The ride across Bristol Bay to the mouth of the Egigik River had been a turbulent four hours spent bucking the wind and tide out of Naknek, Alaska. We had put the 32-foot gill-netter, Kara K in the water at 5AM after seventeen hours of gear preparation and low-level technical maintenance. I say low-level because it became apparent in Naknek that with one whopping year of experience as a fisherman and the mechanical acumen of a prima ballerina I would be the senior member of our two-man crew. My mate was a good-natured twenty-year-old stoner given to practicing Tae-Chi profiles at any point when he was not specifically directed to do something else. And he had to be directed constantly. The skipper and owner of the boat was a high-liner (fisher-lingo for top producers) paraplegic with twenty-plus years experience and very high expectations for the notoriously competitive Bristol Bay sockeye salmon fishery. Wrestling for a few hours sleep on the bumpy ride to Egigik, I contemplated our chances.

My journey to Naknek to meet-up with the Kara K began in Seattle two weeks earlier. I had flown out from my home in DC on the 2nd of June and reported to duty aboard the 156' schooner Stormy Sea, a WWII refitted yard freighter that hailed from Petersburg, Alaska. We were charged with hauling twelve 20-foot trailers, two pick-up trucks, a couple of fifteen-foot aluminum skiffs and 100 tons of rock salt from Seattle to a cannery in Dillingham, Alaska. I had made the same trip the year before and was looking forward to the ride up through the breathtaking Inside Passage, the 1800 mile waterway that snakes through the islands and beaches of Canada and the Alaskan Panhandle from northern Washington to the Gulf of Alaska.

Employment aboard any commercial ship is a rigorous enterprise, and among the vessels of Alaska's commercial fishing fleet the work is notoriously tough. Long hours, hard physical labor and the obvious dangers of toiling in a volatile environment combine to make fish killing an occupation for the hale and adventurous. Ships like the Stormy Sea embody the versatile nature of the Alaskan fisheries and the folks who work them. As one of the larger schooners working the Bering Sea the Stormy is a perennial top grossing opelio and king crab producer during the long northern winters. In late April the opening of the herring season in Togiak Bay and Norton Sound brings the boat north to serve the herring fleet as a tender, assisting in the movement and transfer of supplies and harvested fish. The close of the herring fishery coincides with the opening of the salmon season in Bristol Bay, which in turn is followed by the Southeast salmon fishery along the Panhandle. With 1,000,000 pounds of well-refrigerated hold space the big boat anchors the tender fleet through August. By September the salmon are gone and the Stormy is driven out to Dutch Harbor midway through the Aleutian Islands, and geared-up for the crab season. In between each fishery the boat shuttles back and forth from Seattle to Alaska hauling freight. Like the vessels, the professional fishermen who work them gravitate from season to season, and aboard ship, from job to job.

My duties aboard the Stormy included loading and chaining down the cargo, squaring the deck and gear for the journey north, cleaning the vessel and organizing and buying grocery supplies for the summer. Once we were en route, I would be over-seeing the deck operations, sharing wheel-watches and cooking for our crew. The Stormy left Seattle late in the day on the 6th of June after three days of frantic loading and preparations. I stayed ashore and accompanied the owner on a last minute run to gather the tender gear and meet the boat in Anacortes, WA, a six-hour sail north through Puget Sound. We rendezvoused at midnight, and by 3 am everything was loaded and I was asleep in my stateroom bunk as we passed the Straight of Georgia and motored out toward Vancouver Island. Eight days later we pulled through False Pass at the western tip of the Alaska Peninsula and headed east for Bristol Bay.

During one of my watches we passed through gale-force winds in sector 5-Alpha south of Kodiak Island. I watched a lone albatross dipping through the beams of our deck lights to touch on the cresting swells braking over the bow of the ship. Seconds later the bird tipped its wings and floated off the angry black water just as we slid down into the trough and shuddered up the other side. I listened to the Coast Guard operator calling again and again for a missing vessel somewhere in the darkness around us. I thought about the millions of people who had listened to weather reports this day for whom the consequences meant little more than the difference between carrying an umbrella or not, and the few out here for whom the weather was a very real and mortal thing. I wished we might all have a few pounds of feather and tissue instead of all our tons of technology, because I knew what the chances of anyone surviving these seas in a crippled vessel would be.
I had managed less than two hours sleep when the Kara K's skipper called me from my bunk at 8 am as we neared the mouth of the Egigik River. Power-naps are the main source of replenishment in the trade and they have to be taken whenever the opportunity to get horizontal presents itself, so I was used to short stretches of sleep. It had taken us four tides over the course of two days to offload the cargo from the Stormy in Dillingham though, and I had been averaging less than three hours of sleep per day for most of the week. The weather in Egigik, modest by Alaskan standards, was blowing 20 mph and churning-up 8-10 foot seas in the river estuary. You don't have to be an expert in Euclidean Physics to come up with a visual of a 32-foot boat bobbing around between ten-foot swells. "Go outside and load the gear onto the wheel," I was told by the skipper. I had never loaded gear onto a wheel, but I had not done a lot of things I was asked to do in Alaska before. I woke up the kid. "You ever worked up here before?" I asked him as we put on our raingear on the bucking deck. "Nope," he said. I watched him struggle out the hatch and affix himself to the starboard bulkhead. "Ever been on a boat?"

