Welcome to Bristol Bay, Alaska, home to the largest Sockeye Salmon run on the planet which was, for five weeks, my home as I experienced the adventure of set-net salmon fishing in the far North, firsthand. I ask you to join me as I relive this rewarding ordeal, which I can say for a fact was one of the most exhausting, hair-raising and perpetually damp times in my short life.
Before I begin, I must say that if I attempted to recount everything noteworthy that transpired aboard the 21-by-8 foot fishing skiff that became as familiar to me as a trusted family vehicle, this would turn into not so much a blog post as a blog dissertation. Therefore, I will spare your attention span and my fingers, just recently recovered from the swelling resultant of disentangling thousands of thrashing salmon from uncooperative nets, by only giving you an overview of what set-net fishing is, and what my experience of it was, along with three of the best and most exciting stories to come out of a month of salmon fishing.
Best to introduce my captain and fellow crew members who rubbed shoulders with me these last five weeks--why they kept insisting on rubbing their shoulders against mine remains an unsettling mystery--to begin with.
David Wright was our employer, leader and captain of the set-net skiff St. Brendan. To put it simply, David was the big fish in our little pond which caught big fish in the little Bay of the big ocean with little sleep and just the right amount of deodorant. A veteran of a couple decades as a set-netter, and a captain of his own boat for the past ten years.
I had managed to secure this superlative Summer job from David due to a combination of his knowing my father and my incessant badgering of him via email for the position.
Upon my arrival in Alaska, and throughout the season, David did not disappoint. As a captain he was sharply aware, decisive and hard-working. As an instructor he was informative, clear and supportive. And as a man he was kindhearted, erudite and, to put it plainly, the buffest 44-year-old I've ever met. It was a privilege to work for him, and his friendship was one of the greatest benefits of my time in Alaska.
My fellow crewmen were David's eldest son, Isaiah, an experienced and dependable fisherman thanks to two seasons already under his belt, and Matt Marshall, an ex-Army staff sergeant and a first year fisherman like myself, eager for this experience of a lifetime.
And then there was myself, 19 years old, dashingly handsome (according to anecdotal evidence), overflowing with energy and sporting a recently grown fisherman's beard, toting roughly two thousand dollars of equipment in two massive waterproof bags, and raring to go fishing for five weeks.
PART 1: NAKNEK
The word 'Naknek' is not, as you might have assumed, the name of a rare cough medicine, nor the scientific designation of the enigmatic Long-necked Barfing Seagull. It's actually the name of the tiny town at the very top of the Aleut Peninsula in Southern Alaska which, for the Summer months each year, explodes in population as the dormant canneries along the one road through the hamlet grind to life and the three restaurants and couple bars do a roaring trade as ten thousand fishermen pass through on their way up the coast to the sockeye salmon fishing waters.
We four were counted among those ten thousand. I arrived on the 25th of June, a week after David and Isaiah who had spent their seven days alone, de-winterizing the fishing skiff, setting up our fishing site and restocking the pantry of our living quarters up the coast where we were to fish. Naknek is an hour's boat ride down the coast from Graveyard Point, site of all the fishing action.
Our number was only swelled to four the next day when Matt arrived, and all we had to do was buy a few extra supplies for Graveyard Point and wait for a windstorm to blow over to allow us to sail there.
In the meantime we spent most of our time in our Naknek accommodations, an old abandoned Orthodox church along a dirt road, nearly hidden by the green Alaskan wilderness. St. Anna's was our home-away-from-home for a day and a half, neatly situated right beside the two large containers where David kept all of his fishing equipment.
On the afternoon of June 27th we drove the decrepit 'Alaska Van', an ancient vehicle with a broken windshield and two and a half handles to its four doors that must've been bought sometime before the Hoover Dam was built, down to the pebbly beach of Bristol Bay.
