Going fishing at the start of a fishing season sets in motion a concatenation of events, which ultimately leads to a determination of where to fish next, but which must along the way produce a determination of where to fish first. To fish from a nexus of natural materiality that will contribute to a profitable fishing trip, captains must first gain a workable level of certainty that they will find such a nexus within a particular space. To analyze how captains gain the certainty they need to bet their profitability, and therefore both their and their crew’s income, for a trip on a certain spot, this section first describes the enacted environment that captains must make sense of, the primary element of which is their ‘plotter.’ Then the section describes how captains make sense of this enacted environment.
a. The plotted environment
The wheelhouse plotter is the trawl captains’ primary enacted environment when
beginning a fishing trip. Plotters are instruments that locate objects in space and time. All vessels in the Kodiak trawl fleet have a plotter that is typically on continual display on a computer monitor in the wheelhouse. Tied to the vessel’s navigational system, the plotter is a computer program that plots objects from the past and present in space according to the Cartesian
coordinate system, and in time according to ‘clock time.’ Similar to the geographical information systems that are increasingly commonplace in academic, governmental, and technical industries, plotters display types of objects in layers, starting with a base layer that differentiates sea and land, then building in layers of information upon other layers, culminating in a rich picture of the vessel’s temporal and spatial environment. Such layers include bottom contours, depths,
locations of other vessels, regulatory fishing areas, and past fishing and navigational events.
These are the raw data that captains use to tell a story of what is happening, form which to conjecture what to do next, i.e., where to fish.
One of the primary ways in which plotters influence captains’ sensemaking of where to fish is by recording and recalling fishing and navigational events. Plotters are the means by
Figure 13: Screen capture of a wheelhouse plotter display. The dispersed gray numbers are depths of the ocean bottom, the gray lines depict the contours of the bottom. The colored lines and curves are tow lines. Different colors represent different target species and/or fishing seasons, depending on the captain’s labeling scheme. Groups of tow lines exemplify spots that are fished relatively often. The boxes (the red one above “Alaska”, the blue one above that, and the red box above the blue box) are areas that are closed to trawling, either permanently or based on “triggers” (hence the blue box with tow lines inside it). The gold-colored line conjoined to two nested gold circles above “KODIAK ISLAND” is the vessel (“PROGRESS”) in which this plotter is displayed. Other vessels can be seen above this gold line (e.g., “Pacific St” for Pacific Star).
which captains see in the present what they have done in the past. They save towing information, while also allowing captains to annotate that information. In addition, captains create symbols to capture events for future use, such as profitable tows, interactions with navigational or towing hazards such as wrecks or lost fishing gear, and places and times in which they have spotted potentially profitable aggregations (or bottom types that suggest potentially profitable
aggregations), even if they did not fish there. As one captain described, “We mark hangs where the boat's hung up, where other boats have hung up, fish marks, hard bottom marks. . . these are all marks of all the stuff around here, this Christmas-tree stuff here is all of my personal marks. . . I got thousands of marks from 20 years ago.”
Figure 13 is a screen capture from a plotter aboard a vessel on rockfish fishing trip. This screen displays land and sea, bottom depths and contour lines, markings of “hangs” and fishing events the captain has entered in the past, past towing track lines, other vessels, areas closed to fishing, among other objects. While this screen capture is necessarily static, in the wheelhouse the display moves as the vessel moves through space. The following is an example of a captain attempting to make sense of where to fish using the plotter from which this screen capture was taken:
“This set here I think is what I'm gonna try (pointing to a mark on his plotter).
The last time I fished for dusky rockfish here, a couple of years ago, I did ok up in there. This is real tough towing up through here (pointing to a different area), and then this over here has always been fairly good (pointing to a different spot).”
Objects on the plotter display serve as input to the captain’s production of a hypothesis of where to find a potentially profitable nexus of natural materiality to fish in. Using the plotter, the captain integrates past and future in the present, exemplifying the “What’s the story here?”
portion of a sensemaking episode.
i. Building abductive capacity to find a fishing spot
To make sense of their plotted environment, captains tend to supplement their own experience with other captains’ experiences. Thus, the past experience that the last chapter demonstrated to be an integral part of making sense at sea need not be one’s own - it may be another's. While observing fishing trips and fleet meetings during my field research, I often found captains sharing fishing experiences. One captain, when asked in an interview to divide up the amount of time he spent on the radio with other captains between talking about fishing conditions and strategy, political stuff, or ‘other,’ stated, “I'd say 10% other, 20% political, and
the rest is fishing. The majority is fishing for me.” Captains seek out information about natural conditions at sea from other captains so they can, as another captain stated, “know what to expect” before they arrive at a fishing spot. Obtaining information from a captain who has recently fished in a certain spot is, as a captain noted, “a good indicator” of what one will find there, yet, speaking to the inherently indeterminate nature of natural materiality in this context, this captain continued with, “if you are not right in the exact same spot, it could be something different, but [information from another captain who has been there] is a pretty good indicator of what it is, it’s just not a hard and fast rule.”
