Back in Harbor

I'm briefly back in Dutch Harbor while the boat offloads all their fish and refuels. This was a longer time at sea because after filling up once we offloaded to a tramper (foreign purchasing vessel) at a small island much closer to fishing grounds called St. Paul. The lead observer that I've been working with, Sam has completed her contract so I'll be working with another veteran observer who I just met today named John. It looks like I'll be with this boat for at least a couple more trips. My body does seem to be adapting to pitch and roll of the boat even when it's rough. I'm eating real food now, where as about half of my first trip my diet consisted of the saltines and water I could keep down. I sleep great on the boat and am actually having a tough time falling asleep back on land without the usual rocking of the waves and hum of the engine. I've gotten used to showering in a staggered athletic stance and have become much quicker at getting into all of my layers of rain gear which initially took a clumsy 10 minutes -probably much to the amusement of the crew. The flow of my duties is also much smoother. I'll generally take 5 or 6 samples a day depending on how big of hauls their pulling up. For a single sample I take around 5 big baskets of fish off a belt, and then sort and weigh them by species. For every new species I see I make a drawing and record identifying characteristics. Once in every three samples I record the sex and length of ~20 randomly selected fish. Out of those 20 every 5th haul (bag of fish they bring onboard) I get to collect otoliths. This is probably my favorite part so far. Otoliths are pairs of inner ear bones that are encased just behind the fish's brain. Back in a Seattle lab they are able to determine fish ages by counting the otoliths rings (like counting tree rings). In the flatfish that I'm working with, they can be very small (the size of a pebble or smaller) and it's challenging to make the right cut so that you don't have to go hunting for them. As observers we're also responsible to watch for accidental catch of marine mammals as they dump the codend (really big bag of fish [up to 60 metric tons]). No mammals yet - evidently it's fairly rare to snag one. They call the bringing up of the net a "haul back" and we're notified 15 minutes prior. Off time during a shift is variable from day to day. A couple of days over this last trip I worked around 9 or 10 hours straight while another day when fishing wasn't going well the captain decided to steam to a different fishing ground and I had around a 6 hour break. There's always paperwork to fill out and data to enter onto the computer but when that's completed there can be time to read, nap, eat, or listen to the iPod, etc.
... well that's probably good for one post - much more to share but I should probably break it up a bit. Thanks for the comments!