Andrew Jarrell
Jarrell was born far from this body of water, adopted and raised by an evangelical pastor and his wife in Arkansas. When he was 5 years old, the family resettled in Anchorage, where his father established a church. After the congregation outgrew its small high school auditorium, the parish expanded into an abandoned fish processing facility.
Now 28, Jarrell is on his ninth lap working on commercial Alaskan fishing boats. He has logged time on the industry’s largest king crab boats, as well as smaller ones chasing the summer salmon run. It’s a constant shuffle between vessels, fisheries, and seasons. The boats he works on now, the Halcyon and the Oracle, are part of a fleet called the Super 58. They are 58 feet long and 25 feet wide, capable of holding 230,000 pounds of fish in an icy slurry below deck. They’re hulking boats, but on the scale of the Alaskan fisheries and the temper of the Bering Sea, they are considered mid-range. The season for gray cod starts around Christmas and lasts into the spring, when the target shifts to black cod.
Gray cod is a derby fishery, meaning there is an annual quota shared among the fleet of around 40 boats, most owned by separate companies. Each boat competes to catch as large of a share of that quota as possible. When the season opens, the work doesn’t stop until the quota is hit. It is an industry of high reward and higher risks. The goal is to catch one million pounds a month, but there is no guaranteed day rate. Fishermen are paid a share of the boat’s profits. If the boat is catching fish, they are making money. Good money. But if the boat goes broke, they could lose it all.
Alaskan fishermen harvested nearly 5 billion pounds of seafood in 2024. Gray cod is among the most sustainable of the Alaskan fisheries, representing about 10 percent of the state’s total. Jarrell and the crew of the F/V Halcyon are just one small part of a sprawling global supply chain. But out on the Bering Sea, with no other boats in sight, he says all that becomes an abstraction. There is only the next pot.
“It’s definitely a place where I feel closer to God, but it’s a pretty lawless world out there. It’s good to have that strong moral compass. These guys, a lot of them have been swallowed up by the world and spit out.”
“You could lose it all. I have buddies who have died on boats that I work on. It’s one of the hardest things I’ve had to deal with. But I’ve hauled thousands of pots since that happened. Reassuring everyone in your personal life that it couldn’t be you — that’s all part of the game.”
As Jarrell and his crew finish hauling the last pot of the trip, they crack open the hatch and peer into the fish hold where their catch is packed all the way to the lip. For a second, nobody says anything. They just watch the shimmering mass of cod slosh around with the pitch of the boat. It’s the feeling that calls Jarrell out to sea year after year. Some combination of skill, perseverance, and luck has induced the ocean to pay out in full. He has never been able to explain it. So he photographs it instead. ●
