thank you....yeah i found a job hiring hook setters they said the job rewuires a biy of climbing..i was curious as to why.i assumed hooker was a lead guy on the logging crew...curious to know ones job duties"what they do all day"...ive been on s few crews...del rosa,heaps peak helitack,lytle creek,fawnskin...all socal
I've never heard of a hook setter. Hook
tender, yes.
I've never worked in the rigging on a yarder side but I've cut for a few. From what I've seen the hooktender is like the foreman for the yarder crew. In the words of Findlay Hayes..."the hook is the guy that makes things jump". He probably started as a choker setter and worked his way up. He's usually been around awhile and he can do any job on the show.
Any job. Climbing is a very small part of what he has to know and what he does. He runs the crew, lays out the roads, lays out the rigging for skidding, rigs the tailholds, knows how to splice cable and splice it fast so production doesn't suffer, can figure 20 different ways to rig twisters, can run a saw, is probably a fairly good faller and bucker, understands big timber, and can run any piece of machinery on the landing. He might be handy with a wrench and a grease gun. He's also probably a pretty good supervisor and teacher. He does a lot of both.
If he's lucky he can stay on the landing but it doesn't always work that way. He might spend a lot of time down the hill helping the rigging crew or he might be out on the back end somewhere when they're changing roads. He might be on the phone or the company radio a lot.
The hooktender can identify problems before they
become problems and he's usually the first guy there to start fixing them.
I've worked around quite a few hooktenders and the good ones don't stand around much. A good hooktender makes things look easy...especially when they're not.
If you're thinking about trying to work your way into a hooktender's job you'll want to spend some time in the rigging first. If you don't know enough about the hook's job to be asking the questions you're asking you don't know enough to do it. If I can see that you can bet the owner of a logging outfit will, too.
Being a tree trimmer and a fire line cutter is a decent start but it won't prepare you for actual logging.
