November 18, 2016 — The fishing fleet in Washington State is getting older, and it’s due for a big upgrade. A new study says that work could bring in billions of dollars for the state. That could help save the region’s struggling shipyards.
But first you’ll have to convince the old fishermen to spend money on their boats.
It’s hard to be a shipyard in Seattle. There’s a lot of competition for the land they’re sitting on. “There was a bunch of other smaller yards around here, and they’ve gone away” said Scott Woodard. He works at Pacific Fishermen Shipyard in Ballard.
He fell in love with working on old boats. He mastered an ancient technique where you push strings of tarred hemp into the seams between planks on a wooden boat.
“This is caulking,” he explained. “But people will say corking. My mentor was kind of a traditionalist. And he called himself a caulker. So in honor of him, that’s what I say. I’m a caulker, not a corker.”
But it’s not caulking or corking that pays the bills at this shipyard. Most fishing boats are metal. The real money is in fixing up those boats, doing things like painting and sandblasting.