Clawsome season for small crabbing vessel Ripley

Nome’s crabbing fleet this summer saw a somewhat unconventional vessel. Gabriel Smith used a 22-foot open skiff dubbed the Ripley, hauling in more than 12,000 pounds over the 10-day commercial summer crabbing season.
Was it scary? Not really, said Smith. “It’s got a self-bailing deck, so as long as you’re under power and moving, it’s easy to avoid taking waves from the wrong direction or doing anything scary,” he said. “You have time to correct yourself if it does get that bad.”
Smith bought the boat ten days before the start of the season. He said he jumped at the opportunity. “I guess when Oliver [Tusagvik Hoogendorn] was like, “Hey, do you want to buy the Ripley?’ I was like, ‘What? No way, really?’”
The small size of the Ripley is a bit of an advantage. Smith said that it can still hold around 1,200 pounds of crab, and it’s speedy. “I knew that my overhead was tiny, and if I know that weather’s coming, if I have a little opening, I could get to the pots really quick and then run through them and then run really quick back to port,” he said.
One disadvantage is that he is limited on the pot size the boat can carry. The Ripley is only able to fit three by four-foot collapsible pots that Norton Sound Seafood Plant sells for winter crabbing. “Once you start getting to those big heavy pots, and you have, say, 100 crab in a pot at three and a half pounds, that’s going to be another 350 pounds on top of the weight of the pot, and the drag you get from the ocean current when you’re pulling the pot up,” explained Smith. “Your boom or your davit needs to be able to handle all that weight.”
“The Ripley most likely could, but wouldn’t be the greatest for it, because it’s just a light duty aluminum skiff,” he added.
A day crabbing started around 9 a.m., when Smith would head over to Norton Sound Seafood Plant and pick up bait. He would have to wait a few hours for the bait to thaw, because his operation was small enough to not have a bait chipper. “We did it all by hand. we just diced it up into five or six pieces,” he said. “We didn’t go crazy with the knives, just kind of chopped them up.”
Smith and his brother, Russell, who worked with him for the season, would load the bait bags and hit the water around noon at Belmont Point. The Ripley is small enough he figured he could just keep it on a trailer instead of keeping it on the water, eliminating the need for a dock ticket at the small boat harbor.
The most gas they burnt was about 14 gallons round trip, and that combined with bait costs kept their overhead for each trip to the pots around $200.
From there, they’d head out towards their crab pots, a journey of about an hour to his biggest string. Smith started with 18 pots total and acquired a few more over the season.  “Our farthest pots were about 30 miles from the port, and I think our big string was about 25 miles,” he said.
Smith said he tried to sink pots about a quarter mile apart. “We get the pot on board, and I point the boat in the right direction towards our next pot while Russ is sorting crab and putting everything away,” he said. “By the time that we’re done sorting crab, just idling we’ll be reasonably close to the next pot.”
The big string of pots, about 18 strong by the end of the season, took about four hours to get through. A successful enough catch had them doing two trips out to the pots. “If we were loading up on crab really fast, if the pots were full of that many keepers, we would have to do two runs in a day,” he said.
Most nights, they were arriving at Norton Sound Seafood Plant anywhere from 7 p.m. to midnight.
Crabs must be delivered alive because meat deteriorates fast when the animals die. Smith had a system to keep his crabs fresh by keeping them iced in an insulated tote.
Once the crabs were delivered, Smith and his brother would get the boat cleaned up and ready for the next day and do it all again, a much less strenuous schedule than the more famous crab fishery out of the Aleutian Islands. “Once everything’s cleaned up and you’re off the boat and you’re ready for the next day, it’s pretty relaxed,” he said. “It’s not like you’re in Dutch Harbor on a massive 200-foot boat doing 18 to 20 hour days and sleeping for three or four hours and doing it again.”
“The same dangers are here, but you’re just not as fatigued as all the deck hands and skippers and everyone involved in that fishery,” he said. “It’s just more laid back here.”
More than the side hustle, Smith just likes being out on the water. “The weather this year was phenomenal. Most of the first week of the season was great, a lot of really calm evenings and mornings on the water,” he said. “Towards the end of the season, it got a little choppy.”
The boat can be a little sketchy in heavy waves. “Anything more than two feet, and start to think about, like, ‘Well, if we try and wait another three or four hours, will it calm down?’” he said.
Still, the boat handles well in swells. “We could do whichever swell size, up to like six or seven feet, as long as the swells aren’t stacked on top of each other, and we’re not just bobbing up and down constantly,” he said. “But big slow rollers? Piece of cake.”
No one in his family was a crabber before him, but he grew up fishing near Wooley Lagoon. He said that time out on the water helped prepare him for this summer’s crabbing season. “I guess it started with dad with the rowboat setting a gillnet out in front of Wooley,” he said. “Being outside in and around boats just really helps you visualize what’s going to happen, what things will be like.”
He got his start in crabbing helping James Horner on the Marilyn Jean, a much bigger boat. “I want to say he’s like a 38-foot seiner that he converted into a crab boat, which is awesome,” said Smith. “James’ boat is amazing.”
Smith took time off to work the season, but he said it was worth it. Now that he’s got the pots he needs and he has it dialed in, he’s already looking forward to next year. “It’s way more enjoyable than an office,” he said.