For the first time I took out my waders on the shore and put them on, my lower half becoming snugly warm and waterproof. Next, over the thick wader socks I put my fishing shoes, which from that moment on would never be dry again, and then pulled on a bright orange pair of fishing bibs, which are protective overalls to help prevent tears in the waders. A rain slicker, a wool hat and the arm-length tear-proof fishing gloves later, I was fully prepared to take on whatever fish the world threw at me.
But first we'd have to get there. The windstorm of the previous night had died out, and the water was as calm as we could hope for, just a few waves with barely enough energy to curl bashfully above the water. Pulling our skiff the St. Brendan to the shore, we hopped in and blasted off to Graveyard Point. I found out later that David put a motor on his boat with about twice the power necessary, like a Ferrari engine in a mini-Cooper. We got places fast.
Naknek retreated behind us, the expanse of Bristol Bay opened up around us, and I took my first real breath of bay air. Far sweeter than sea air, it was the smell of clear, clean sky and forty million salmon swiftly coming our way.
In the distance the shape of Graveyard Point, a projecting spur of land dotted with dilapidated buildings, slowly became clearer and clearer.
PART 2: GRAVEYARD POINT
During this ride in, I found out where it got its unsettling moniker. In the early 20th century the point had been a fish cannery much like those in Naknek, and all the buildings that the fishermen bunk in during the season are old cannery buildings from the 20s and 30s. Why isn't it a cannery anymore? Well, because a Spanish Flu outbreak killed many of the people there, causing the company to completely abandon the cannery. It was later given it the name Graveyard Point. They say skulls of the dead workers still wash up on shore every few years, and some local fishermen believe the entire Point is haunted, like one big graveyard. This belief was only strengthened by the suicide of a young man there last year.
Soon enough, we were sailing down the small creek that cuts into the land beside Graveyard, making a perfect landing ground for the many skiffs of the dozens of fishermen on Graveyard alone. It was high tide, so we managed to float right up to the grass in front of the many spurs of wood projecting from the mud on the beach, remnants of an ancient dock.
We had arrived on Graveyard Point, now the real adventure begins.
The part of the Point (where all the decrepit canneries repurposed into fishing cabins were located) was perhaps a 3/4 mile in diameter space, overgrown with trees and bushes, with dirt paths criss-crossing between all the buildings, while some had very old, broken down boards laid on them, more sure-footed paths for the cannery workers ninety years ago.
Our home for the next five weeks was in the lower floor of one of the larger buildings, conveniently right beside the dirt path through long grass to the Graveyard Creek beach. The extent of our quarters was comprised of a large main room ('bout 20-by-20ft) which fit a table, camp stove and pantry, four smaller bedrooms and a gear room half the size of the main room where we were to strip off and strap on gear dozens of times to come.
The pantry was well stocked with supplies to keep us well-fed for the duration, namely lots and lots of canned soup, ready-to-eat cereal and oatmeal, and a mountain of Clif bars. The table in the main room was where I learned and we played poker when we had the time, which was rare. This was good for me, it turns out, as I discovered I am prodigiously terrible at Texas Hold'em, and decided to stop playing and just deal, cutting my losses, having already lost forty dollars.
With no running water on Graveyard, two rain barrels made up our supply of hydration. As water was in relatively short supply, there was no possibility of showers until we returned to town. Wet wipes became my best friend after every tide, and I used them so religiously that I emptied the entire enormous box of them that I brought with me.
On the bare wall across from the pantry and stove, we painted a movie quote from Speed, which David made our motto, and I personalized my own door with a few verses from Invictus.
Inside my room was a cot on one wall and shelves for my belongings on the other. Actually, they were empty cardboard boxes tied to the wall by twine. My first day, I rendered them more substantial by nailing them to the wall. There was one roughly cut window with plastic sheeting pulled over it. It was perfect. The best investment I made pre-trip had been a blackout sleeping mask which was the only way I could really get to sleep, as in Summer, it only gets dark where we were from 1 to 4 in the morning.
