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We’ve moved south, though we’re currently in port in Wrangell instead of Ketchikan. This has definitely been the best week we’ve had since coming up here, and though we’re not dancing yet, some of the crummy vibes that we’ve been fighting for the last few weeks look like they might be fading. We’ve had the opportunity to work a bit more, fishing Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday of this week, and are heading back out again tomorrow to fish until Monday.
Before talking about those days, however, I should probably explain the work I’m doing up here so that some of the terminology makes sense. The basic setup is a large boat (The Yankee Boy is 56x16 ft: some are larger, some are smaller, but that’s a pretty typical size), a small boat called a skiff (around 11x6 ft), and a 250 fathom long net (1,500 ft). The net has three parts: the cork line, which floats it, the web, which forms the barrier for the fish, and the lead line, which sinks the web. Rings hang from the lead line along the second half of the net, and the purse line passes through those rings. One end of the net is hooked up to the skiff, which has an enormous engine block that delivers nearly 300 hp, and the other end is hooked up to the big boat. While fishing, the captain and crew scout for “jumpers,” salmon that leap from the water and often indicate a school of fish, and when we think we’ve identified the direction they’re running we release the skiff from the back of the Yankee Boy. The Yankee Boy and the skiff then line out the net until it forms a taught semicircle, open opposite the direction of the salmon run, and tow for about 25 minutes. Once we’ve towed long enough, the skiff and Yankee Boy close up, forming a complete circle and the skiff man hands off his end of the net to the crew on deck. We hook the skiff on to the opposite side of the boat so that it can control our position while the Yankee Boy idles, and the captain comes down on deck to work the hydraulic controls. We use a power block—a large wheel suspended from the boom over the deck—to haul in the net, which the deckhands stack in preparation for the next set. The three jobs for deckhand are cork man, web man, and lead man: it shouldn’t be too hard to guess who stacks which part of the net. My job, web man, entails grabbing the bundle of web as it falls, and piling it in as orderly a fashion as possible while Harold and Tim stack corks and leads. As we haul in the net, Jim brings in the purse line using the winch, a large, metal rotating wheel, which draws the rings on the back half of the net together to form the purse. Once we have the purse formed we hop off the pile and hook the end of the net to the deck. Then Jim throws the power block into high gear and we stack at a much faster pace until we only have a small portion of the net remaining. This is the bag, and if we’re lucky it has a lot of fish it. We use a system of pulleys to haul the bag on deck, hook up the net to the skiff, and repeat for 15 hours a day.
Tuesday and Wednesday weren’t particularly thrilling: we spent two days in Anita Bay working to haul in just over 4,500 pounds of dog, and the red jellyfish were so thick that we felt they stung our necks, eyes, faces, and arms as they got pulverized in the power block and flowed over our rain gear. Though it would have been nice to do better, working is better than sitting on anchor and we didn’t have high expectations going in to the bay. The real day that we were all looking forward to was Thursday’s opening in area seven, south of Wrangell, where the pink salmon usually make a big appearance. Jim fired up the boat at 2:15am (I went back to bed until 4am, after we lifted the anchor) to scout out a spot and we made our first set of the day at 5am, hauling in about 2,000 pounds. Though this was half what we’d caught over the last couple days it wasn’t that much in absolute terms, and pink salmon are worth half as much per pound as dogs. We made a few more sets in the same spot, none of them larger than our first, and by 8am Jim was furious. “You know what you’re going back to school with, kid? A f*king baloney sandwich!” he would shout as we hauled in the net. I said that I liked baloney, but pepperoni was preferable if we could afford it, to which he said "Don't piss me off, kid. Cook! The kid's not eating lunch today" (I still got lunch).
It looked like it was going to be another long, discouraging day fishing for peanuts on the Yankee Boy. Around 9am most of the other boats had moved on, and we moved further down the eight mile stretch of beach to try a new spot. For the first time since we started fishing, it looked as if we were actually going to have a decent one—we could see fish jumping every several seconds in the wide area encircled by our net. Then we noticed that a large section of the cork line was submerged, presumably hooked on a snag, which could be a log, or rock, or anything else that hooks the lead line and drags on the net. This problem is of varying degrees of severity: at the best, your net pops up after a couple minutes and everything is cool. At the worst, the net gets snagged so bad the skiff can’t haul it in. In this case the skiff unhooks and the crew back-hauls the net, possibly mending some giant tears in the web, purse line, or leads. Though we were fortunate enough to be able to close up the corks stayed under, and Jim expressed what we were all feeling when he stormed out of the wheelhouse railing about how jinxed we were. “Why does it always play out this way?” I asked in my head "Why can't we just catch some fish?" Not a minute later, just as we began to stack the net, the corks rose to the surface, lifting our spirits: even though a couple had gotten away we knew that there were still fish in that net. We brought the bag in, and for the first time of the season had the joy of seeing the water boil and the boat keel over under the weight of a several tons of fish. Praise God!
That set was probably around 4,000 pounds. Though not huge, it was the biggest bag we’d seen to that point, and we immediately set in the same area. It had become a beautiful, sunny morning, unusually clear and warm, and we had an open view down the four mile stretch of beach to our north. This makes for both a pretty view and a clear salmon run, and we quickly realized that this set had potential: Fish were jumping two or three at a time throughout the entire 25 minute tow. We started piling, and as we got near the end of the net the water once again began to boil, except earlier, and over a wider area. The sound the fish make as the net pushes them to the surface before rolling the bag is somewhere between being under a tin roof in a heavy rainstorm and standing by a river swollen by spring rain. It is one of the most beautiful sounds a fisherman can hear, trumped only by the sound of those fish pouring over the side, and the sight of the seething, flopping mass spreading out over the deck, around the cabin, and flowing into the hold. At last! That set was probably about 20,000 pounds, and we were able to make several smaller, though still respectable sized hauls before some of the other guys further to the south rushed up and set down the beach to our north, interrupting our clean run. No hard feelings, though: we’d do the same thing in an instant.
It feels great to catch fish, but the experience of being on deck doesn’t get any less stressful. The work is hard, particularly when we have to pull in some of the cork line by hand when it gets behind the leads, or when I take Harold’s lead line and pile it along with the web while he helps Jim roll the bag. There’s lot of shouting, cussing, sweating, slipping, and plenty of opportunities to get hurt. On our largest bag of the day the fish were weighing down the net to the point that a few started to slip over the corks. As Tim and I strained to haul in the slack I looked down into the sea of fish below me and wondered, for just a moment, what it would be like to fall in. On good days fishing is stressful, dangerous, tiring and lucrative. On bad days it is just the first three. Yet, as I stood on the back of the deck in the afternoon sun, feeling its warmth spread over my weary arms and back, and looked out over the islands I felt happy and at peace. “This is what I came for,” I thought, “days like this make all the other stuff worth it.” I mentioned in passing in my last post some the struggle with self love and insecurity that my experiences up here have raised; how I came here, in part, to prove something to myself. Though I continue to wrestle with God in my heart about what it means to truly throw off attachment to outside approval, to quiet my restless spirit and truly seek Him in all I do, Thursday reminded me that I really do love this work, this place, and this brief season of life for what it is.
That’s all for now, folks, thanks for staying tuned. On Thursday we made around 1,700 dollars per guy, which means we’ve just about covered our liability and can start making money. Hopefully we’ve got a few more days of the same ahead. Jim and the experiences crew still aren't optimistic though: the possibility is still very real that we'll be back in August. In either case, being here is proving to be a reward in and of itself.
God willing, I might make it back with a baloney sandwich and a couple bucks,
Aaron
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