The S.S. Ocean Phoenix is a 680 ft factory ship operated by Premier Pacific Seafoods Inc. of Seattle.

The Ocean Phoenix is a “mothership” operation, meaning she processes the fish caught by a fleet of trawlers. The trawlers haul their nets and then transfer the 55 ton codend (the back end of their net that holds the fish) directly to the Phoenix. As the trawler prepares the net, the mother ship pulls up beside them, trailing a hawser from the stern ramp. The trawler then shackles the codend to the hawser and releases it. An empty codend is sent to the catcher boat, which resumes fishing, while the mother ship hauls the bag aboard and begins processing the fish. The ship will take 15-20 deliveries a day.

The Ocean Phoenix operates mostly in the Bering Sea, as well as a short season off the West Coast of Washington and Oregon with occasional trips to Japan and Korea to deliver the vessels products. She was originally built as a break bulk vessel, the Oregon Mail by American Mail Line in 1964, converted to a container ship by AML in 1972, where she operated as the Oregon Mail and later President Kennedy, and finally to her present configuration in 1989. This is the largest vessel in the American fishing industry.

The ship is mainly owned by the catcher vessels and is managed by Premier Pacific Seafoods. A full compliment when fishing is a crew of 220, including a full merchant crew, a supplemental deck crew for the trawl deck, extra engineers to run the power generation, water making and refrigeration equipment, a large stewards dept, and the factory supervisors and crew.

The Ocean Phoenix has always had a strong CMA presence. Currently the Captain, one of the Chief Engineers, Chief Mate, several of the junior mates and assistant engineers are CMA grads. We are always on the lookout for good people, and CMA is at the top of the recruiting list.     (Information provided by Captain Chris Farrell, ’88, Master of the Ocean Phoenix)   CAL MARITIME April 2007

The Ocean Phoenix processes POLLOCK in the Bering Seas and Pacific Whiting off the West Coast. These fish are processed into SURIMI, a fish paste used in the production of processed foods such as artificial crab, mince (for fish sticks etc), or are headed and gutted for further processing elsewhere. The ROE (eggs) is a high value product harvested during the winter Pollock season. These products are mainly sold to Japanese, Korean and Chinese markets, with a small amount going to European and domestic markets. The rest of the fish, not used in these products, is cooked and made into fish meal, which is mainly used in aquaculture in China. OIL is centrifuged out of these parts and either sold as food-grade fish oil, or burnt in the mail boilers as propulsion fuel.
	MINCE: The most common way of separating edible flesh from waste is by filleting, but a greater amount of flesh can be recovered in the form of a coarse mince by putting either the unfilleted fish, or the waste left after filleting, through a bone separator. Fish, or pieces of fish, are fed from a hopper to pass between a moving rubber belt and the outside of a revolving perforated drum of stainless steel. The flesh is forced through the perforations into the drum from where it is expelled as a coarse mince by a fixed screw. Skin and bone are retained on the outside of the drum and removed continuously by a scraper blade. <-That's IMITATION FISH FOOD we get at the store or SUBWAY! SURIMI: Literally "ground meat", traditional Chinese: "PINYIN" or "fish puree"; is a Japanese loan word referring to a fish-based food product intended to mimic the texture and color of the meat of lobster, crab and other shellfish. It is typically made from white-fleshed fish (such as pollock or hake) that has been pulverized to a paste and attains a rubbery texture when cooked.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surimi	Ground Fish Meat
POLLOCK ROE: Roe or hard roe is the fully ripe internal ovaries or egg masses of fish and certain marine animals, such as shrimp, scallop, crab and sea urchins. As a seafood, roe is used both as a cooked ingredient in many dishes and as a raw ingredient. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roe
FISH OIL  =  FUEL: This should come as no surprise to anyone who remembers that before the petroleum age dawned, the world used whale oil for light and heat. In fact, petroleum was an eco-friendly alternative when first discovered, as several whale species were roaring into the fast lane on the road to extinction. Don't worry about fish fuel speeding up the depletion of the oceans, though -- all the fuel described here is made from oil left over from fish processing.   OCEAN PHOENIX does use fish oil in her boilers. Using this waste oil for fuel has long been standard practice. Processors produce millions of gallons fish oil per year as a byproduct of fish meal plants. Much of the oil is used in the process as boiler fuel for drying the fish meal..." At first they started simply mixing the raw fish oil with diesel fuel. This worked, but raw fish oil is about 6 percent less energy-dense than diesel, and some newer engines cannot use raw fish oil.
HEAD and GUT: All of the by-product solids including the heads, skin and bones are sent directly to the fish meal plant portion of Ocean Phoenix.  It is a brown powder or cake obtained by rendering pressing the cooked whole fish or fish trimmings to remove most of the fish oil and water, and then ground. What remains is the "fishmeal".  It is a nutrient-rich feed ingredient used primarily in diets for domestic animals and sometimes used as a high-quality organic fertilizer.