Now that you know what the cabin was like, time for the real thing. The thing we spent ten to fourteen hours a day doing, which brought us back to the cabin mud-caked and exhausted, our finger swollen to twice their normal size, our waders and clothes spattered with blood that wasn't ours, the thing that nearly got all of us killed a dozen times, and the only reason we were there. Set-net salmon fishing.
PART 3: SET-NETTING
There are two tides every day, and, weather permitting (and sometimes weather not permitting but we not really caring), we would fish both tides up the flood and down the ebb.
David would wake us up and we'd traipse into the gear room, pull on our waders, equipment and fishing gloves. If it was dark, we'd wear our headlamps too. The same routine every day from the first tide to the last tide. Get geared up, fill a thermos with fresh coffee, fill up the water cans, grab the dry bags full of Clif bars, spare clothes and other miscellany, and head out the door.
Leaving the cabins behind, we would walk along a dirt path through tall grass to the grassy ridge just above Graveyard Creek. We would almost always leave the cabin just as the tide was flooding in, so the creek would often be pretty low, leaving a steep mud bank between us and the water.
David would grab our canoe from where he'd stashed it on the grass, mudslide down into the water and paddle over to the St. Brendan, haul in the anchor and boat over to the mud, the rest of us squelching our way down the bank to hop in, one of us trudging back up the bank to return the canoe. That mud was foul smelling, and deceptively deep, sucking our boots down sometimes to our upper shins, forcing us to either fall over or rip it out before we overbalanced. I would usually just fall over. I became known as the fisherman who always lost his shoe in the mud.
The St. Brendan, a 21-ft. by 8-ft. skiff, is comprised of a small slot at the stern where the steersman stands. The dry bags, radio and other equipment are stashed by the motor, six large bins that make up the majority of the boat, with thick burlap 'brailer bags' fastened in each one to hold fish, and a small space where the prow narrows to a point, the ideal place to take a nap, and much sought after on our down time on the boat. Each brailer bag can hold 800lbs of salmon when full, so the boat's capacity is just under 5,000lbs of fish. Every few feet on the gunwales (pronounced 'gunnels'), or the sides of the boat, are holes where tall metal bars are stuck and can be removed, there to make sure the line to which the nets are attached doesn't get pulled over the prow.
When a skiff leaves Graveyard Creek, the land with the cabins is to its right, and the uninhabited land is to its left. On both sides there are set-net fishing sites set every 300 feet. A site is roughly 1,000 feet of thick rope (your "running line") that stretches from close to the shore to its end, attached by four or five buoys to the bay floor, where long metal rods ("augurs") are sunk by hand to secure the line.
To bury the augurs, you have to wait until low tide and walk out to the spot through the mud-flats left when the water runs out, carrying the heavy metal bar and buoys back and forth, sinking knee deep in the mud. It is exactly as fun as you think it would be.
At high tide, the fishing site is completely covered by water, and goes completely dry by the end of ebb tide, leaving the line on an expanse of mud that stretches from the shore.
Our site was to the left of Graveyard creek, four or five sites along, and the journey there alone every tide proved to me that David deserves the lion's share of the profits. I know this because, while Matt, Isaiah and I could turn our backs, protected by rain jackets, and let the spray thrown over the prow wash harmlessly off, David was always steering, so he would get a face full of bay-water every single tide, except when it was completely calm, which it rarely was.
One time when we were making our way to our site, David filled a mug with coffee from the thermos and took a swig at the exact moment a wave hit the prow and soaked him head to foot. He smiled and said, "That one had a little extra zip to it."
Once we reached the line, the flood would have usually only half finished, so we would cruise up to the upper half of the running line, the only half submerged, and pop the running line over the prow by snagging it with a hooked grabber we kept in the prow seat with the anchor.
Then we would start setting nets. Alaskan fishing law only allows for 50 fathoms of net to be in the water at one time, and as 1 fathom equals 6 feet, that meant only 300 feet of net could be in the water at the same time or else we would risk a $10,000 fine.
