October 16, 2023 — Some 400 miles northwest of Dutch Harbor, Bering Sea pollock congregated in spectacular fashion.
In the wheelhouse of this factory trawler, Captain Jim Egaas scanned a sonar displaying a dense red band that represented millions of fish in a school that stretched for miles.
He could see the pollock up close on another screen that relayed images from an undersea camera stitched in the mesh of a quarter-mile-long net. The video feed showed swarms of them deep in the funnel-shaped trap.
Once pulled on board, the tail end of the net bulged with more than 220,000 pounds of tightly packed pollock. A crewman unstitched a seam. Raised by a powerful winch, the net spewed a silver avalanche of fish into below-deck holding tanks to await processing in a plant primed to operate 24 hours a day.
Egaas was in hurry-up mode. Even before the last of this catch was shaken from the webbing, he called for crew members to unfurl a second net from a giant reel.
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