4:00pm, Friday August 5
It's been awhile since I felt compelled to write anything. This is due in part to some lingering sea-sickness through the last two trips, and in part to the fact that we've been either sitting on our hands in port or hauling up close to empty nets for three weeks now.
You can imagine the compounded demoralization writing about all of this would create.
And you might imagine that if I'm writing now it's because things are better....
Well, we were stuck in port the last couple of days trying to get our refrigeration fixed, and waiting for Paul's girlfriend whose flight ended up getting cancelled. Once we found out she couldn't make it Thursday, we fueled up the boat and cast off heading to the southwest section of Kodiak Island for the first time all season. The guys and I were pretty excited, as so far we had only really fished two areas, and our consistent bad luck at one of those areas (and the Skipper's consistent choice to return to said area) had pretty much made us sick of the eastern top of the island.
About four hours in to our trip, we emerged from the foc'sole to see the windmills and buildings of Kodiak. That's weird, we thought. Soon enough we were informed that, though they were catching "some fish" down southeast (one of the Skipper's favorite understatements), it was too windy and snotty seas for his liking. So there we were passing Kodiak going back towards our old unlucky haunts. On the way, about two hours out, we stopped at a bay fronted by three small islands where two other boats were fishing. Actually ended up doing pretty well here: in 5 hours we made 4 sets and probably hauled in about 4500 pounds, a decent spattering of dogs and reds mixed in with the less lucrative pinks that make up the largest runs at this time of year.
Great, we thought, we're actually catching fish. Maybe we'll stay here a few days?... Not quite. We woke up to a wind our Skipper said tends to blow all the fish out of that area leaving it completely empty. So this morning, once more, we shook ourselves up from some dozing to see we were passing Kodiak again, heading south. About one hour later we came on an area the skipper wanted to try. After a forty minute wait, he apparently got some intel about prohibitive shallows (our net is deeper than many) and away we went again.
Eff.
About three hours later, we showed up at our current location. Of course, none of us crew members have any idea where we are. We did one set and hauled up about 2,000 pounds of jellyfish. They were kind enough to leave 20 fish in our net, which we pulled paralyzed from the 22 inch deep jellyslop all over the deck. Like most areas, this one has 3-5 sites that seem the most productive to set at. Suffice it to say we moved down a few hundred yards from jellyzone to try another set where people were catching some fish. Just as we got the net laid out and the deck cleaned, Paul radioed in a problem to the skipper.
Fuel leak in the skiff. Five gallons already lost. One end of the net dead in the water. Of course.
So we backpiled the net on to the deck and waited for the bad news. I went for a beer to help take the edge off my despair. You see, I stayed on an extra two weeks—differing a trip to Portland to see a good friend, and fam time back home—as the pinks generally run strong at this time, and the guys and me could see some more $1,000 days if we ever actually find some fish. We may (Meh) have earned that much in the last 15 days.
Usually this sort of a radio announcement from Paul sees us securing the skiff and rigging and heading post haste back to town. We seem to have gotten lucky though. Paul looked around and figured out that one of the fuel hoses seems to have merely slipped off its fitting.
One Pabst Blue Ribbon.
One Fifteen minute fix.
Back on track?
Like so many things in this entry, that remains to be seen. We headed to the other side of this bay to see what we can find. We'll probably be setting here in a few minutes. Maybe it was a good omen that a potentially serious problem had such a simple solution. Maybe this site will produce some lucrative sets for us. Maybe the pinks will slam in and I won't regret staying on longer up here. Maybe I'll end up zooming back home for three days before heading to Mississippi and school with an extra couple grand in my pockets.
Maybe.
11:35am, Sat August 6
Last night turned out alright.