Fishing is hard work, but it is not rocket science. A lot of what is done involves endurance, retention, and common sense. Within five minutes of hitting the deck it was clear my colleague had none of these skills in his repertoire. While he alternately held his head over the side of the boat and scrabbled about on the deck watching, I figured out the hydraulic system and dragged the first of four shackles, or nets, to the wheel. Each shackle of gear was 112 feet long, 14 feet deep, and lined on one side with cork floats, and the other with lead rope to help it sit properly in the water. Unfortunately, Junior and I had already screwed ourselves by haphazardly stuffing the gear into bags when we loaded them the day before, jumbling the cork and lead lines in a hopeless maze and burying the ends somewhere in the copious folds of mesh. Unable to make heads or tails during forty minutes of skidding across the deck and railing at the helpless kid, I pushed the first heap aside and dragged the next one up. The skipper called me to the window.

"It takes a fucking hour to load one shackle of gear?" the skipper screamed. I looked over at the kid, sprawled on the deck and greener than month-old wonderbread. "Not exactly," I said. "We haven't got the first one on yet." He let out a bit of the sailor-speak. "It's fourteen minutes until the open," he told me after spinning around in his seat a few times. "Are we going to be ready?" "Not a chance," I said. By the time we did get the rest of the gear on the wheel it was well past noon, and most of the boats around us were working on their third set. I did not bother answering his next furious summons to the hatchway. I knew it was difficult for him watching our slapstick routine and not being able to leave his seat while fish were running under the boat, but I was too far over my head to take on his frustration.

The night before I had spoken privately with the skipper about my expectations for the coming day. Junior was already prone. I pointed out that we had one greenhorn and one second year hacker on board to take on the hardest hitting river in the Bay; I did not add the obvious, that his assistance at critical points would be verbal only. He had been aware of my limited experience, and assured me that a third man would be joining us after the first open. I let him know I wasn't overly worried about the pending zero-hour, but that ours would not be a flawless debut. What neither of us could have told each other at the time was that working his boat, which was set-up entirely different from the one I had greenhorned on the year before, would require my relearning the whole lot, and no one had pegged the kid for breathing baggage yet.

As I already mentioned, I am not mechanically gifted, but most of my ineptitude is rooted in failure psychosis; I am loath to use any instrumentation with which I am unfamiliar. The truth is, there are few moving parts involved with putting-out and hauling gear on a gill-netter: the drum onto which the gear is wound sits mid-ship behind the wheel-house, and the wheel over which the gear is played-out or hauled-in sits directly over the stern. Each of these components is hydraulically operated and can be run in forward or reverse, or they may be left fully braked or disengaged so that it can spin freely. Optimally, the drum is left free-wheeling and the stern-hauler is run outboard while the gear is being set, and the drum is run inboard and the stern-hauler free-wheels while the gear is being hauled.

The gear is usually set-out quickly. After the skipper picks a spot he gives the signal to drop the gear. While the boat is moving forward a buoy-ball is attached to the front of the first shackle and thrown over the stern and the gear is run out between the upright horns of the stern-hauler, which should be running outboard at full throttle. Unfortunately, that was one part of the hydraulics I did not figure out. As a result the gear was not deployed evenly, but run out in precipitous bursts, alternately dragging in a slack loop over the deck and snapping-up taut as wire when the boat rocked in the swells. Either condition can destroy huge tracts of expensive gear, not to mention any limb in the vicinity should the lines snap. But the kid and I were blissfully protected by our absolute idiocy, and for some reason there were no major malfunctions incurred though I did see other fisherman cover their eyes when they motored past.

Not to say the day was calamity free, in truth our ineptitude might have been a marvel to witness on film, but no one was free to film that day. At one point we had to roundhaul, or pull in the gear manually over the stern while it was loaded with fish because we were drifting out of the demarcated fishing area and not picking the net fast enough to have it out of the water before we got there. The skipper's eyes rolled white and Junior's face waxed greenly while I hauled and cursed and bit through the pain in my burning arms.

"Pull the fucking net!"I screamed. "Just set your feet and pull!" I railed and fumed freely as Junior lumbered back and forth and jerked at the line like he was straightening out a pair of leotards. Of course the stern wheel should be cranked full-throttle inboard at this point to assist in pulling the chunky load over the rubber-coated surface, but that was one lever I left alone all day so that it remained locked and immobile while we pulled the boat against the tide and the tons of fish and gear stretched behind us. The kid, who was really as strong as a draft animal if marginally less adroit, rallied for a few minutes when the wind died off and we stood side by side yarding on that gear and I was convinced it would never end, but I promised him it would.

"One thing I can guarantee you is that this day will end." I told him. I would have delivered the same cheery pronouncement to the skipper but I had ceased to wander close enough to the window to communicate.

At the end of that first day we had put better than a ton and a half of Egigik River sockeyes in the bank, and we had done it undermanned and woefully brief on experience. As it turned out is was just below the fleet average for the day. I wasn't proud, in fact I felt utterly spent and more than a little embarrassed, but as I had promised Junior hours earlier, the day did end. But something else happened to me that day too. There have been very few moments in my life when I stared out from the dark kernel of my being and doubted that I could physically continue. Several times as I was sprawled on my hands and knees flailing through the fish-soaked net on the first day of the 2000 season I had laughed aloud and promised myself that I was going to pack it in. Just walk up to the skipper and tell him to take me to shore. Maybe that is what makes pushing ahead easier sometimes, that little valve of reason that rescues us from collapse. We ended up leaving Egigik one week later with the highest cumulative total in the fleet, thanks to the new guy Jeff's timely arrival and excellent coaching. Junior never really got it into gear and left us long before it was all done, but the truth is the nightmare of that day brought me closer to a part of myself I had never seen. It was not a great view, but it was all I had.