About four months ago I in a sein skiff by the mouth of Uyak Bay, Kodiak Alaska. Not everyone knows what a sein skiff is, so I'll elaborate. Our primary skiff was a sixteen foot welded aluminum bathtub of a boat with a big block Chevy engine mounted midship. This one had the control console right in front of engine, which was covered with a large aluminum box. This also served as my only seat. Why these things are built with out a presentable seat is beyond me. Anyways, the whole point of a sein skiff is to hold that end of the net and to gradually haul it back toward the boat. This requires a lot of power and can get pretty crazy in rough weather. The benefits of our primary skiff, which was jet powered, were appreciated most in the rough stuff. Mostly because you could take it over the cork line, something that you couldn't do w/ an outboard.
On this particular morning I wasnÂt in that skiff. I was in our backup. This was basically the same thing, only it had a 350 horse Johnson outboard instead of a jet. The steering is reversed when you use an outboard, but it wasnÂt very much harder to operate. I had been cut loose about twelve feet form the rocks and I was supposed to tow in and but up with them. I throttled up to about 50% or so trying to get a feel for the current/tide. It was really screaming around the point just east of me and I couldn't get any closer to the shore even with it wide open. I was actually being pulled away. After about fifteen minutes of this I was a good twenty yards from shore. The line from our skiff to the sein was the same stuff they use to bring up crab pots, it's yellow and feels like steel cable. When it broke it sounded like a shotgun blast. I saw it snap and grabbed the handrail on the control consol just as the skiff stood up and took off like a shot toward the rocks. I'd gotten slammed into the outboard pretty hard but I managed to rip out the shutoff before it got to shore. I started and reversed toward the sein... of course I had forgotten about the five feet of towline hanging in the water behind me which promptly mangled itself in my prop. I was only about ten feet from the rocks and I was damn glad I had my Endura w/ me. It made short work of the tangled line.
I changed out the towline for some nice new Kevlar reinforced braid before I would go back out.