The 57’x19’ Kalliste, a blackcod longliner and salmon seiner out of Sitka, Alaska, arrived at The Port of Toledo Shipyard in Toledo, Ore., on Oct. 10 and was hauled several days later to be sponsoned. The primary issues were stability and carrying capacity.
Dauntless Maritime in Sedro Woolley, Wash., was doing the drafting and the Port of Toledo Shipyard was doing the work. The Kalliste was built in the 1980s by Richard Huff in Port Orchard, Wash., and as with any 40-something-year-old fishing vessel, there’s bound to be more work than originally anticipated.
The Kalliste was built with large fish holds, in fact too large. She lacked enough buoyancy “to completely fill the two fish holds,” said Dauntless Maritime’s Jason Huff. Part of the buoyancy issue is that the boat’s owner had added a shelter deck on the stern for longlining. “That adds a bunch of weight in the stern,” Huff noted, making it even harder to put fish in the aft hold.
Sponsoning the Kalliste added about 30 inches per side with 1/4-inch hull plating. It “was primarily to add buoyancy so he could utilize the full capacity of the fish holds,” said Huff. Sponsoning also allowed fuel tanks to be moved outside of the main (forward) fish hold and the engine room, which created work space in the engine room. It also pushed the hull’s center of buoyancy to the forward fish hold. That added buoyancy at the stern, meaning the Kalliste could have both the shelter deck and fish in the aft fish hold. “It allowed them to be able to use the boat the way it was originally designed,” said Huff.
In addition, both the bow and stern were replaced. The bow was cut off at the forward engine-room bulkhead. The new bow’s “bulwarks were a little taller, which pushed the bow out,” said Huff. More importantly, the new bow module came with a bulbous bow, something Kalliste hadn’t had before. The new stern module begins at the lazarette bulkhead.
Huff said that “a fair amount of new keel was added in the bow and some in the stern. It was rusted out.” This was probably one of those unexpected repairs since there was concrete in the lazarette, with water under it that rusted out the steel, “but you don’t know that until you get the concrete out.” The solution was replacing bottom plating from the forward lazarette bulkhead to the stern, while keeping the shaft log and keel intact. “That was unexpected,” Huff added, “aways is, especially with a boat that old.”
The Kalliste left The Port of Toledo Shipyard in March, measuring 58’ x 24’, said Adam Peterson, fabrication supervisor for the Port of Toledo Shipyard, “to go longlining for cod and she’s doing good,” he said.
Carlos Schwantes, the Kalliste’s owner, would certainly agree with that assessment. The boat “handles the weight really well,” and he says its speed increased “1/4 to 1/2 knot burning the same amount of fuel.” While he’s going to put 3,000 to 4,000 pounds of ingots in the bow to get it “settled down a bit,” the Kalliste is now a “little more sea kindly in a trough: side-to-side it’s amazing. We are ecstatic with it.”
For Jason Huff, the “coolest” thing about working on the Kalliste’s sponsoning was “it was a boat that my great uncle (Richard Huff) built. For me to be able to work on the boat 40 years later is special.”
