Arctic Trawler

"At the end of 1979 came the turning point in Kjell Inge Røkke's life. The two Ålesund shipowners, Erik Breivik and John K. Sjong, bought a decommissioned supply boat from the Gulf of Mexico and transformed it into the state-of-the-art trawler "Arctic Trawler." They wanted to try their hand at cod fishing along the Pacific coast northward from Seattle. It was quite a daring venture, but the reason the shipowners took the chance was that they had no competitors. In Seattle, there were no major trawlers to speak of, so the two sunnmørings bet that they could make a catch. The problem, however, was that it was almost impossible to find proper professionals in Seattle. Sjong was big on crab fishing, and his people could not be used. Therefore, they agreed that Breivik should try to scrape together the best he could find in Ålesund. There, there were plenty of youths who would eagerly jump at this opportunity, they rightly assumed."

"When the "Arctic Trawler" went over to Seattle, Kjell Inge was on board. Kari stayed back home in Norway. They had agreed that Kjell Inge should go over first and check out the conditions. There wasn't much free time to speak of either, and that suited Røkke and the other Norwegian young men just fine. They didn't earn anything on land, and since all of them were interested in earning money in the form of percentages of the catch, they wanted to be at sea as much as possible. And should they be so unlucky to spend a few weeks on land in Seattle, Røkke knew what to do. He tried to earn some extra dollars then too."