The difference between trollers and trawlers (and purseiners and gill netters, for that matter).
We’ve been inadvertently calling the fishing vessels in this part of the world "trawlers", when they should be called "trollers". Trawlers use a trawl net, which scrapes along the bottom, picking up everything in its path. Only a small percentage of the catch is commercially viable, and the rest is thrown back, typically dead. This is very hard on the ecosystem and eventually the fish populations can get so out of balance that the good fishing stocks decline with the bad.
Trollers, on the other hand, fish from individual lines, set at specific depths, with bait optimized for catching the desired fish. It takes more work, but avoids the random destruction of the trawl approach, and in the long run leads to better financial return for the fishermen.
Trollers in this part of the world come in all shapes and sizes. Modern looking hulls like the top two photos, and lovely double enders, like this, abound.
The double ender won’t carry the payload of the design with the transom stern, but it will be more economically driven at slow speeds, and will have a much softer motion uphill.
We’ve already discussed the gill netters, when we talked about our experience in Cordova. These too target a specific species, in this case salmon (but gill nets in some situations are indiscriminate in their catch).
Then there are the purseiners. In this case they have a purse net which is drawn around a specific school of fish (salmon or anchovies, as an example). The purse net is closed by the tender (shown on the right of the photo).
And then the net is brought aboard with this hydraulic self-tending winch/block affair.
Posted by Steve Dashew (July 19, 2007)
