Erling Skaar started worrying about the way fishing boats burn dinosaur juice in 1973, when the Arab oil embargo drove prices up and supplies down. This choked off fuel to Dutch Harbor, the base camp and truck stop for Seattle's Alaska fishing fleet. At the time, Skaar, who’d started out in the Norwegian merchant marine at age 15, was running a new crab boat, the Silver Dolphin, out of Dutch. He started wondering how fishermen might burn less fuel and be less vulnerable to shortages and price hikes. Forty years later, those thoughts have led to an invention that might enable the fishing industry to do just that, not only here but around the world — one more chapter in Seattle’s long history of innovation in this ancient but increasingly tech-heavy industry.