Captains are disposed seek information about natural materiality from other
captains. This disposition complements the disposition to fish where one has fished before, as one captain exemplified in his response to being asked if he typically fishes in spots he has fished in before: “Yeah, or somebody tells you about a spot.” The disposition to use another’s experience with natural materiality is due to the efficiency imperative. We can see the
relationship between importing information from other captains and the efficiency of locating aggregations in one captain’s response when asked how often he relied on other captains to determine where to fish: “Probably 50% or so. If there's a lot of fish around you don’t need to ask a lot of questions, but if they're hard to find, then you get on the radio.” As another captain put it, “There's lots of us out there, and if somebody finds something, we go to that spot; we’re not going spend time driving around where there's nothing.” Captains import experience from one another in order to enhance their ability to efficiently know, with as much certainty as they feel is necessary or possible (i.e., a workable level), what they will catch in a certain spot before they expend the resources to steam there. In other words, captains choose a fishing spot based on a workable level of individual certainty, which is often socially attainted.
Importing information from another’s experience with natural materiality is one way in which captains enhance their ability to efficiently make sense of their plotted environment, or what I call ‘abductive capacity.’ Captains not only engage in abduction, as Chapter Two demonstrated, but they use an abductive mode of inquiry, rather than solely deduction or induction, because it is a comparatively efficient process. Rescher (1978: 42) characterizes the the economy of abduction in the following: “Conjectural fancy is limitless, but resources are scarce and life is short. . . possibilities in practice cannot be spun out forever.” Similarly, Peirce argues that economy is the driving force of abduction: “[Economy] is in all cases the leading
consideration in Abduction. . . Economy of money, time, thought, and energy” (Peirce, 1931-1958: 5.598 − 5.600, cited in Rescher, 1978: 66). Abductive capacity is the ability to engage in, what Peirce calls, “intelligent guessing” in order to efficiently alight upon a plausibly effective next step in one’s organizing process. Captains increase their abductive capacity by
incorporating information about natural materialities from other captains’ experiences into their own sensemaking so that they can more intelligently guess where they will find a profitable nexus to fish in.
The disposition to increase abductive capacity by importing experience from other captains manifests in various patterns of interaction. These patterns range from haphazard
information-sharing events, such as in passing to and from the fishing grounds, to less haphazard events, such as when captains are gathered in meetings before and after seasons, to more routine information-sharing processes, such as when captains operate in an established fishing group.
The following conversation among two captains sitting at the dock preparing to go fishing and one who is already fishing exemplifies a haphazard occasion of increasing abductive capacity by importing information about material conditions at sea:
Docked captain #1: “It looks like you are traveling at tow speed, what are you doing?”
At-sea captain: “Towing my last tow then coming in”
Docked captain #1: “Is this your first tow on the east side?”
At-sea captain: “Yeah, just made a three-hour pass”
Docked captain #2: “You must have found some fish”
At-sea captain: “Roger that”
The docked captains in this example were tracking the at-sea captain’s movement on their plotters. From the nature of the at-sea captain’s movement they could tell he was fishing. Thus, before leaving the dock, the captains located a fishing spot that another captain had evidently already conjectured would be a profitable place to fish. Yet, they sought to enhance their
understanding of that fishing spot by importing the at-sea captain’s experience with the material conditions in that spot.
Figure 14 diagrams the contribution this interaction makes to the docked captains’
abductive capacity to find a profitable fishing spot. First, we can assume that the docked captains, based on their own past experience, have existing interpretive schemata of the
characteristics of a profitable fishing spot at that time of year based on their target species (arrow 2). We can also assume that the specific quota amounts the captains can catch, and the profit they want to make at the end of the trip, are also incorporated into their interpretive schemata (arrow 1). These captains, however, sought information from the captain at sea to better understand current material conditions, based on that captain’s experience (arrow 5). Due to the information they received - that the at-sea captain towed for at least three hours - the docked captains were able to increase their understanding of at-sea conditions, such as how aggregated target fish might be in that spot (arrow 3). In terms of arrow 4, the reason the docked captains were seeking concrete information about a certain fishing spot was to attempt to understand whether that spot would help them move toward their desired future event of enacting a profitable trip. The
Figure 14: Diagram of an abductive sensemaking event that is distributed across two sets of captains
occupying two different locations – one who is fishing, the others who are at the dock preparing to go fishing
concrete information they gained informed their conjecture as to whether fishing in that spot will help them move toward their desired future event of enacting a profitable fishing trip (arrow c).
What we do not know is whether the docked captains updated any part of their respective sensemaking spaces based on the new information, such as altering their desired future event by changing the amount of profit they expected to make. Nonetheless, we do know that the docked captains enriched their capacity to produce a conjecture of what to do next by using another captain’s experience to inform the concrete part of their abductive sensemaking.
