Dove gets tangled up with the Official Secrets Act, so her boss sends her to Bodkin, Ireland, to help Gilbert, a podcaster who is working on a story about three people who disappeared 25 years ago. The comedy, such as it is, arises mostly from a contrast of styles. The podcaster just wants to get people to tell their stories and he thinks being nice to people will get him what he wants. He comes across as a bit foolish. Yeah, betting eight large that you don't have against a local gypsy kind of seals that deal. By comparison Dove is hard nosed and rude. Emma, Gilbert's 'researcher' is a neophyte to this whole business of actually talking to strangers.

They go to poking around and talking to people and you have never met a more evasive bunch, no straight answers here. Some it is because the locals are used to talking to other locals and so assume a certain amount of common knowledge that our intrepid reporters do not have. Like, how can you not know Frank? Everyone fricking knows Frank. Well, yeah, everyone who lives here might, but our gang is not from here. It's also because many of them are old and a little befuddled, to put it nicely. But then right quick we learn there is skulduggery afoot in Bodkin and people are lying to conceal it. Dad burn criminals.

Bodkin is fictional, but County Cork is real and is the southwestern most part of Ireland.

P. S. Eels show up somewhere in the last half of the series. Weird, since I just put up a post about them.

Eww, Eels

Why We Haven’t Learned More In 101 Years Of Trying
MinuteEarth

I don't like eels, they're slimy and creepy. Mostly I suspect I don't like them because we never ate them when I was a kid and I don't think I've ever seen them for sale. But this story is as weird as the one about wasps pollinating figs.

Fishing Boat

30-foot aluminum diesel powered waterjet bowpicker

Nephew Nick seems to be getting serious about fishing. He's been working on other people's boats for a few years and now he's thinking about buying his own. This boat is in Cordova, Alaska, home to a big fish processing plant. There are no roads to Cordova and this boat is not suitable for open water, so presumably he would stay in that area and fish the inlets and the Copper River (Wikipedia).

Copper River and Cordova, Alaska

Supposedly this boat can be operated by one man, though I think a two man team would be a better choice. It would cost roughly $100K. It might work out, but it is 30 years old, and there is a bunch of complicated equipment on board, so you might want to be at least somewhat competent mechanically.

Nick Goes Fishing

My nephew somewhere between Anchorage and Seattle

Mobius Dickius

Sailing Yacht Champagne

The spiritual sons of Moby Dick have returned to wreak vengeance on the puny humans who dare to sully their pristine ocean. A pod of Orcas attacked a sailboat in the Mediterranean and inflicted enough damage to sink the boat. Thankfully no one died or a bunch of hotheads bent on revenge would be scouring the sea looking for the killers.

Commercial fishing vessels lose miles of nets every year and those lost nets cause untold damage to the denizens of the deep. I imagine American fishing vessels are better behaved but that may be wishful thinking. The American fishing fleet is only a small fraction of the fishing vessels in use world wide.

Via Ross

Nick Comes to Lunch

Dutch Harbor, Alaska

My nephew Nick came to lunch Tuesday. He's been up in Dutch Harbor for the last month on board the Fishing Vessel Nordic Fury. The Fury was operating as a tender, carrying fish from fishing vessels back to one of the three fish processing plants in Dutch Harbor. Something went wrong however, and there were three tenders and only one fishing boat, so Nordic wasn't seeing much action and eventually they sent the crew home.

F/V Nordic Fury

The Nordic Fury is 127 feet long and has three holds / fish tanks that can each hold 70 tons of fish. They fill the tanks with sea water which is about 40 degrees Fahrenheit and then chill it down to around 32 degrees. 

Fish Pump Diagram

The fish are transferred from the fishing vessel to the tender using a vacuum system with a ten inch diameter pipe. When they get back to port, the fish are transferred from the tender to the processing plant using a similar system that uses a 14 inch diameter pipe. The system at the fish plant can empty a hold in 30 minutes. Here's some photos of a fish pump installed on a fishing boat:

F/V Perfect C's with Fish Pump

Close up of fish pump

Fish Pump in Action

Near as I can tell, fish pumps work by alternately apply vacuum and pressure. They apply vacuum and atmospheric pressure pushes the fish and the water up the hose, past the check valve and into the tank. When the tank is full, they close off the vacuum and apply some pressure and the fish and the water flows out through another check valve and the exit pipe.

Nordic Fury Haulback
mel defaoite

Nick's crew were fishing for Pollock, most of which is turned into surimi, a seafood protean paste, and sent to Japan. Some of it is used to make artificial crab meat. 

Commercial Crab Species Spreadsheet

There are other boats up there that are crabbing (fishing for crab). A typical rig for a crabber will have a three inch diameter cable a couple of thousand feet long with a hundred crab pots attached to it. The pots are like seven feet in diameter and weigh a hundred pounds. They will lay the line along the top of an undersea ridge and the pots will lay on either side of the ridge. They were catching golden brown spider crabs, giant spindly things.

Fish processing plants in Dutch Harbor in the summer

Dutch Harbor is full of bald eagles, seals and eels. There are literally hundreds of bald eagles in the area. Walking on shore, heading into a strong wind, head down, he looks up and sees a bald eagle heading right for him. The seals swim in packs around the harbor hunting small fish. The water in the harbor freeze over and the seals would poke air holes in the thin ice. Nick caught a 30 pound fish while they were at anchor in the harbor by simply dropping a baited hook on a line into the water. He lowered the hook a hundred feet of so into the water and hooked a fish.

Fishing Boat

 Fish dragger " Carmelle NO.6 "..Pubnico Jan.22
Jigsaw Puzzle

The Sinner - Netflix Series - Season 4

The Sinner Season 4 Trailer | Rotten Tomatoes TV
Rotten Tomatoes TV
Small fishing community on Hanover Island off the coast of Maine within a ferry ride of Portland, Maine. Not enough fish or lobsters to go around, commercial fishing permits cost an arm and a leg. Fishermen squabble, tensions flare, fists start flying and one guy gets on top of the another and is beating him mercilessly. The girl pulls out a gun telling him to stop, he doesn't, so she shoots and kills him. Was it an accident or deliberate? Kind of hard to tell, though she was pointing the gun at him and she did pull the  trigger. Her brothers want to cover it up because if it got out 'it would ruin her life'. The girl can't handle it, falls into deep, dark depression and two years later jumps off of a cliff into the water and drowns.

It starts out kind of weird because the girl comes out of an alleyway in the middle of the night and our guy happens to see her and starts following her because he is curious and or worried. To the casual observer he looks like a pervert. Why didn't he call out to her? Could be that she was too far away, but it sure didn't look like it. Anyway, he's the good guy, so we aren't going to entertain any ideas about him being a bad guy.

Wikipedia has a page.

Portland Maine and Ferry Routes to Nearby Islands

Hanover Island isn't real, but there are a bunch of islands northeast of Portland. Not that it makes any difference, the show was shot in Nova Scotia.

P.S. I forgot to mention the alien smuggling business. Making fake ID's and carrying people to Canada. Quite the business.

We've seen all four seasons. Post about Season 2 here.