A decade of work on a hybrid electric-diesel boat propulsion project culminated April 2 as U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski shattered a bottle of champagne on the bow of the fishing vessel Mirage and saw it move under electric power along the dock at Sitka’s Gary Paxton Industrial Park.

Tradesmen worked at the industrial park the past year to install the hybrid propulsion system on the 50-foot troller-longliner, completing the first phase of a federally funded Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association initiative to fit three boats with battery-electric motors.

Mirage skipper Jeff Turner returned the night before from the offshore black cod fishing grounds so that Murkowski could tour the vessel during her brief visit to Sitka.

Turner is breaking in his vessel’s new battery-electric motors.

“It runs nice and quiet the way it’s supposed to, and it’s powerful enough to haul black cod pots from 300 fathoms — 40-pot strings, over and over and over and over,” he said.

With the hybrid system, Turner can run to and from the fishing grounds using the boat’s diesel engine and then switch to electric mode for trolling or longlining, or to cruise at slower speeds.

As Turner is learning the new technology and adjusting it to his vessel, he’s leaning on the technical expertise of energy scientist Chandler Kemp and electrician Ben Matthys, who spent years bringing the project to life.

“They’re my pacifiers,” Turner said. “When things go wrong, I text them pictures of what everything is doing. If I see an error message, I send it to them and they tell me, ‘try this.’”

Jeremy Serka, of Sitka Custom Marine, helped rebuild the boat’s propulsion system and redesign the engine room, as well as the cabin, to make way for the new equipment.

He said that the most exciting challenge came early this year, just before the team was scheduled to commission the vessel.

“We realized the engine showed up with the wrong flywheel — from the factory, they put in the wrong flywheel, so there was no starter we could get to actually engage that flywheel,” Serka said. “So we had to figure that out, and then pull apart the engine, get a new flywheel, replace it, overnight essentially, to make this work, and that was a big challenge.”

After meeting the team members, Murkowski asked Turner why he decided to make his boat available for the hybrid-electric conversion.

Turner said he was initially drawn to the project to “be greener, maybe save money.”

Now that he’s fishing with the hybrid vessel, the absence of noise “is something I really notice,” he said. “A quiet boat is fatigue-free. You can talk in a normal voice, you don’t have to yell across the deck.”

Murkowski said that with the way fuel prices are going, Turner should feel good about pioneering the hybrid technology.

“Everyone’s going to be looking at you with ‘electric envy,’” she said.

Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association Executive Director Linda Behnken said the team is preparing to install an all-electric inboard power system on the Energizer, a Juneau gillnet boat that’s now in Serka’s shop.