Sternpicker

The modern sternpickers are quite a different matter. Sleek, efficient, redolent of power, they easily spool their 1,500-foot nets off large drums set on the afterdeck and have taken most of the back-breaking work out of fishing, although enough remains to still qualify it as very hard work.

Word got around that it had won the Columbia River fishing boat race, as a bowpicker, before being rebuilt as a sternpicker for the Inlet fishery.

As the fishery evolved, the practical and beautiful butterfly fleet—dories named for their widespread sails—gave way to more prosaic but still handsome diesel sternpickers and bowpickers.