Cape Cleare Fishery
CAPE CLEARE
The Fishing Schooner
On March 26th, 2013, at 1:06 pm, Rick Oltman became the owner of a seventy-foot schooner built by Skookum Marine. Designed to handle the lively seas of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, the schooner was originally conceived for the charter trade. Rick had a different idea.
He had been fishing commercially in Alaska for over three decades. Rick’s previous boats were traditional wooden trollers, including the original Cape Cleare, which he owned for twenty-three years. Rick converted that boat from an ice fish-hold to a freezer-troller. Then he began selling his own catch.
With his fishing methods honed and business established, Rick dreamed of a bigger boat. Decades earlier he had sailed on a schooner from Hawaii to Washington and the memory of that voyage never dimmed. As he considered the Skookum 70 more fully, an idea emerged.
Rick began to re-imagine it as a fishing schooner.
The Fishing Schooner Cape Cleare
The boat would need a complete refit to suit its new purpose. Rick redesigned the boat’s interior, carving out old space for new functions. He built a custom freezer system and installed insulated fish holds where none existed before.
Rick improved the boat’s propulsion system and installed a generator. He engineered new electrical, plumbing, refrigeration and hydraulic systems. He reconstructed the schooner’s standing and running rigging, commissioning The Port Townsend Foundry to build custom blocks and deck hardware to handle the loads from the sails aloft - twenty-four-hundred square feet of canvas.
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For ten years, Rick persevered as the architect of the schooner’s rebirth, transforming a vessel left in limbo— its purpose unfinished, its potential untapped — into a labor of love.
In the summer of 2022, the Fishing Schooner Cape Cleare set out on its maiden voyage to the fishing grounds in Alaska, fulfilling the dream Rick had envisioned years before.
The Specs: Power and Sail!
Cape Cleare is equipped with a six-cylinder Gardner main engine, and a Hundested variable pitch propeller for improved maneuverability in varying sea conditions.
The boat has a 30 KW genset for electrical power needs and an air evaporator freezer system with a fish hold capacity of eighteen to twenty-thousand pounds of FAS (frozen at sea) salmon.
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Under sail Cape Cleare sports a Marconi mainsail, gaff-rigged foresail, staysail and jib.
Beyond the Specs...
Rick often refers to the Schooner Cape Cleare as the Millenium Falcon, the storied spacecraft in Star Wars whose outer appearance disguises its true purpose.
With its proud masts and traditional rig, the Cape Cleare looks like a sailing ship from a bygone era. But below decks she’s full of modern surprises - her purpose and capabilities shrouded in the same veil of mystery as her mermaids.
