I flew to Dutch Harbor, AK with three other crab biologists. We met the captain and crew of the fishing vessel Royal American chartered to conduct our crab research. To be efficient in our use of time and resources, we are actually conducting two research projects. We are tagging red king crab and conducting a trawl survey for Tanner crab. We needed quite a bit of gear on board – all the nets for the trawl survey, plus crab pots for catching the red king crab to complete both of these projects. The crew did an excellent job of fitting everything on the deck. It’s not typical to have find room for both trawl gear and pots on a boat at the same time.
When we prepare to go to sea we need lots and lots of lists, that get checked once, twice, and many more times. When you are in the middle of the ocean, you can’t exactly run back to the store — and no, there isn’t an Amazon boat to bring it to you! The big things are easy to remember, but it’s often trivial things like pencils or zip ties that get forgotten. You don’t want to be at sea for three weeks with only one pencil and lots of data to record! After many last-minute trips to the store, we left Dutch Harbor a few days ago, and so far so good, we don’t seem to be missing anything!
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