David keeps about 75-100 fathoms of net in the St. Brendan, divided into several 25 fathom nets and a couple 12.5 fathom nets. This way, when a net closer to the shore would go dry on the ebb tide, we could throw out another on the outside to keep fishing the full 50.
This season the nets had fresh netting, the mesh making thousands of holes big enough to snag salmon, but not big enough to let them through, below the line of white corks at the top of the net that kept it afloat, and above the heavy 'lead line' of rope at the bottom that dragged the net down.
To set a net, you pop the running line over the prow and keep it in the boat by pulling its side posts on the port and starboard gunwales. Then you tie the end of one of the nets to it using a 'net knot', a simple tie which is very secure while being quick and easy to release. The rest is just feeding the top and bottom of the net out of the boat as you pull yourselves along the running line, making sure the corks and leads don't entangle.
To make a net belly out away from the line less, you stop feeding it out for a few seconds while continuing to pull the running line, tautening it and bringing it closer to the line. David calls this 'tightening the boob', but for us, it deteriorated over the weeks into 'nice boobage'.
Once a net is fully in the water you tie the other end off and either 'pop off', throw the running line off the prow and move to another part of the line, or wait at the end of the net you've just set. But after the nets are set, all you can do was wait.
On our first day out Matt and I were both seasick, or baysick, technically, but calling myself basic hurts my feelings, so I'll stick with seasick. He was the first to puke over the side, but my stomach refused to upchuck, and I spent a miserable half hour on the lightly rocking skiff trying to induce vomiting to make myself feel better, until at last I was forced to take drastic measures.
"Hey Cap, can I have some coffee for a gag reflex?" I was pretty sure my dislike of coffee would help me this once, as anything besides water must surely upset my already churning stomach sufficiently. My fellow fishermen were skeptical, but I insisted and got a mug of hot mud to end my ordeal.
I took two sips, then stood up, moved to the nearest gunwale, and barfed spectacularly over the side, my stomach contracting so forcefully it felt like an accordion. The crew's skepticism turned to hilarity as, although I'd already thrown up everything I'd eaten in the last six months, I kept gagging SO loudly Matt and Isaiah nearly passed out laughing, and "can I have some coffee for a gag reflex," was repeated and savored almost every tide, sometimes on multiple occasions.
Every tide would bring in a different amount of fish, so there was never a set amount of time we would always wait before fishing them. If it was a slow tide, we would set them during the flood and wait until the top to fish them. But if it was a busy tide, we would put them out and wait maybe an hour before pulling through them. During 'peak,' the ten to fourteen days in July when every tide is extremely fishy, we would often set the nets only a few minutes before pulling through them, so as not to have to fish an absolutely packed net.
On our first day, we only pulled in about 200 pounds of fish. The procedure is simple. Two fisherman on either side of the net, one usually standing in each of four bins the net is being pulled over. Whenever there are fish, the closest fisherman to it works it out of the net and drops it into the bin being filled. When the net is full, you pull it in until the packed portion of net almost goes over the other side, fish it, then pull in another length.
Before I arrived at Graveyard, I was under the foolish notion that the fish would simply fall out of the net into the boat. Unfortunately, for a fish to be caught in a net, it must be caught in the net.
If you're lucky, the salmon will be halfway through the net, and you can grip it at its gills (the only part of a fish you can hold without its slipping out) and pull it all the way through. More usually, it will have only gotten its head through the mesh, and its gill slit will be caught. To free a salmon caught by its gills you have to push a finger into its gill slit, find the net cord keeping it there, and pop it out using your middle finger and thumb, much like the way you open a beer can (not that I have any experience in that field).
These are the two most common ways the fish are caught, but sometimes the salmon will be well snarled up in a twisted bit of net, and you have to 'conduct surgery', as David calls it, which is infuriating, particularly when you're new and clumsy, but is aggravating throughout the season as you attempt to find a pathway through the tangled wad of net to free the fish.
