Sea Control - Sea Control 431 - Working Boats with Tom Crestodina

Episode Date: May 18, 2023

Links1. Working Boats – An Inside Look at Ten Amazing Watercraft, Tom Crestodina, Sasquatch Books, 2022.

Hello, and welcome to the Sea Control Podcast. I'm Nathan Miller. Today, Jared Samuelson speaks with Tom Crestedina about his children's book, Working Boats. In addition to the masterful illustrations he created, Crestedina includes a little something for everyone to learn about these fascinating machines. Joshua Groover edited and produced today's episode. SimSec is looking for a volunteer to join our technical team and support our web operations. We're looking for someone with a background in WordPress implementation and support, as well as knowledge in web hosting and networking. Some knowledge of identity management

and security operations is also helpful. Please reach out to content at simsec.org to share your background and discuss. I would like to pause here to highlight our local chapters. Whether you are in South Korea, Egypt, Singapore, France, New York, India, or the Caribbean, chances are there's a SimSec local chapter near you. You can find a full listing of local chapters and contact information on our website at simsec.org. So if you are interested, please reach out. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec podcast network,

The Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of Iron Brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. And with that, Kimber's Men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Hello, showmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control.

My guest today is author and artist Tom Crestodina, and we're going to be discussing his children's book, Working Boats, an inside look at 10 Amazing Watercraft. You can find it on the SimSec holiday reading list. So I put in a plug for you there. If you have little ones, it's a great book for them. As a reminder to listeners, all the opinions today are our own and not reflective of any institution with which we might be otherwise associated. So, Tom, welcome to you. I don't think most of our listeners realize, but you're an author, illustrator, as well as a mariner.

You grew up in the Midwest. So where did you grow up and what made you want to decide to pursue a life at sea? Yeah, good morning. I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me. I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, outside of Chicago, in the north suburbs. I originally came out to the West Coast in 1994 when I was in my 20s and was just a love the natural environment here the mountains and the water and so that was kind of what drew me

but I had no experience with boats at all until I started working in a boatyard in Seattle and started painting boat bottoms and worked from there to to working in the yard store and really just loved the the trades and it was the uh in the beginning for me I think it was the The sights and the sounds and the smells of the boatyard, the sawdust and all those sounds of the grinders and all the action of the boatyard was just thrilling for me. So I went from there to studying at the Seattle Maritime Academy. I actually completed my course, but I did not go to my graduation ceremony because during the month prior to that, we had a boat come into the yard where I was still working that I just loved. It was 1947, Wooden Saner, and I met the crew, and I got kind of shanghaied, and I ended up skipping my graduation ceremony and flying up to Sitka, Alaska, and I've never looked back. That was it.

I've been fishing parts of the year ever since then, and I'm actually in the process right now of making moves to buy that very same vessel after running it as a hired captain. so we've kind of come full circle and now it's it's called the alsec named after the alsec river she's a beauty oh very nice um can i ask you a little more specific about where in the chicago suburbs you happen to grow up because that was where my family's originally from oh really uh yeah i grew up in the unincorporated area between columbia and niles illinois so right not very far from where there was the columbia naval air station uh which is now and i think it's condos now but uh we used to see the airplanes flying out of there hear them all the time went to some air shows there so that was that was actually the only contact i had as a kid with the navy

although later learned there was there's a big station at waukegan yeah absolutely um my family grew up in elgin and nephew and grandson of some naval officers so the pull of the sea away from the midwest and like the flatness of it right it's like i i can definitely appreciate the draw of the Pacific Northwest. But you mentioned you studied marine engineering at Seattle Maritime Academy. I don't know what that setup looks like up there, but I've been to the one at Cal Maritime out here in Vallejo, California, which is not that far away from where I live. And it's pretty impressive. What was it about fishing vessels that made you want to go to sea and those vessels as opposed to something larger? Because you have a lot of options once you graduate with that sort of

marine engineering certificate. Right. And I have never, ever used it. I completed the course. I was at the top of my class i originally when i got into uh when i got into boats my interest was principally is i had kind of the cruising dream that many people have i thought you know someday i'm gonna get a sailboat i'm gonna sail down to the caribbean or sail to hawaii and travel the world that way and uh so i was fascinated with boats from that perspective and the boatyard was mostly a pleasure boatyard and i did not i was not interested in fishing at all it sounded like a lot of work it sounded miserable and cold and hard and i just met those these people the four guys and they're the book is dedicated to them that uh the four guys that took me to see for

