Our first use wasn’t exactly a controlled experiment. We were making the 70-mile run from Point Baker to Craig, Alaska, largely outside Prince of Wales Island. The forecast called for southwest swell around 5 to 6 feet at 12 seconds, which sounded perfectly reasonable. As usual, Southeast Alaska had other ideas.
As the day progressed and we moved from depths approaching 1,000 feet onto the 300- to 400-foot shelf, the swell started building, we were occasionally seeing 10-foot swells at about 10 seconds. Wind stayed below 15 knots most of the day, mostly from the northwest, but there was enough of it to create some wind chop and make things interesting.
The roughest conditions ended up being between Warren Island and Prince of Wales. It’s one of those classic choke points where tide, current, bottom contours, and geography all seem to get together and decide to remind boaters who’s actually in charge. Around mid-tide, the longer swells largely disappeared and were replaced by confused seas coming from several directions at once. We eventually moved over toward the eastern side of the channel where an eddy reduced some of the drama. The tradeoff, of course, was shallower water and a lot more kelp.
That detail becomes important later.
The Good
The deployment process turned out to be far easier than I expected.
Following the advice of just about everyone who had ever run paravanes before us, we put the poles out shortly after leaving the harbor. Release the lines, push the poles out, set the grasshoppers that keep them from lifting back up, and lower the chain. The fish themselves stayed secured in their saddles on the stern until we felt conditions justified putting them in the water.
As the wind waves built to around three feet on the starboard quarter, we decided it was time.
Dropping the fish was surprisingly simple. Unzip the canvas, lift the fish out of the cradle, make sure the shackle and chain aren’t fouled, and drop it overboard. The fish disappears beneath the surface, the line settles into place, and that’s about it.
What was surprising was how quickly the boat’s motion changed.
For anyone unfamiliar with paravanes, they don’t work like fin stabilizers or gyros. They’re not actively trying to stop the roll. The best way I can describe them is that they effectively make the boat wider. As Fortitude rolls to port, the starboard fish generates lift and resists that motion through a pole hanging well outside the beam. Sailors will recognize the sensation immediately because it feels remarkably similar to motorsailing.
The boat still rolls. That’s important to understand because paravanes aren’t active stabilization, but what changes is yes the amount of roll and, maybe more importantly, the speed of the roll. Instead of quickly rolling from side to side, the motion becomes slower and more deliberate. I’d estimate the roll angle itself was reduced by about half, but what really stood out was how much gentler everything felt.
Coffee stayed where it belonged. Nothing got launched across the salon. Nobody felt seasick.
Later in the day, when we found ourselves dealing with occasional 10-foot swells and opposing wind waves, we were both struck by how comfortable the boat remained. We weren’t sitting around complimenting the sea conditions, but neither were we bracing ourselves against furniture or counting the minutes until we reached protected water.
The fish did exactly what they were supposed to do.
More importantly, they proved something I’d hoped ever since we started this project. They open up more routing options. I’m not talking about crossing the Gulf of Alaska or charging off into conditions we’d otherwise avoid, but they absolutely make those outside passages along the Southeast Alaska coast more comfortable and less tiring. That’s exactly why we installed them.
The Bad
Unfortunately, sometime during our adventure through the Warren Island area, we picked up what can only be described as a death star sized ball of kelp on the port side fish. What surprised me most was that I never noticed it happen.
I assumed a fouled fish would cause the boat to pull noticeably to one side. Maybe the confused seas masked it, but I never felt anything unusual. At some point I happened to glance over at the port line and noticed it wasn’t trailing aft at its normal 45-degree angle. Instead, it was sticking almost straight out from the boat. That got my attention.
A quick look out the pilothouse door revealed the problem. The fish was skipping across the surface inside a massive floating ball of kelp. Apparently the buoyancy of the kelp ball kept it afloat as it slid down the chain and lifted the fish completely out of the water. Instead of acting like a stabilizer, it was behaving more like a surfer skipping on top of the water well aft of the stern.
A converation later with a local Craig fisherman revealed that this pass is notrious for kelp balls. The same combination of tideal current and rips through there that we were experiencing above the water also impacts the kelp beds below tha water, ripping them up and spinning them into large tangled messes of bull and newspaper kelp.
At least now I understood why I hadn’t noticed any strange handling characteristics. The challenge, of course, wasn’t figuring out what happened. The challenge was figuring out how to fix it.
The Ugly
This is where things got educational.
We have an electric retrieval winch system that’s about halfway installed. Unfortunately, halfway installed is not the same thing as operational, so we were relying on the old-school method of retrieval. Out came the grappling hook. If you’ve ever watched Deadliest Catch, you’ve seen the concept. Throw a hook, snag the buoy line, pull it to the boat, and let machinery do the hard work.
The flaw in this plan was that we didn’t have the machinery.
