sternpicker

plural sternpickers

1. A gillnet boat that deploys the net from the stern of the boat.

   Word got around that it had won the Columbia River fishing boat race, as a bowpicker, before being rebuilt as a sternpicker for the Inlet fishery.

   2008, Bert Bender, Catching the Ebb: Drift-fishing for a Life in Cook Inlet, →ISBN, page 145

   2 more examples

   The modern sternpickers are quite a different matter. Sleek, efficient, redolent of power, they easily spool their 1,500-foot nets off large drums set on the afterdeck and have taken most of the back-breaking work out of fishing, although enough remains to still qualify it as very hard work.

   1985, Earl Roberge, Columbia: Great River of the West, page 146

   As the fishery evolved, the practical and beautiful butterfly fleet—dories named for their widespread sails—gave way to more prosaic but still handsome diesel sternpickers and bowpickers.

   2012, Robert Michael Pyle, Sky Time in Gray's River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place, →ISBN