When a fish is freed, you drop it into the brailer bag lined bin, but before that you bleed it. The canneries to which we delivered pay ten cents extra per pound for bled fish, as that speeds up the canning process apparently. And though bleeding a fish does kill it faster than letting it drown in the open air, it is a pretty savage thing to do, as I discovered.
Once a fish has been freed, the procedure of bleeding is very simple. Hold it up by sticking a middle finger through its gills, and with the other hand rip one of its gills in half, letting its heart pump blood through the opening and onto the boat.
The first few fish I freed from the net and bled actually had quite an affect on me. When we had pulled all the way through the net, I sat back, stunned, looking down at the creatures I'd just killed, feeling as though I'd done something very wrong.
But, both fortunately and unfortunately, I became callous very quickly. And by mid-season, I was emptying nets at speed and bleeding fish one-handed. You do have to be careful when you bleed salmon, though, as I discovered one tide.
Pulling our way through a thickly packed net, I held up a medium sized Sockeye and popped a gill, forgetting to make sure the salmon's tail, and thus the blood squirt, was aiming down. Instead of the blood joining the rest at the bottom of the boat, it sprayed into my face, covering my neck with dark red liquid, and ruining the shirt I was wearing underneath my waders, a Be Bold running t-shirt which I still have, its yellow color marred by a splatter pattern of scarlet. But whenever I go out in it, I make sure to tell people it's not my blood, which for some reason makes them even more anxious to get away from me. I suppose they really like fish. Odd.
If it was a slow tide, we would wait until the end to deliver our bags of fish to the cannery tenders, but if it was a busy one, David would have us make two, sometimes three trips in a tide, to keep our boat as light as possible for a packed net.
The delivery process, like most things up there, is simple. Usually there would be a tender anchored only a few hundred meters from our site, right off of Graveyard Point, almost always the same one, a thick-set black boat with peeling paint called the Inalek, which took fish for the Copper River Cannery.
If the Inalek wasn't there during a tide, or David wanted to deliver to his other cannery, AGS, we would boat a quarter mile or more down the coast to where the rest of the tenders sat at anchor in a hodge-podge of different shapes and sizes.
Usually there would be a line of fishing skiffs waiting off the stern of the tenders, but it never took them very long to deliver. When we were up, somebody, either Isaiah or me usually, would stand in the prow and tie us off to the side of the tender, where buoys hanging over the side prevented our skiff from banging into the thick metal hull.
Then we would tell the deck hands how many bags of fish we had, usually two or three, and another deck hand would activate the crane with a giant hook in the end to lower into the skiff while we tied the fish filled brailer bags to metal contraptions (pelicans) handed to us by another deckhand, whereupon we would hook the crane to a pelican and let it lift the brailer bag out of the skiff to dump into the fish hold aboard the tender.
As we bled our fish, whenever a brailer bag was lifted, a thousand streams of oily blood would seep out the bottom and splatter the skiff and deck as it swung past. One time it swung directly over me, and I was very thankful I had kept my rain jacket on, as I tipped my head down and was unaffected by the disgusting downpour.
When all our bags were delivered, the bottom of the skiff would always be swimming in several inches of dark fish blood, which one of us would bale out if it got too deep. But usually, after we got our brailer bags back and rinsed them off by hanging them in the water over a gunwale, we would get up to speed and unplug a draining hole at the stern, and the blood would be sucked out while we sped back towards Graveyard.
Thus went every tide Rain or shine, calm water of skiff-rocking rollers, bright afternoon of black night, the same routine every day. Suit up, walk to the creek, load up and make our way to the site. Set nets or motor up beside those we left overnight or overafternoon or overmorning, fish them up and down the tide, deliver to a tender, then return to the creek. Simple.
PART 4: TAILS TO ASTONISH
I've decided on three stories to illustrate the adventure that my trip was, and though these are but a tiny percentage of what went on, I feel they will be sufficient to complete a picture of what a month of salmon fishing in Alaska is like.
