The R/V Nugget by Craig Staude
The Nugget was a 42’ double-ender wooden salmon troller built in the late 1940s.  Later it was enjoyed recreationally by Dr. John Bell and family, residents of San Juan Island, who generously gave the boat to the Labs in the 1980s.  With the help of Dr. Bob Donnelly at UW School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences and the skills of our talented Maintenance crew, we converted this “troller” into a “trawler,” capable of using much of the same gear as the Hydah as well as a remotely operated vehicle (ROV).


Although small, the Nugget was powerful and quite capable of rock dredging or trawling in the strong currents of the San Juan Islands.  The original anchor winch was moved from the bow to the stern and fitted with a stainless steel cable, marked at regular intervals.  The winch had no level-wind, so we had to push the cable by hand onto the drum while adjusting the rudder.  No fingers were lost!
 
Some of our most memorable trips were to Bellingham Bay in search of the big pink sea slug Tritonia, used for neurological research by Dr. Willows and his students (see Bill Frost's Sept 2016 Tide Bite).  Often in that bay the net would fill with heavy mud or waterlogged wood chips, or worst of all, with a barnacle-covered submerged log that took forever to extract from the net (Figure 4).  Perhaps the funniest incident was the time we brought the trawl to the surface to find a very large orange sea anemone wearing sunglasses, staring right at us!
 
The shortcoming of the Nugget was its small size.  The deck only accommodated eight or ten students comfortably around the sorting table, and usually allowed taking only half of a class on each trip.  Nevertheless, for trawling and dredging the mechanics of dragging from the stern rail and dropping the catch directly into the sorting table were quite efficient.  The Nugget remains my favorite boat.