Deadliest Catch, a prisoner’s dilemma in a dyeing industry.

I have been watching Deadliest Catch for over a decade and admitted: i love it.

The guys and girls featured on the show are some of the hardest working people without a safety net that lefts in terms of the old industries and old ways of partnering up on a boat against a share.

The sharing comes from old Norse Traditions where the owner of the boat gets 2 shares the same does the captain and everyone else gets 1 share - it goes back 1000's of years and it’s a model based on real partnership and real value creation, together.

Now, after watching the show on Discovery for more than 10 years (well season 18 now...) it strikes me that we are watching the death spiral of an industry.

The traditional Crab fisherman are becoming a niche and its increasingly harder to earn money and support your family as a fisherman in general as it has been over the last almost 50 years globally the industry has changed forever.

So, what can they do?

They can work more together; they can think outside the box and they absolutely need to start trusting each other fully or there is little hope of a future for Crab fishing in Alaska (and many other places).

Prisoners Dilemma in Political Science is the theory of 2 prisoners who can get out of Jail if they work together and they don’t share their knowledge they both go free, but as humans seem to be most they end up going to jail because they "tell" on each other.

It’s a story of trust and issues of trust between humans and how they interact together.

Crab fishermen are not that different...

Let’s start with their #data (said the data tech guy).

Let’s assume Sig, Johnathan, Casey & Josh, and the rest of the captains, started sharing data (it can be anonymized) with a simple micro frontend (app on phone or tablet) they could report in catch numbers and dept level from each pod, and the device would add in location data, weather data, current data etc. ensuring the data was near-real-time reported and aggregated.

What could that data do?

I would assess it could save up to 70% of fuel cost and time spent catching Crab.

How can it do that?

Well, most times Crab fisherman actually prospect to find a school of Crab, but because the ocean and area they are fishing is so large and they are relatively poor at working together, due to issues of trust, they are spending a very large amount of time and resources trying to locate a potential school of Crab and then to get the following data parameters:

1. The direction of the migration of the school
2. The speed of the migration of the school
3. The edges of the school (the radius within the school is traveling)
4. The size and "age" of the school (as weight per avg. Crab)
5. The "clean" level of the school (the quality of Crab)

With those 5 data points coming from let’s say 20 fishing boats instead of just 1 the very simple data can be aggregated to in near-real-time tell at which ocean levels the Grabs are currently migrating under the given weather and current conditions as well as "hot" areas where fishing is good, as well as in near-real-time answer all 5 fundamental questions that any fishing captain has.

Sig, Johnathan, Casey & Josh if you should happen to read this "Saturday Data Blog" post then send me some data from last season and ill crunch it and come up with a solution model to help you guys save the industry, it’s really not that hard i reckon if you are willing to trust each other and work together.

If anyone else reads this and already working in the industry #steal the idea and help the guys and their families out, they are hardworking people and worth the effort.

#deadliestcatch #discovery #crab #fishing #tech #data #partnership #vikingculture #share #fairshare