10 Cast Net: Alaskan Crab Boat

Tuesday 2 October 2012

Alaskan Crab Boat

The Wizard is a 155’x30’ vessel commissioned to be built by the US Navy in 1945 in Brooklyn, NY by the Ira S. Bushey shipyard. Her original name is an International Marine Organization (IMO) number, YO-210. She is one of the few remaining YO-153 class vessels. Purchased by John Jorgensen After the war, she was laid up in mothballs in Boston harbor. Some of the Oiler fleet was used as target practice, or for building artificial reefs off the eastern seaboard in the last few decades. YO-210 was eventually purchased and made one trip unsuccessfully as the Clifford K hauling molasses before being purchased by John Jorgensen in 1978 to be converted to a fishing vessel to fish crab in the Bering Sea. Renamed the Wizard after his grandfather’s Longliner, which was one of the premier cod and halibut boats in the Seattle fleet of the early and mid 20th Century. John’s father and grandfather were Norwegian immigrants in the pioneer days of the Alaskan commercial fishing industry, and John started working for them at a very young age.