I thought I would share some photo's that I took while I was at

work. I do seasonal work for fisheries in the fall validating red

and green sea urchins that the fishermen harvest. I watch them

offload the urchins that they have harvested and record their

weights for their fisheries logbooks and fill out all of the

necessary paperwork showing what areas along the coast they

harvested the urchins from (they are only allowed to harvest so

many pounds per area) and make sure the truck driver has the

paperwork that he needs showing how much product goes to

which buyer and that it has been weighed and tagged just in case

he gets stopped by another fisheries officer on his way to the

processing plants.

This is a red sea urchin and this particular one is 115mm in

diameter. I keep my eyes open for small urchins since it is 

illegal to harvest undersized ones and measure them with

my pretty yellow callipers that you see on this one : ) They

have to be a minimum of 90mm so this is just a little guy.

They get much larger than this. They are extremely difficult to

handle without gloves on since they are very spiney as you can

see : )

Divers dive down to the ocean floor to collect the urchins.

They generally are along the shore line not out too deep.

This picture is one of the packers (a commercial fishing boat)

that goes out to where the diver's boats are and picks up the

urchins from them so that the divers can go home without

worrying about unloading their product at the dock. The packer

takes care of offloading them and getting all of the necessary

paperwork to me. The urchins are packed into the net bags for

easier transport.

When the individual boats or the packer arrives at the dock

there is a crane truck that is waiting to lift the bags off of the

boats and onto the dock. Each of these bags weighs

approximately 150 - 200 lbs a piece.

Once the bags are lifted up into the air off of the boat they are

positioned over top of these large plastic totes that they will be

dropped into for transportation to the processing plant.

Here is one of the bag pullers working underneath of the net

bag trying to get the slip knot undone that is holding the urchins

in. This can be tricky work with all of the water that is dripping

out of the urchins and then gloved hands that are slippery and

sometimes awkward to use for undoing the knots.

Once the slip knot is loosened they pull on the ropes and the

bottom of the bag opens up so that they can shake them out

into the totes.

Here are some of the loaded totes that are going to be

stacked up by the forklift. Each of these totes usually weighs

somewhere around 500 -600 lbs each.

Here is the truck driver running the forklift to stack the totes

on top of each other. They stack them 3 high and then moves

them onto the truck.

Once the totes are stacked the forklift takes them over to the

waiting semi truck where they are lifted on and then rolled into

the back of the truck with a floor jack. The truck is going to take

them directly to Vancouver where they will be taken to the

processing plant. The roe (eggs) inside of the urchins is

extracted and then shipped directly to Japan. It is considered

a delicacy and goes for big money over there. It is supposed to

be extremely good for your health as well. One of the fishermen

is native and he said that the elders of a tribe are the only ones

that receive the fresh urchin roe when it is available to them.

This is a little green urchin. He's probably only about 60mm

in diameter. They are considerably smaller than the red

urchins and much easier to handle. They are harvested the

same way as the reds but instead of packing them into net

bags they are transported in crates much like a milk crate

just a little larger. Once they have harvested all of the red urchin

quota in the area I will start doing more work with the greens.

Hope you enjoyed my photo documentary : )

Blessings, BChsMamaof3