the first time and it was the people of the industry that made me stay that really was the most fascinating the best part of it is the people and i think that's true in any profession of course But there's just a really special, it takes a special kind of person to go and take the risks that fishing involves, not just the physical risks, but there's also no guarantee that it's going to work out, that you're going to make any money or make a living. and it takes a lot of optimism and toughness and adventure that kind of adventurous spirit and that's the thing that really kept you know this kept me in the industry to this day and that i still love so much as those being around those people and the great fortune that i have now is that because i've been making these drawings that are um that depict the life sea life of especially fishing life that's not exclusively but especially that's allowed me to

be in a place where fishermen and other mariners are coming to me all the time to tell me their stories and to ask me to help document what we do and that is just an amazing blessing it's just incredible it's like never thought i'd be here it's really really cool but it's the people that's the thing yeah i'm gonna have some follow-up questions on the uh on the documentation piece later on later on for you but can you tell us sort of that that first i don't know my my navy brain is kicking in i want to say deployment but uh i don't know that that's the first time yeah the first season that you went out uh what was it like and what sort of what were your first impressions and what what was it that uh no pun intended hook to you yeah i've actually never

worked in a hook and line fishery uh we were uh we're so i was working on the boats of purse and fishes in southeast alaska which is an amazing natural kind of place so uh but the first day i flew into sitka and if you've never been there it's a stunner that town it's it's incredible there's a beautiful volcano across the it's like kind of ash cone volcano like mount fuji and the it's a sitka sound is full of all these little islands and some of them have houses on them and I came in, there's huge tides there. The tide was kind of low flying in the airplane and I could see all this intertidal rocks. And I was just like, this place is incredible.

It's beautiful. It was a sunny day. And we didn't have very many of those that season after that. But when then I joined the boat and we went out to fish for chum salmon, I got kind of sick and didn't want to admit it. Then I spent the day leaning on stuff when I wasn't working. The first time, I wasn't mentally or physically really ready to understand how much work it was going to be in the beginning. I remember eating so much food for the first few days. and then since you're kind of there and i was committed to it you know after a couple of weeks

you know i got acclimated and and i realized i can do this you know and of course i started out working on the deck you know we handle our these nets that are a quarter of a mile long um multiple times a day and so it's a lot like work and and sating in alaska also involves a lot of getting stung by jellyfish which is uh it's not an experience you can really convey uh to other people in words particularly if you do you want to take a shot oh it stings and it's bad in your eyes like uh so that is and there's a it's kind of like i told i coached baseball for my sons later and i could you know i had to kind of explain to them there's a certain amount of pain that goes into this and uh it helps so the the people in the industry self-select for who wants to continue

the jellyfish is a it's a filtering process it helps us keep the strong the strong-willed can you tell us a little bit more about sort of the typical work day on a on a purse sign or two because i mean i will just tell you about our listenership it's a lot of academics it's a lot of naval officers i don't know how many actual people we have who are intimately familiar with sort of the day-to-day life of a commercial fisherman although we do talk about iu fishing a lot uh even though i don't think a lot of that's going on up near alaska there we're usually talking about south china sea and the indian ocean and those kind of things but sort of what is you've described the uh the arduous nature of it but what does that day entail it's very difficult

to put like the experience of of being uh of working on fishing boats into into a single bucket and say this is what it's like to be a fisherman because every gear group which is the kinds of equipment that we use to catch fish they vary from from you know long lines that we that a long liner would would lay along the bottom with hooks on it baited hooks and those people who work in those are working very very often monotonous long seasons um but in our fishery there's there are draggers that that being trawlers that drag large nets that cone-shaped through the water our fishery uses uh is a is a net fishery that uses two boats to fish on the surface of the water in the upper zone of the water so that the cork line of our our net

floats in the top the two boats are we call them the boat and the skiff and they uh they tow the net and we we fish along the beaches because uh along shorelines because that's where the salmon swim so each time we set our net which is about a quarter of a mile long we tow it for about 20 minutes and then we it takes about 20 minutes to get it back and if you're on a strong operation you'll do this about 20 times a day so you get up our fishery is called is a derby fishery meaning that we're limited by time not by a specific specific poundage in terms of conserving the resource we're disallowed from fishing for most of the time and they'll have an opening that will allow us to fish for a certain period sometimes that period is one day and sometimes it's two

days and sometimes it's longer and then they'll count the fish so that's my little prelude when uh so when an opener happens a fishing opening we'll uh usually get up at they typically start at five in the morning so we'll get out we'll we'll anchor in the place where we're gonna go and then the skipper usually gets up and goes out to wait to make sure that nobody takes their spot very early in the morning meaning you know one o'clock or earlier then uh the boat will jog there and the crew will roll out of bed at four and get everything ready if they the final preparations for the day and then we'll work that day and by the and if it if it's a one day opening it'll end at eight o'clock and during that time we'll be trying to make as many sets as possible um so

