For the 2022 fishing season, Rozema Boat Works delivered a pair of aluminum 32-foot Bristol Bay gillnetters and one aluminum 20-foot seine skiff. For the coming 2023 season, the Mount Vernon, Wash., boatyard will be doing that and more.
The “more” is an aluminum 47-foot crab and prawn fishing boat that will be working Washington’s Puget Sound and Southeast Alaska.
A new feature for the Rozema 47-footer is a raised pilothouse matched up to a planing hull. “You step up off the deck three steps,” says company president Dirk Rozema, explaining how high the pilothouse is above the deck. That creates a larger than normal engine room beneath the pilothouse and better visibility from the pilothouse. “You get up higher and see the whole operation a little easier. It’s the first time we’ve merged it with the planing-hull form.”
The boat’s owner “was looking for speed,” Rozema adds, which explains the twin 550-hp John Deere 6090 diesels matched up with Twin Disc MGX5086A gears that will be going into the hull. He figures that’s enough power for 23 to 24 knots when fully tanked down and carrying a small load of crabs.
The 47-footer is scheduled to be completed by the end of the year, which brings up a constant headache for Rozema. The engines and gears were supposed to be delivered this past July. Then in June, Rozema got a phone call telling him that “the gears will not be here until maybe November.” The John Deere engines have been in Seattle since June, but without the transmissions they aren’t going in the boat.
Dealing with delayed equipment deliveries be it engines, transmissions, electric motors, hydraulics, or electrical panels is “half my battle every day,” says Rozema.
That’s what happened last year with the gillnetters Rozema was building. The engines and gears arrived “really late and we picked them off the truck and they went from the truck directly into the boat. That’s a first.”
This year the same issue arose with the two 32’ x 17’ gillnetters currently under construction that need to be in the water by next April. In both boats, ZF Marine gears were going to be matched up to twin 600-hp Cummins 8.3 diesels with 340HT UltraJet water jets until ZF called Rozema and told him the gears wouldn’t be delivered until June 2023. “We had to scramble and switch to Twin Disc gears with similar reduction.” The Twin Disc gears are scheduled to arrive at Rozema Boat Works in March 2023.
That issue hasn’t plagued the 20-foot seine skiff that’s going to Kodiak, Alaska, in June. It will have a Cummins steerable 350-hp nozzle and a Twin Disc MG5061SC gear.
