The mission of the Hybrid Fishing Boat Project is to design, build, test and produce a hybrid commercial fishing vessel.

Click here to read a very good article about the Derek M. Bayliss and the hybrid fishing boat in the 10/17/06 New York Times Science Section.

My thanks go to Larry Fisher for the fine writing and to Frank O'Connell for the excellent graphics. Well Done!

Little more than a hundred years ago, most of the boats in San Francisco's fishing fleet were feluccas, such as the one pictured above. Feluccas were seaworthy and easy to handle, but with the arrival of marine engines and cheap fossil fuel they disappeared from San Francisco Bay.

With a nod to the felucca, the Hybrid Fishing Boat Project hopes to produce a modern fishing vessel powered by the wind the sun and alternative fuels.

Successfully harnessing wind and solar power power to drastically reduce the burning of carbon based fuels in commercial fishing boats has obvious benefits for the environment, but this project is equally about saving an endangered species -- the small independent fishers.

While the price fishers receive for their catch (their income) has remained flat or decreased in recent years, their costs for everything from bait to berthing fees have increased, but few costs have increased as much as fuel.

In 1985, San Francisco fish buyers paid about $3.75 for a pound for salmon on the dock, and a gallon of #2 marine diesel cost about 45 cents. Today fishers receive little more than $3.75 a pound for salmon and until recently fuel sold for close to $3.00 per gallon -- six times the 1985 price. This eats the profits of fishing boats that use a lot of fuel and/or travel great distances. Read a good article from the Juneau Empire about the effect high fuel prices were having on the Alaska fishing fleet -- before the post Katrina price increases.

"If the fishing industry were a country, it would rank with the Netherlands as the world's 18th-largest oil consumer, a team of fisheries scientists is reporting. In 2000, the scientists said, fisheries around the world burned about 13 billion gallons of fuel to catch 80 million tons of fish...." NY Times 12/20/05. Read entire article here.

80 million tons = 160 billion pounds of fish
13 billion gallons = 88 billion pounds of fuel

Using those numbers, it would seem that for every pound of fish caught worldwide, more than a half pound of fossil fuel is burned. Yikes!

Fishers are environmentalists by nature. They rely on clean oceans, abundant wetlands and free-flowing rivers for their livelihood. Helping the environment and realizing significant savings on fuel costs will appeal to many fishers, but the hybrid fishing boat must be a practical commercial vessel if it has any hope of success in the marketplace. That's the challenge of this project.

Hedley Prince -- Updated September 2007
fishwharf52@yahoo.com