try to be as efficient as possible and the work itself is you know we're all in rain gear and it's very hard to to describe the details of how it works which is one of the reasons that i've been drawing all this stuff for so long is to help people who haven't experienced it visualize what's happening so you work a day that's the work is generally kind of wet and It rains a lot where we are, but there's also breaks while we tow. So, you know, have a really intensive 20 minutes of work, followed by sitting around and telling jokes for 20 minutes. And then, you know, the net comes back and then we got to work hard for the next 20 minutes. And ideally, you just keep that process going all day long.

And then at night, after the fishery closes, we'll go to a tender, a transport boat that pumps our fish off using a kind of vacuum pump. They're really cool, the fish pumps. They use an air vacuum and positive air pressure to pump these slugs of fish and water out of your hold. So it's really a neat process because it doesn't damage. The fish aren't physically moved by any kind of impeller or anything. so that keeps them from being bruised and beaten up and uh something i really want to draw so that people can see it that's you know the theme of my life now is that i do all these things they're so hard to describe so i draw them uh but the tender will take the fish back to town so but we'll

usually have to wait for it so and on that day you might get to bed you know if you're lucky at midnight and sometimes you hit the rack for an hour or two and wait and sometimes you can't get unloaded until you know very early the next morning and then we go back to town and get outfitted for the next one when the season's really going well then we'll have periods of two days to fish followed by two day closures and it will go in a cycle like that so the openings will be 40 hours long instead of 15 hours long and a 40 hour opening you have to expect that you're not going to sleep very much we can fish when we have enough light in alaska in the summertime that's really most of the time it doesn't make sense for you can't catch fish in

the dark so once it gets dark then we'll stop so in june and july which are the early part of the season for us you know if we have those two-day openings then you're really going to expect to work pretty much the 40 hours followed by unloading and proceeded by getting ready so you'll work out you know what most people work in a week two days and then when you're done you still have to go to town so that process it doesn't start out with those two-day openings because the department of fishing game that regulates us has to count the fish and determine whether or not it makes sense for us to continue but it makes sense well whether we're going to do any harm by making by working so uh they want to make sure that there are fish in the rivers with

and eggs are being laid before we really before they give us that two on two off schedule so you start off with some some easy ones you know one day things and then you work it into as the as the salmon run builds and they start to really storm in which is amazing when it happens really well you know we're getting this routine where we're working all a lot of time during the opening And then during the closure, we go back to town, repair our nets and get things fixed up because things break every day. And so that's our that's kind of the routine and rest a little bit and then go back at it. How did you get into doing the illustration piece initially? for years i lived a kind of a beatnik lifestyle of going fishing and then going and traveling and

seeing the world when i wasn't working and taking long trips abroad and i was i traveled in europe a bunch during the winters of uh 2001 through two and three and so uh i traveled a lot in the west and i enjoyed that a lot and then i went to prague one year and i was the first time that i encountered a language that I couldn't understand anything in almost. So that made me want to learn to speak a Slavic language. So this is kind of a long answer. So the following year, I went to Poland to try to learn to speak Polish. And I did not understand how complicated that was going to be, but I'm glad I did it because I met my wife there. I lived there for several years and I met her maybe the second or third year that I was there. And we had our first son in 2008. So that

was like every parent knows it's just an incredible life-changing experience in my head but it made things very complicated for me because i i couldn't i couldn't square the the lifestyle of going back to fishing with being the parent that i wanted to be so i stayed home for two years and did not went and worked in a translating business that we established in 2011 there was a projected return that was really promising was huge and it was also a really good price projected and anya my wife and i you know we looked at the we were starting to hear from friends from the industry you know what kind of an opportunity that was and we made the decision that it would be a good idea for me to go and see what i could do for us by going back to fishing

and my son Franjo was two and so it was so hard to leave was they were going to be 10 time zones away and I was going to be working with people that I had I didn't they weren't the same group that I'd been with for all those little years so I didn't think there was really going to be any opportunity for them to come and visit and I was going to be away for three months and it was tough so we had a great season it was really good um but you know i'd get these pangs of missing my son that were like physical pain it was it was really difficult so i've been drawing pictures all my life you know and kind of busking with them sometimes when i was traveling and so i decided to kind of do what i knew how to do and um send my son a drawing of the boat that i