We drove across the bay to another set site where the Kilokak was doing some work. Had four or five solid sets (800-1200 pounds) and worked till just after ten. Last set was a heartbreaker. We just had the powerblock* teeth re-welded to beef up its gripping power, and until some of the metal added to the teeth wears down it tugs extra-strong on the leadline, outstripping the corkline as we pile the net on deck. This has been leaving us with extra corks in the water at the end of some of our sets--and extra corks in the water means the fish can spill out when we're hauling up the last few fathoms to dump the fish on the deck. So that last set was a heartbreaker because we lost about half of a 1200-2000 pound set that way.
Today has been scratchy but productive. Made our first set a little after 6 am, and did 3 or 4 decent scratch sets averaging 100-120 fish (400-500 pounds). I guess our last set got the captain thinking the fish were dropping off because we lit out across the bay right after. Drove around for about an hour checking out potential set sites and met up with the boat we were fishing next to. Sure enough they pulled in 20 fish on their last haul.
Skipper radioed down from the tophouse to let us know we were going to anchor up so he could take a long nap, and to make sure I knew how to spell "useless" when I describe him in this blog entry. I think he's a little miffed that he hasn't put us on major fish today.
C'est la vie. Of course, we'd always rather be slaying lots of fish, but I wanted some time to work on a couple projects anyway. I might even do some illegal sports fishing (the other two crewmembers bought sports fishing licenses; as long as there's only a total of two lines in the water, I have a hard time being concerned about which of us is jigging them).
Well, having finished a novel while performing the sacred morning rituals today, I guess it's time for...
Novel Opinions!
Cormac McCarthy is, or at least has been, one of my favorite writers. Earlier in the year I finished Blood Meridian (19--), which many call his masterpiece, and found myself rather underexcited. For me, it didn't measure up to his work in Child of God (19--), The Road (19--), or even All the Pretty Horses (199-), all of which are powerful books. The latest read is called The Orchard Keeper (197-). It's one of his first published books, and reads like it. The action and character work—when any of either manage to sneak into the novel—are engaging despite being quite experimental. However, nearly half of any given page is filled with overwritten landscape descriptions pertaining to locations in which the reader has no clear stake. Additionally, these descriptions read as if McCarthy was preoccupied with using every archaic descriptor, meteorological term, and rare coinage he could, perhaps to cross them all off some list for pretentious writers.
Set in the Appalachian backcountry surrounding Knoxville, TN—and occasionally venturing into the city itself—The book is principally concerned with three or four characters: Marion Sylder, a local whisky-runner; John Wesley Barrett, a pre-adolescent befriended by Marion; and Arthur Ownby (Uncle Ather), an aging intriguing character from whom the novel takes its name. There are quite a few journalistic moments—detailing a Knoxville crowd on market day in the '40's, lengthy discussions of the mountain region, etc—that add to a sense McCarthy was attempting to encapsulate a particular moment and culture in order to preserve its memory.
For my money, I call Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding—set in the same interwar period—a much more even, compelling, and altogether successful attempt.
A lot of people say southern writers of any ambition have to write through Faulkner in order to arrive at their own voice. That definitely rings true here as the tone, literary devices such as italics to represent memories that interrupt the "present" action, and even the purposely obtuse plotlines call to mind a lot of Faulkner's Absalom! Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury. So, at the end of the day, I was hoping McCarthy might be an exception to the rule that the early work of great authors is often rather dull and I was disappointed. Still, if you like McCarthy, the novel is a fascinating place to see him working with a lot of the devices he would later hone to craft much more powerful works (i.e. an acute sense of place, more useful coinages, judicial use of archaic wording, intriguing obtuseness in plot and character development rather than near-opacity).
Meanwhile, back in Alaska...
The guys are napping, and the alarm just beeped on some fresh coffee, so it looks like a perfect opportunity to tackle some other writing.
Including today, I've just got three more days of fishing left. We've sort of adapted dear, sweet, 8 pound, 11 ounce Baby Jesus [link: Taladega Nights] as our patron this summer. Hopefully, once the sleepers awake, he'll come through with a few big sets to boost my summer paycheck.
*suspended from the boom, the power block is a large—about 28 inch diameter—aluminum wheel run with a hydraulic motor that we use to pull the net back on to the deck.
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