#1: The Bear Attack
As it only got dark for three or four hours each day, we almost never fished in complete darkness, and even more rarely began a tide in totally black night. When we did, those tides were particularly difficult, as we would have to find our fishing site, secure the running line, set and fish nets all while in the dark, only a portable spotlight and our headlamps to light the work.
On one of these occasions, the four of us were trudging away from the warmth of the cabins along the dirt path that ran through a field of long grass toward the creek, our headlamps bright enough to illumine the path in front of us.
David was in front, behind him went Matt, and a little further back I came with Isaiah close behind. At one point, David was already canoeing to the skiff, Matt was on the beach, and I was nearly out of the grass, Isaiah perhaps twenty feet behind me.
At that moment, a shout rang out across the field, coming from the cabins behind us. I turned, and realized the shout had come from the balcony of the nearest cabin, where a fisherman was standing. He yelled again, and this time I could make out the words.
"ISAIAH WRIGHT! THERE IS A BEAR COMING DIRECTLY AT YOU!"
I looked to Isaiah just as it happened. He had looked down too, and the fisherman's eyes had not deceived him.
An Alaskan grizzly bear was lumbering down the dirt path I had just vacated, its massive feet carrying it at speed right at Isaiah.
I didn't know this until this fishing trip, but when a light shines into a grizzly's eyes, they flash yellow as if they've caught fire, and it is an absolutely terrifying sight. This one looked only about half-grown, which meant it only came up to my chest on all fours.
But I was twenty feet back, while Isaiah was right there, as the bear came on.
To Isaiah's credit, he didn't run. If he had, this story would probably have had a slightly different ending. Instead of running, he froze, and shone his headlamp right at the bear. For my part, I too stiffened, and gave an inarticulate cry, which I assume was meant to scare off the oncoming ursine.
However, the grizzly continued forward without slackening its pace until, a few feet from Isaiah, it swerved away to the left and lumbered off into the wilderness, disappearing into the darkness with the muted swish of displaced grass.
Suffice it to say, we got on board the St. Brendan quicker than usual.
Whenever we went out in the dark again, we kept to groups of two more often than not, often bunching together in one single unit, so at least the bear would be distracted enough by eating one of us to let the other three escape.
When returning to the cabins in the dark, we shone our headlamps extra carefully around every corner, expecting to see flashes of bright yellow. We had almost reached the cabins when all four of us turned the corner right beside the cabins and all of our headlamps showed two beady flashes of brightest yellow.
My heart was kicked in the groin, Matt swore fluently, Isaiah and David froze, and the dog whose eyes we had illuminated barked complacently at us.
#2: The Great Round Haul
One round haul to rule them all, one round haul to press them,
One round haul to bring them all, and in the darkness stress them
Fear the round haul. That's what I did. At the very least, I disliked the concept and rarely enjoyed the execution of one. I don't think any set-netter does. But, unfortunately, they are sometimes necessary.
There are a few different ways to fish a net, all of them simple, and all but one of them relatively easy. You can simply 'pick through', i.e. keep both ends of the net tied to the running line and pull the skiff along the net, emptying it of fish. You can 'pick and pull', i.e. untie one end of the net and coil the corks and leads in empty bins as you pick through the net, filling any number of bins with the freed fish, and two others with the neatly coiled net.
Those are procedures for when you have time to fish the nets, and there are several more, but those are the most common and often-used. When you don't have time, when your nets are exploding with fish, or when the tide is ebbing and you're dangerously close to going high and dry on the mud, you must then resort to, you guessed it, the round haul.
With no time to pick through the nets, you untie one end of the net and heave in the entire length of it into a disorganized pile aboard the skiff, the fish still tangled in a mass beneath the mound of mesh. This is difficult when you only have to round haul one net, very difficult when you have to round haul two, nauseatingly difficult when the nets are packed, and absolutely hellish if you have to do it in the dark.
The tide of our greatest round haul started off unusually. It was late, and the sun was beginning to set. But it was during peak, so we fished one net and already had two bags of salmon to deliver before the top of the flood.
