Pros
It doesn't matter where you live in the world. Glacier Fish is based out of Seattle, where you will go to meet the ship, or to Unalaska(Dutch Harbor). Many employees earn their shares and take the currently-valuable USD back to their home country. There is a lot of comradery at sea. Generally, if you are friendly, then others are friendly too. You'll meet people from all over the planet that you'll never even have the opportunity to meet otherwise. You're served five meals in one sixteen hour shift. No cooking or washing dishes. Housekeepers wash your laundry and clean your room&bathroom. There is no cost of living at sea. Outside of buying your rain gear, you never have to spend any money at all. Depending on your personal situation, you can save a lot of cash. English may be the official language of the company, but it some days it certainly isn't the most spoken language onboard. The wheelhouse often converses in Norwegian and during galley time there is a beautiful mesh of French, Spanish, Tagalog, Vietnamese, and Polish. Likely others too, I'm not much of a linguist. For some, being out at sea for months at a time, away from the news, families, telephone, internet, and everything else works out great, even during hake season. Again, you do not have any cost of living at sea, so if you live like a nomad in your personal life outside of Glacier Fish, you can save a lot of money. NUMBERS(disregard that this is in the "pro" section mentioned above): Pay - All pay is based on shares. You get paid in halves, with one check coming 10 days after offload and the other 30 days after offload. A processor earns a maximum of two shares. A & B season (pollock fishing in the Bering Sea) pay the same, even though A season has roe. Processors don't get paid for roe even though we work 112 hours a week and handle all the product. One share averages 1100 USD. A season is 7 trips and B season is 10. So, if you break your body and do everything, 17x2200=37400. You'll make shy of 40k and spend at least seven months at sea. The workforce is a bit older. Most are 40s and late 30s, some even older. Many have families and children of all ages. Shipyard - Pays 14 dollars an hour, with free lunch and board. Comes to around two months total in a year, with two weeks in April-ish and the rest in and surrounding December. You work 50 hours a week, with overtime becoming active after breaching 40 hours. Overtime is x1.5, so 21 dollars an hour. Each pollock trip takes approximately ten days, from backload to offload. Working hours - you work 16 hours daily. 16x7=112. You work 112 hours a week. An average full time jobis 40 hours a week. A year has 52 weeks, so 40x52=2080. 2080 hours is the average worked from a regular ol' job. Since each pollock trip lasts about ten days, 16x10=160, or 160 hours worked per trip. 2080/160=13, meaning in 13 pollock trips you've already clocked a year's worth of working hours. Time off - let's work this out. There are 52 weeks in a year. That means 52 Saturdays and 52 Sundays, together for 104 days total. Here in the USA there is no statutory minimum vacation or public holidays. While on the ship, there is no time off ever. Working at sea is often advertised as having a lot of time off, but that statement no longer holds water. The company always needs you on the boat and if you don't go, you lose your job or are docked in pay. If you work those ten months for your 40k, you'll then have two months off, or approximately 60 days. That's less than just the weekends off from a regular job.
Cons
There are plenty of bad things about working at sea: It is not easy. I entered the field expecting to make my yearly 30k in a few months rather than twelve months, but that time is over. If you want to keep your job and share count, you have to go on hake trips. Hake trips take about 26 days, from backload, fishing, to offload, and pay maybe 3/5 of a single pollock trip. The ships operate at sea ten months out of the year. If you want your 40k, you're going to be out for all that time. Fish processors compose the majority of the crew. My ship operated on 118 people, let's say 70 of them are processors. Each trip produces 325 shares. The maximum shares for a processor is 2, meaning 140 shares of each trip are given to the backbone, the people doing the longest hours and hardest work. Every shift at Glacier Fish is 16 hours long for the processors. That eight hours begins when you're down in the factory in your gear, to being down there again all geared up. You sleep maybe four or five hours in each 24 hour period. There are three shifts, although since you never see sunlight or even go outside it doesn't make much of a difference. Those shifts are 4am-8pm, 8pm-12pm, and 12pm-4am, so every eight hours the factory is refreshed with new bodies. You're going to be very tired and very sore. Everybody hurts at sea, including the tough guys who won't admit they do. A season backload begins in early January and if you go all the way through, you'll be back in Seattle in April. B season backload begins in early June and if you go "all the way," you'll be back in October. But the ships do hake seasons as well, and so will you if you want to keep your job. Hake happens in May and October/November, leaving December as the only full month spent not fishing. Shipyard work occurs when docked in Seattle, which still needs some processors to be present for. It's volunteer first, but the company will pull bodies as they need them, even if you don't live in Seattle. Is it all worth it? Up to you. I got what I needed, as well as a huge sense of pride. It's satisfying to walk the streets of Seattle knowing the crowds you pass by couldn't work 16 daily hours of labor, much less part from their cell phones for 16 hours. It's good, honest work. I think there ought to be a mandatory difficult hurdle for every individual to conquer in order to appreciate being alive. I've been through the military and I count that as one way. After experiencing both military and commercialized fishing, I can count this as another way to "earn your right to be alive."