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RSW class planned this weekend in Dillingham

Refrigerated seawater system operator class planned in Dillingham

Fishermen looking to upgrade to a refrigerated seawater system can learn more about them in a class offered in Dillingham June 3-5.

The RSW Operator class should help demystify those systems said Doug Cannon, the course’s instructor and part of Marine Refrigeration Solutions, a company based out of Dillingham for the summer.

“Some of the things that I try and do is take a little of the voodoo out of this mystery and educate them so they have a basic understanding of what it is that is working,” Cannon said. “So they can understand it. Because if you understand it, you can keep it alive. If you don’t, you blame it for things that it’s not responsible for, and you don’t know what you can do, and what you should be hiring to be done. So those are the goals of what do you want your technician to do for you and what can you do yourself.”

Togiak fisherman Casey Coupchiak checks out an RSW system similar to the one she plans to install on her drift boat during a class at the Bristol Bay Campus in Dillingham in March 2016.

To do that, Cannon explains the mechanics of RSW in the class, and has a more hands-on component, and also has a more hands-on component to the class.

Cannon has worked in the refrigeration field for 15 years, including coming out to the Bay as a technician. That’s how he realized there was a need for the operator class.

"And I saw all different kinds of things from the service technician point of view, and recognized a lot of the things that fishermen didn’t know. I’d fly 12 hours to get somewhere, get on the boat, flip a breaker that they didn’t know existed, and then ask them if there was anything else I could do for them, and then fly home 12 hours and present them with a 30 hour bill. And some simple knowledge can alleviate that very expensive service call so that they can be fishing. ‘Cause it’s not just the expense of the service call, it’s the lost fishing time,” he said.

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