So we skimmed down to the AGS tenders, where we boated up alongside the Silversword, a rickety old tender crewed by meth heads and third-generation pirates.
It wasn't what I would call very wavy, but I soon realized that anything above a lapping wave is bad when you're tied to a large boat. And tonight, these waves were three feet tall and rolling in endlessly.
The moment we were tied to the Silversword, I knew we were in some kind of trouble. As the deckhands aboard her took their sweet time handing us down pelicans and activating the crane, the waves began to slam the St. Brendan against the side of the Silversword.
Wha-bam! Wha-bam! Wha-bam!
Our two bags were lifted out of the skiff, making us even lighter.
Wha-bam! Wha-bam!! Wha-bam!!
Up on deck, the meth heads are discussing the stock market as they slowly empty our bags into their hold. Down on our wave-tossed skiff, Matt is swearing his head off, Isaiah is glued to the starboard gunwale, and I am spreadeagled like a cat in an earthquake.
Wha-bam!! Wha-BAM!! WHA-BAM!!
"WOULD YOU HURRY UP?!" Someone in the skiff roared as we crashed again and again into the ship's side. As they did, I noticed a groaning sound as the bar on the starboard side, around which the line tying us to the tender had been lashed, was bending slowly. To be precise, the solid metal bar, welded to the side of the skiff, was being bent by the force we were generating slamming against the buoys protecting us from the shear side of the Silversword.
But finally, someone threw us our brailer bags, and, without waiting to rinse them off, tore off the line and zoomed away back to our site, sighing with relief, and looking forward to an easier rest of the tide. This was not forthcoming.
The sun had almost set as we began to pick and pull our first net, as the tide had just begun to ebb. Then, through the gloom we saw the water appear to be strafed by a machine gun as the fish caught at the top of the net all the way along it thrashed. And if that many fish were on the top, chances were the net was absolutely packed.
"Oh, it's blowing up! Round haul!" David yelled, and we forgot about picking fish and the four of us began to heave in the net as fast as possible.
This wasn't very fast, as every foot of the one-hundred-and-fifty was full of massive, thrashing Sockeye, hundreds of pounds every pull. Thank heaven we had four crew members.
But even with four, every few minutes we would rest for a few seconds, gasping for breath and wiping sweat out of our eyes before grasping the net again and pulling for all we were worth.
At long last we heaved in the end of the net and untied it, leaving a pyramid of salmon-packed net in the center of the skiff. Only one more to go.
Untying our second 25 fathom net from its first net knot, the four of us gritted our teeth and set to again, heaving in piles of fish inch by inch.
At one point, David leaned over the side, I don't know why, and his entire head was dunked in the water. For a frozen five or ten seconds, it stayed there as we stared at it, too stunned to do anything but watch. Then he pulled his head free of the water, shook it, and resumed pulling in net. We joined in.
Grunting and yelling, we finally pulled the last feet of the second net into the boat. There was now nowhere to stand but on fish-filled net, but for the tiny slot where David steered. A gigantic mound of net filled the entire skiff from stern to prow, and the nose of the skiff, while before it had been four feet above the water, now sat less than twelve inches above the mercifully calm water.
Our boat's maximum capacity weight of fish is 4800 pounds, and we had just pulled in more than 5600 in one fifty fathom round haul. But it wasn't that bad, it only took us five hours to disentangle all of them fish.
By the time we were finished, every one of us was caked in fish scales and red and white foamy gore, delivering eight packed to bursting brailer bags to the Copper River tender. There was so much blood in the bottom of skiff that it lapped at our shins in the stern. My hands were so sore, numb and swollen after that that I could barely remove my gloves when we returned, totally mentally and physically exhausted, to the cabins.
But hey, at least the waves had calmed down before the round haul. I can only imagine what a round haul like that would be like if it were choppy...
