Some of the most interesting commercial fishing vessels on the water are owner-built. The design and functionality of a fishing vessel that moves from imagination to final form through the work of the people who will take it to sea are almost always unique. Along those lines, the F/V Ironic, built by Ken Bates in Eureka, California, is a one-off.
“It’s an old boat,” says Bates. “I built it over 30 years ago. It’s fiberglass over plywood. All my boats are.” Initially built for gillnetting herring and trolling for salmon, Bates later started fishing Lampara nets. He set the vessel up with a 12-inch Marco power block on a davit to handle one wing of the net, retrieving the other wing with his net reel. “It’s not an ideal setup,” Bates says. “I wouldn’t recommend it, but we’ve been doing it for 25 years, and we are used to it. I use a different double sheave hauler on the skiffs I build.”
The Ironic has an 8-foot by 9-foot cabin with three bunks. “It’s got a diesel stove, sink, all that,” says Bates. “When we’re trolling salmon, we go all the way to Monterey. We can be gone four months, just the two of us.” While the Bates haven’t been salmon trolling in 3 years, when they do go, they clear the deck and put on a pair of aluminum trolling poles and a pair of 2-spool Kolstrand salmon gurdies near the stern. “We access the trolling pit by an alleyway on the starboard side,” says Bates. “When we get fish, we bleed them and send them down a chute on the port side and ice them in slush ice in brailer bags.”
