Pacific Seafood
To give you a sense of setting, it was a wild weather day in the midst of a wild week at the coast the day we had planned for the tours of the dock area of this town. The coastline and the ocean had been experiencing tempest-type weather with gusts and spits of snow, hail for several days, the crabbing boat that capsized on re-entry into port happened the evening before and was on our minds as we geared up for the weather side of our session. The rain was pouring and the wind was lashing as we made our way along the docks.
The processing company of Pacific Seafood was first up on the docket. This company is a premier processor for the Dungeness crab that is currently in the height of the season right now. It is the job of this company to get the crab off the boats and through the processing sequence in a timely manner to keep the product at the utmost highest value. We got to witness the whole sequence of a ship loaded with crab pulling into the dock for unloading, the backing and cleaning of the crab on the fast paced conveyor line, the crab that had been placed into shallow flats and the flats stacked into blocks, the blocks going through the cooking and cooling process before the product could be individually quick frozen or sold fresh.
Time is of the essence of this job, especially during the first two weeks of the harvest season. The huge freezer room that holds several truck loads at one time, can get filled to capacity on a daily basis and a fleet of trucks is put into service to remove the frozen product to facilities out of the area that can hold train-load volumes of the crab. Many off-site facilities are well away from the area to north to the Willamette Valley and into Washington State. After the actual crab harvesting season is over, the individual frozen pieces will be packed and sold to specs from retailers across the nation.
Once crab season has slowed to a trickle, the whole processing facility and all the equipment switches over to handle the next season of fishing which will be whiting. All the production lines and specific pieces of equipment are moved out of the building, temporary walls are torn down and replacements that reconfigure the facility are put up. Even the equipment on the dock changes from crab to whiting to keep the quality high and the unloading as efficient as possible for each kind of fish.
Other structures along the dock handle the shrimp processing and the fish that need to be processed into fillets like tuna, rockfish, and cod with the same degree of specificity. The amount of equipment needed to process the loads of various bounties is astounding and fills their own facility. Crews are needed around the clock at each facility to manage the loads coming in and to keep the lines of production running smoothly along with maintaining and switching over equipment to match the product load.
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