#3: Drowned Haul
I thought when I had secured my job as an Alaskan commercial fisherman that I would potentially work harder than I had ever worked before. Actually, I didn't. I worked very hard, and the work was almost as hard as the hardest thing I've ever done. However, I have been more exhausted during a cross-country running season, so I cannot say that it was the absolute hardest work I ever endured.
But I can say without a doubt it was the most stressed I have ever been in my life. Not just the constant potential of meeting a bear on the island, not just the endless repetition of hard work on the water, not just the difficulty in being in close proximity to only three other people for five weeks, but also, the fact that I, that is to say we, nearly all went overboard one tide.
It was during a late evening tide, meaning the sun was relatively low on the horizon. We had begun to pull in the first twenty-five fathom net of two we had set. And then the water began to thrash as a dozen fish tails cut the choppy water apart, and we were in it again.
Barely needing to call the order to round haul, David began heaving at the net, Isaiah, Matt and I joining in with gusto as the net still in the water foamed with writhing fish.
A hundred and fifty feet never felt so long before in my life. With every heave we pulled into only a few feet, and the rest of the net snaked out seemingly endlessly in the water still, full of heavy fish fighting for their lives.
But in another agonizing few minutes, we managed to pull in the entire first net. What we didn't realize was that we had pulled almost the whole net into the stern of the boat, adding several thousand extra pounds to the back of the skiff. Well, we realized it eventually.
"Look at the stern!" "We're going under!"
We had just begun to pull in the second twenty-five fathom net when these cries rang out. Whipping around, I saw something that shot my stress through the top of my skull into overdrive. The stern of the ship had been pushed nearly underwater, and waves were washing over it, quickly filling the back of the skiff with water.
"Pull to the prow!" David yelled, and we dove for the net, ripping it into the boat with desperate energy. In another second, I had climbed onto the pile of netting and was using my entire body to grab and pull as much of anything resembling net towards the front of the boat.
In those moments, I was fully prepared to leap overboard if the skiff began to sink in earnest. I had a life jacket on, and I would take my chances in struggling through dark, shallow water to the shore instead of being dragged down by netting on a foundering boat. But while I was contemplating this mentally, I was joining in the frenzied attempts to equalize the weight of the boat.
And in another minute the danger had passed. The net we were pulling in was so heavy with fish that it had only taken a short while for our combined efforts to bring in enough weight to tip the stern up enough to prevent us from going under.
The skiff-ride to the tender was almost as tense as the fishing itself, as our prow was barely a foot above the water, and each wave that broke against it threatened to swamp and sink us. But we made it to calmer waters and set to emptying the nets. And this one only took us three hours.
PART 5: CONCLUSION
Those were only three of the countless stories I could tell. But I haven't the time to tell of the naked fisherman picking through his nets, of the dozens of seals, bears and bald eagles we spotted, of the unimaginably beautiful sunrises and sunsets we grew used to every day, of the time when I misjudged the depth of a jump into the bay and was almost swept out to sea, the water skiing on sunny days, the misery of the wavy tide when I decided not to bring my rain jacket, of when Isaiah tore his waders from shin to chest while underwater, of the salmon that jumped into our boat while at full speed, the dance party aboard the skiff, and the hours upon hours of conversations, debates and jokes on the St. Brendan.
This has gotten to be far too long as it is, but now I think you can somewhat appreciate what a Summer spent salmon fishing in Alaska is like.
Without a doubt, this has been the most action-packed Summer of my life, and I owe that primarily to David, but also to Matt and Isaiah, all of whom I want to thank for all the help, encouragement and much more they gave me over the course of the trip. I will be forever grateful.
Right now, however, I have you to thank for finishing this treatise on Alaskan fishing, which I hope you enjoyed. If not, I'm surprised you've read this far. Perhaps you're a skimmer.
Nevertheless, this whole long ordeal has been one for the record books, and I hope I was able to illustrate above just how great an experience it really was. Between the unique company, the near drowning, the bear attack and just the fishing itself, I doubt I'll have an experience like this ever again.
Unless I go back next year of course.