was on and i really loved always the um children's books of like richard scary and david mccauley they're not necessarily just for kids the mccauley ones for sure no but the mccauley one is the one that i thought of as i was doing my prep as like this book is like castle uh which is like probably the most popular david mccauley book uh the one that i grew up reading the most here is yeah i used to go to the library in our elementary school you know and read that and this pyramid book that kind of language visual language the language of uh this kind of explanatory drawings was something i had not done before um but and i didn't want i wasn't going to do something very technical for my two-year-old so i drew a cutaway drawing of the boat that i was on at the time

and then uh i was doing it you know we have limited space on the boat so you know go to town sit and sit in the bar or restaurant and that would be a way to kind of give yourself some space right and that was where i worked and other fishermen really responded to that and after that time i had people asking me to do something similar for them for their kids or just for themselves or to explain to other people what they did and that just started the ball rolling on the series drawings that i made which eventually led to to the publishing company finding them and in a coffee shop in seattle and approaching me about making the book at what point did you decide to have a book here and how did you choose which vessels and topics you wanted

to pick for that the book idea i wanted to make people had talked about we had talked about making books and the drawings were inspired by books to begin with but I did not know what you would what it takes to do it so I well I thought about doing it myself I now know a lot more about it I always wanted to make a book but I didn't have the resources or the skills and I was very fortunate that an editor from Sasquatch Books Christy Cox who has been an amazing ally came to this coffee shop in seattle saw my drawings on the wall was there with a friend and they started trying to figure out if they could fit on a fit them on the pages of a book and and then that's the owner for my contact information and they offered me the the opportunity to to make a book and i ended up

working with an amazing team and the process is a lot more arduous than i thought it would be and like there's a lot of exhaustive kind of editing and checking and a big team of people has to work on this so we came up with the table of contents and that got kicked around a bunch of times and but i wanted to choose i wanted to choose vessels that had a lot of strong visual interest like the fireboat that i chose to things that would be exciting to look at i definitely wanted to show how these fishing methods work so that people whether they were kids or adults could use the book is a tool to explain their trades because i've explained so many times to people how sainting works trying to use my hands and gesticulations and you end up there's a point

where you start talking about the rings on the net where you can see their eyes go blank and you've lost them right so the book is designed to do that it's designed to help people explain their own lives to others and so i try to in that way it kind of advocates for them which i hope i'm doing well and we want to choose a variety of things that showed that uh that there are many kinds of work that people do on the water and in that way hopefully you know put plant that seed of inspiration for young people who might want to bring their talents to the water side of the world Well, then just one final question before we close out here. But we have an awful lot of sailors who listen to this, both in the civilian side as well as military side from a lot of different nations. But do you do work on a commission here? Do you take commissions from folks? i do sometimes yes uh i do but it's been really hard to find the time now the great news with the

book has been it's was very successful and it's sold out of its first printing run within just a few weeks and really struck a chord with fishermen in a way that i hoped for you know couldn't count on and was had my fingers crossed you know now we're i'm working on a follow-up project and i'm been so busy for the last month in a good way the last three months it's made the all the hard work that went into making the book uh worth it because of the way it's connected with people but it's also now taken up all of my time so i don't have a lot of bandwidth can you still say But I don't have a lot of free time or time to do projects that I would love to, even for my friends. So I try, but it's hard.

No, no problems at all. But I'm sorry, that's all that we have time for today. I'd like to thank my guest, Tom Cressidina. You'll find a link to Working Boats in our show notes. I'm assuming from what you said that there's probably going to be a second printing run of this, Tom. Yeah, it just came back into stock 10 days ago. OK, well, I'm just telling the listeners like strongest possible recommendation for all these books where I wind up talking to the authors, I get a review copy and it's not very often that I reach out and buy an extra copy just for myself to have those review copies get handed off to the local Navy ROTC unit to go there to stock up their collection of maritime things. But this is one that I reached out, bought for myself. On the second printing run here, I will probably get some additional copies for all the little ones in my family.

But if you have a small person in your life there between the ages of three and seven, this thing's phenomenal. If you have someone who spent their life going to sea, they will appreciate it just as much as that three to seven year old. So strongest possible recommendation. There is reason we put it on the on the list. Tom where can we find you online you you've already sort of mentioned what your next project is but where can we find your work online uh my website is called the scow and it's at www.thescow.bigcartel.com but if you google boat cutaways there's a pretty good chance you'll find something I've drawn now and it'll lead you to me now we'll be sure that we uh put a put a link for that in the show notes as well. So anybody can find this stuff that you're looking for. It really

is spectacular. Thanks again for joining us. To the listeners, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time. Thank you. Jim Moran.