From a safety standpoint, I put on a PFD, grabbed a headset, and headed aft. Looking back, I should have also rigged a tether and clipped into the centerline padeye that’s already there. The first challenge was simply getting the hook onto the line. We slowed to idle ahead to keep the fish trailing aft. With the canvas enclosure still in place, every throw seemed to hit something other than the target. Eventually I removed the side panel just to give myself room to work.
You’d think hooking a line ten feet away wouldn’t be particularly difficult. You’d be wrong.
After what felt like ten failed attempts, I finally realized I needed to stop throwing in front of the line and instead throw over it and pull back quickly to snag the chain.
Success, sort of.
Once I hooked the gear, I discovered just how much strength it takes to move a fish, chain, and giant kelp ball through the water. Even pulling it close to the hull was a workout. Eventually we stopped the boat entirely, which solved one problem and created another because now we were rolling around while I wrestled with the gear. I could get the fish alongside the boat, but I could not get it out of the water.
Several attempts to remove the kelp with a gaff accomplished almost nothing. At that point we made the wise decision to stop fighting, drop everything back into the water, and divert into Warren Cove to reassess our life choices. While we were heading for the cove, Suzanne suddenly remembered we had a folding tree saw aboard. You know the type backpackers carry for cutting firewood. A few minutes later she had duct-taped it to an extendable fiberglass wash brush handle and created what can only be described as an Alaskan engineering solution.
Once anchored, we came up with a new plan. By pulling in the starboard pole and walking the fish line forward, we eventually got the fish close enough to the surface to work on it. Suzanne’s newly invented kelp-cutting tool turned out to be remarkably effective. A few cuts and the entire mess floated away. We briefly discussed staying in the cove. There was a beautiful beach nearby and reports of Japanese glass floats, which immediately caught Suzanne’s attention. Finding one has been on her bucket list for years. Unfortunately, swell was still finding its way into the anchorage and we both realized that after the morning we’d had, launching the dinghy probably wasn’t the next adventure we needed. So we weighed anchor and headed back out.
For the rest of the trip I became extremely attentive to every patch of kelp we encountered. I reminded Suzanne that even fin stabilizers catch kelp. Years ago I helped reposition a friend’s Nordhavn in Mexico where a kelp encounter eventually led to a hydraulic leak at two in the morning, a hot rolling engine room, and ultimately a haulout and expensive repairs. At least with paravanes you can see the problem. That doesn’t mean I want to repeat the experience.
Back in Protected Water
Once we reached sheltered water near Craig, retrieving the fish was much easier. The process was straightforward enough. Slow to idle ahead, throw the grappling hook, catch the line, go to neutral, pull the gear alongside, and then hand-over-hand the fish back onto the rail and into its cradle.
“Easier” is probably the correct word, but “easy” would be a stretch.
I’m a reasonably strong guy and I still found the process physically demanding. Some of that was the weight of teh fish themselves but a lot of it as the resistance in the water. The very same characteristics that help them stabilize the boat, also means they resist any affort to pull them alonside. Even at idle pulling them in hand of hand was a hurculean effort. Now, to be fair, some of it was simply learning an entirely new set of motions I’d never done before. Either way, by the end of the day I had a much greater appreciation for the commercial fishermen who do this routinely.
Lessons Learned
The first lesson is that the paravanes absolutely work. They did exactly what they were designed to do. Nobody got seasick, nothing got thrown around the cabin, and conditions that would normally be exhasting on the crew – thinkgs remained surprisingly comfortable.
The second lesson is that finishing the winch installation has immediately become the highest-priority project aboard Fortitude. Push-button retrieval will make fish handling safer, faster, and far more predictable. More importantly, it will turn kelp removal from a full-body wrestling match into a manageable maintenance task.
Third, Alaska forecasts remain as optimistic as ever. We already knew that, but this trip reinforced something important. The fish meaningfully expand our comfort zone for offshore passages. They won’t make bad weather disappear, but they make passagemaking substantially more comfortable when conditions inevitably deteriorate beyond the forecast.
Fourth, our fabricator was probably right when he suggested these fish are slightly undersized for Fortitude. They originally came off a narrow 38-foot salmon troller. We’re a 54-foot, 66,000-pound trawler with a 17-foot beam. The system works, but I can see why commercial operators up here often run larger fish. I’ve already accumulated far more photos of paravane designs than any reasonable person should.
And finally, I underestimated how stressful the kelp incident was for Suzanne.
I’m very much a “we’ll figure it out” person. Suzanne likes to understand all the possible ways something could go sideways before we leave the dock. Neither approach is wrong, but I probably should have done a better job discussing potential failure scenarios ahead of time. To be fair, this was our first real use of the fish sow e were making the transition from theory, reading, and dockside conversations to actual experience and isn’t that usually where the real-world, hard-core learning happens.
When we get back to our home port in a couple of weeks, the first order of business will be finishing the winch installation. After that we’ll be buying a proper extendable pole saw and experimenting with some sort of kelp-cutting solution mounted above the fish.
Because after our first trip with paravanes, one thing is abundantly clear. The fish work. The crew survived. But sooner or later, the kelp gets a vote.