Steve Clark

If fishing is a vital part of Ballard's identity, then Interbay is an extension of Ballard. The tract of land that runs from the southern end of the Ballard Bridge, between Magnolia and Queen Anne, ends at Terminal 91 and Elliot Bay. There, the fishing boats and the bustle around them defy the impression of an industry in decline.

Ships, some almost three hundred feet long, are tied along two piers, manned by skeleton crews unloading, cleaning and stacking, getting ships ready for the next season. They dwarf the trucks on the docks that wait with ship bound cargoes of barrels and boxes. Provisioning these factory ships starts early, and often from just to the north across the Ballard Bridge.

The American Triumph takes up just less than 300 feet of dock space at Pier 90. The Triumph is classed a catcher processor and it does just that two seasons a year, with piles of nets above decks, and jammed with processing machines below. It's job is carving fish into fillets and grinding heads and tails and guts to meal. Even the fish oil is used, burned in boilers. It's very much a floating factory, with a crew of more than 100, working day and night, pushed around the Bering Sea by a 9000 horsepower engine, searching mostly for Pollock. On a good day, the Triumph can produce 170 tons of fish products, enough for five tractor trailers to haul.

The working conditions on the Triumph are cramped with low head spaces and lots to trip over. The crew are surrounded by machines built only to cut and grind flesh. Here, people will work 16 hour days so they can keep the operation to two shifts, and not split their shares into thirds. For a few very long, pungent, rocking months of work, a crew member can make $45,000.

The catching on the Triumph is done using nets, dragging the catch onto the trawl deck, a cavity that runs down the center of the ship, that looks a bowling alley without a roof. The trawl nets are huge, and weigh as much as ten tons, with thousands of feet of wire used to attach those nets to the ship. A lot of those nets come back to Dantrawl on Shilshole Avenue for replacement and repair.

"There's a design specific to the species of fish you're trying to harvest, "Elias Olafsson says about the piles of nets that, to the unaccustomed eye, look like just a mammoth tangle.

"The factory trawlers come to Seattle twice a year and the end of each season tends to be our peak," he says, his Icelandic accent still prominent, 25 years after moving to Ballard.

It's not just trawl nets in Ballard though.

"It's the whole neighborhood," says Ed Hajek, owner of Ballard Inflatables. His company outfits ships like the American Triumph with rescue boats. If the rescues take place in the infirmary, pharmacies like Lafferty's do the job. Barry Lafferty built his first custom marine emergency kit in 1976, when an ill-equipped ship captain asked him to build an emergency kit stronger than the kind at food stores - one for crews alone at sea.

Lafferty's kit was a hit and Barry's son Mike figures they've sold a couple of thousand medical kits for the marine business.

The busiest time is November to January, Lafferty says, referring to the second of two fishing seasons the big boats, one from January to March, and the second that starts in the summer.

"An average person doesn't have any idea what it takes to get something on the dinner table," says Steve Miller, one of the co-owners of Ballard Transfer. Miller's company hauls heavy equipment like nets, cranes, piston heads and cable spools - that can weigh 25,000 pounds - between the floating factories and the manufactures and maintenance firms that keep the gear working.

Terminal 91 has stationary factories too. Trident Seafoods, one of the largest fish suppliers in the United States, processes some 300 fish products, including the 'big three' of Pollock, Cod and Halibut. The fish, much of it frozen, end up in mostly in boxes consumers never see, going to food services companies that supply restaurants, though big retailers like Costco are becoming a significant part of Trident's business.

What Trident can't hold in their freezers can get staged next door at City Ice Cold Storage, where the freezers are big enough to stack pallets of fish three stories high.

The Port of Seattle commissioned a study in 2003 to quantify the economic impacts of holdings like Terminal 91. Though that study has been criticized as being too conservative in some estimates, it figured that $33 million in purchases to local companies comes from businesses at the Terminal and more than 6000 jobs are directly or indirectly tied to the business that goes on here. Between the land and the docks, the Port of Seattle made about $5.3 million dollars in revenue from Terminal 91 last year.

The Port provided a rare public tour of Terminal 91 on October 13, billing the even t as "Fishing Industry 101." Port Commissioners Bob Edwards and Alec Fisken were in attendance, as was Port Chief Executive Officer M.R. Dinsmore. After the tour, City Ice Cold Storage and its president, Kim Suelzle, hosted a catered reception at the cold storage facility.

The open house was partly a way of publicizing efforts to restore the economic vitality of the terminal - the Port will have invested nearly $100 million dollars improving infrastructure there when the project is completed.

Perhaps more important for the port is an effort to engage an industrial business community alienated by a non-marine real estate development plan at the terminal as well as allegations on various fronts - including some of the candidates for port commission - that the Port of Seattle staff is making decisions in a vacuum, unaware of or indifferent to their constituents.