A less haphazard situation in which captains import experience from one another is at regular gatherings on land, such as fleet meetings. Fleet meetings, as described in Chapter One, are typically held to so the fleet can structure how they enact a particular fishery, or how they progress from one fishery to another, all with the goal of maximizing the ability of each vessel to have access to a target species quota. I regularly observed captains seeking and sharing
experiences regarding natural conditions at sea before, during, and after such meetings. The following exchange at a fleet meeting between two captains who are regular members of the Kodiak trawl fleet and one who is a regular member of the nearby Sand Point (i.e., Western Gulf) trawl fleet (but who attended a Kodiak fleet meeting), demonstrates a more regular situation in which one captain shares cues about material conditions with another:
Kodiak captain #1: “How much do we know about the boats from Sand Point that are coming out to harvest the pollock quota?”
Kodiak captain #2: “One of those guys is right here (points to another captain), why don’t you ask him?” (general laughs in the room)
Sand Point captain: “The reason we came out here is because there wasn’t any fish around Sand Point. We’re probably going to go back there and look again to see if there’s any fish”
Kodiak captain #2: “I saw plenty above Mountain Top”
Sand Point captain: “Pardon?”
Kodiak captain #2: “I saw plenty of fish above Mountain Top the other day”
Sand Point captain: “Did you?”
Kodiak captain #2: “Oh shit yeah, I would have loved to set on it!”
This interaction during a fleet meeting, diagrammed in Figure 15, consists of an information-sharing event that connects two implied sensemaking episodes. The first implied sensemaking episode is part of Kodiak captain #2’s experience at sea in which he made sense of the natural materiality at Mountain Top; the second is the Sand Point captain’s future episode, before he goes fishing, in which he will conjecture that a certain place to fish is his best choice among whatever options are available to him. And one of those options is, due to this conversation,
Mountain Top. Thus, we know that Kodiak captain #2 conjectured that Mountain Top would be a profitable place to fish, even though he did not fish there (the pollock season was not yet open).
To produce this conjecture, Kodiak captain #2 integrated interpretive schemata, distilled from past experiences, of what a profitable place to fish for pollock looks like with cues from the natural materiality he encountered at Mountain Top. Although we cannot know to what extent the Sand Point captain integrated the Kodiak captain’s experiential information into his own sensemaking, we can assume that his abductive capacity for finding a place to fish was enhanced based on his statement that prior to the meeting he could not find “any fish around Sand Point.”
In addition to occasional information-sharing events, most captains have groups they regularly fish in. Groups tend to range in size from three (e.g., a group the fleet calls “The Three Amigos”) to five or six vessels, and the members of groups tend to share a common
Figure 15: Diagram of two sensemaking episodes, one in the past (at Mountain Top), the other in the future when the Sand Point captain goes fishing, which are linked by an information-sharing event at a fleet meeting. This event served to distribute the Sand Point captain’s sensemaking of where to fish across these two captains.
characteristic in addition to fishing in the same spots, such as delivering to the same cannery (e.g., “The Trident Boats”), having the same general homeport (e.g., “The Oregon Boats”), perhaps even the same hometown (e.g., “The Newport Boats”), or operating vessels that have common owners. Groups share information about material conditions across multiple vessels, enhancing individual abductive capacity to make sense of where to fish. In the following quote a captain, who is also an owner of three vessels, describes the first day of a pollock fishery,
demonstrating a group approach to finding a place to fish:
“I control three boats, it’s a luxury. When we left town, most of the fleet was already out. I talked to them, asked how it was going. The three boats I control, we all went to the same spot we went to last year. That’s what most people do.
We went to three different areas. As for the fleet, half the fleet went to one area, half went to another area. . . The other two boats would tell us what biomass they were seeing [on their sonar], and I would compare that to what I was seeing. Well, based on what I saw, the two other boats picked up and ran all night to get to where I was. . . As an owner, I was looking at the bottom line of making money.
Because I have three boats and work with the fleet, nine times out of ten I am on the fish.”
A common strategy among Kodiak trawl captains is to steam to the fishing grounds a day or two before the regulatorily-prescribed start to the season in order to find profitable fishing spots.
Because the fishing season of interest in this quote was the first pollock season of the year, captains had time to go out to the grounds to look at concrete conditions before the season started. Figure 16 depicts the sensemaking process described by this captain/owner.
In this sensemaking process, there is one production of a conjecture, but it is informed by cues from materialities from different locations. In order to obtain such cues, each captain put the fleet’s disposition to fish in the same spots they have fished before into action. After steaming to their individual spots, the captains, using sonar, examined the materiality beneath their vessel for aggregations large enough to satisfy their desired future event of fishing in the most profitable spot of their three options. Captains then shared those cues with the owner of the three vessels over their radios (arrow 5), which he used to inform his understanding of concrete conditions at all three locations (arrow 3). Using an interpretive schema for choosing the best fishing spot of the three (a schema built from past experience, arrow 2, and a desired future events, arrow 1), the owner conjectured that one spot was better than the others (arrows a + c), from which he
conjectured that if they all fished in that spot, they would all be better off than fishing from the
other two, moving them from the past and into the future (arrows b + d). Thus, after this conjecture, “two boats picked up and ran all nigh” to the third boat.
ii. Information sharing and incongruity
While captains are disposed to seek information about the conditions of natural
materiality from other captains, they are not always disposed to share such information. When
materiality from other captains, they are not always disposed to share such information. When