Rozema Boat Works delivered a 47-foot crab and prawn boat this past February with a pair of 550-hp John Deere 6090 diesels. It is fishing Washington’s Puget Sound and Southeast Alaska.
After that the Mount Vernon, Wash., boatyard scaled back the boats for commercial fishermen, delivering a pair of aluminum 32’ x 17’ Bristol Bay gillnetters and an aluminum 20’ x 11’ seine skiff at the end of April. The 32-footers are “very similar to the last three we delivered the year before,” says Rozema Boat Works Dirk Rozema.
Those were bow-picker stern-picker combinations, with the house-aft wheelhouse elevated on a pair of towers, allowing the gillnet reel to pass underneath. It’s a design that Rozema describes “as the current trend in Bristol Bay boatbuilding. A number of builders are doing this design.”
The Bristol Bay boats both have twin 600-hp Cummins 8.3 diesels matched up with UltraJet 340HTs. With that power package 40 knots is not out of the question, and they should be able to get on plane carrying 10,000 to 12,000 pounds of salmon. The maximum hold capacity is 25,000 lbs. The forward accommodations consist of four bunks, a galley and a dinette.
Both boats are going to Naknek, Alaska, which is close to Bristol Bay. The owner of one of the boats is based in Washington; the owner of the second boat has slightly further to travel for the Alaska summer fishery, as he lives in Germany.
The 20-foot seine skiff is for a Kodiak, Alaska, fisherman. It’s powered by a 350-hp Cummins and a steerable Kort nozzle. Rozema describes its design “as well proven; we’ve been building on and improving on for 40-some years. It started out as a 19-footer and then morphed into 20.”
The skiff is an open aluminum boat with the steering console on the starboard side and a raised afterdeck for more freeboard. The towing post is about 5 feet forward of the stern. “It has a lot of bollard pull,” noted Rozema “probably close to 7,000 pounds.”
