Boat Maintenance The Rural Alaska Way

This is the fishing vessel Eventide undergoing maintenance on the grid in Pelican.

Commercial fishing boats, especially wooden boats, are in constant need of maintenance and upkeep. But how do you make quick maintenance and repairs to the hull of a fishing boat below the water line? One expensive way is to go to a haul-out facility to have the boat hoisted out of the water and placed in dry dock. This can be expensive and there are relatively few places to dry dock a commercial vessel.

Fishing Vessel Eventide, Pelican, Alaska

Many remote villages in Southeast Alaska offer public marine grids to accomplish the same objective for quick maintenance. When the tide is high, covering the grid with enough water to float over it, a boat can pull over the grid and tie off to the pilings. When the tide goes out the boat rests on the grid and all that is normally below the water line is available to work on. Usually this means scrubbing off barnacles, adding a new coat of bottom paint, making a repair, or adding strips of zinc to prevent electrolysis from corroding metal parts such as the propeller or rudder. But fishermen have to be quick - the tide comes in and goes out twice daily so the window to get work done is short!