Most of the vessels that visit Bell Harbor Marina are private sailboats or power cruisers. But late yesterday afternoon, an atypical vessel entered the harbor. It was the F/V Chasina, a 50-foot purse seiner that performs surveys and test sampling in the coastal and inside waters of Washington State and British Columbia.
F/V Chasina is currently under charter to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW). See http://www.ga.wa.gov/pca/contract/10905c.doc. Last fall, she was chartered by the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences at UW to conduct field trips on Lake Washington for a class studying the life history and behavior of salmon. See http://www.fish.washington.edu/classes/fish450/LakeWashington.htm.
If, like me, you would have difficulty explaining precisely what a purse seiner is, here's some help from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA advises that "a seiner is so named because it fishes with a net called a seine that is laid out in a circle around a school of fish and drawn into a purse that closes the bottom, trapping the catch inside." See http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/speciesid/fish_page/fish58a.html.
F/V Chasina homeports in Port Townsend, WA.
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