Novels of Life, Love & Danger in The Great Land
The two images below are both looking down to the deck on an 86′ long tender that is tied up to a pier. On the left, the view is from the wheelhouse on the stern. On the upper deck are hoses and parts of the conveyor/slide. On the lower deck are the aluminum sorting tables. There are cranes on both sides of the boat. The photo on the right is taken from the bow and you can see part of the wheelhouse. This is the same boat deck, from two viewpoints.
This is a tender tied up to the delivery dock at a cannery/processing facility. The yellow crane in the center is often used during deliveries and to lower supplies to the boats.
Alaska is larger than Texas, California and Montana–combined. The stories in our books take place in areas surrounding the Gulf of Alaska, which is slightly smaller than the Gulf of Mexico. Below is a zoom in on Google Maps of the Kenai Peninsula. There is one highway–2 lane for the most part–going south from Anchorage to Homer (~225 miles/3.5 hour drive), with a branch off to Seward (~125 miles/2 hour drive). Prince William Sound is in the upper right corner of the blue box below. In Rocky Bay, the seiner Stormy C travels from Seward (center of the box) to Valdez, through Prince William Sound.
Below, within the larger outline, is a closer view of the areas fished in the books: Rocky Bay, K Bay, Windy Bay, and Nuka Bay. Res Bay is in the upper box. It generally takes a seiner two days to go from Res Bay (Seward) to K Bay (Homer).
I smoke the salmon, then peel the skin and stuff the meat into jars for canning under high pressure. The photo above is of smoked fillets. Below are jars being stuffed.
The power block is a spinning wheel, controlled with hydraulics, that helps bring the net in. The interior rubber grips the net, leadline, and corks, pulling the net and fish aboard, where the deckhands separate and stack it, corks on one side and leadline on the opposite side, with the webbing between them. On the boat above, the power block is on a slider on the main boom, meaning it can be extended to the end of the boom when needed, or brought in closer as shown above. One end of the net is hanging from the power block in the photo above.
The crow’s nest is a stand at the stop of the main mast. It has a steering wheel and throttle controls and the height allows the skipper to see into the water and see the net as it is deployed. Access is via rungs welded onto the main mast.