The current position of WIZARD is at North America West Coast (coordinates 54.10619 N / 166.44927 W) reported 2 days ago by AIS. The vessel is sailing at a speed of 10.1 knots.
Today, Keith continues as the Captain and now owner of the Bering Sea’s premier crab vessel the F/V Wizard which is featured on this year’s season of Deadliest Catch on the Discovery Channel. Community content is available under CC-BY-SA unless otherwise noted.
The vessel WIZARD (IMO: 8992883, MMSI 367050980) is a Fishing Vessel built in 1945 (77 years old) and currently sailing under the flag of United States (USA).
It looks like The Wizard has been fixed up, luckily. Watch the new season of Deadliest Catch every Tuesday on the Discovery Channel at 8 p.m. EST.
What is the F/V Wizard?
The F/V Wizard (Fishing Vessel is a Coast Guard registered vessel ) began fishing crab in 1979 during what is now known as the “King Crab Heyday” of the late 1970’s. She targeted primarily Bairdi crab (tanner) and the fledgling opilio crab (snow) throughout the 1980’s. In the late 1980’s, when king crab had recovered and opilio quotas surged to phenomenal levels, the Wizard routinely was one of the top 10 crab producers in the Bering Sea in a fleet that at times would be as large as 270 vessels. Under John Jorgensen’s tutelage while still active as a captain, Keith Colburn learned the ropes of becoming a proficient crab captain.
The Wizard is a 155’x30’ vessel commissioned to be built by the U.S. Navy in 1945 in Brooklyn, NY by the Ira S. Bushey shipyard. Her original name is an International Marine Organization (IMO) number, YO-210. She is one of the few remaining YO-153 class vessels.
After World War II, she was laid up in mothballs in Boston harbor. Some of the Oiler fleet was used as target practice, or for building artificial reefs off the Eastern seaboard in the last few decades. YO-210 was eventually purchased and made one trip unsuccessfully as the Clifford K hauling molasses before being purchased by John Jorgensen in 1978 to be converted to a fishing vessel to fish crab in the Bering Sea. The boat was then renamed the Wizard after his grandfather’s Longliner, which was one of the premier cod and halibut boats in the Seattle fleet of the early and mid 20th Century. John’s father and grandfather were Norwegian immigrants in the pioneer days of the Alaskan commercial fishing industry, and John started working for them at a very young age.
Bender Shipyard in Louisiana converted the Wizard to a crabber in 1978, from where John and his family sailed her through the Panama Canal and on to Seattle where Marco Shipyard finished the conversion. She originally had 8 tanks for carrying oil cargo and a capacity of 240,000 gallons.
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