Saejin Blair
9/22/08
We Made It
As I stood out on the porch smoking the first cigarette of the morning and looking at the blood red sunrise, I found myself reflecting back on the season. It was looking like it would be a fairly good year; we had a decent haul of fish at that point - about seventy thousand pounds or so. While we still had some time ahead of us for more fishing, the weather had started to turn bad on us. It usually does come late July, early August. That wasn’t going to stop Theron and myself though. Our deckhands had already left for the year, but we were still game to make money – money that would be going into our pockets alone.
I flicked my dwindling Monarch Light and turned to walk back into the house. An old converted Moravian Church, the house has one of those histories – complete with death and basement burial. Into the house I slowly walked, to gear back up for the day’s work. It was early, really early, the sun was just starting to pull itself up over the mountains across the bay. It looked to be a gorgeous day but Alaskan weather can change at any moment, so I didn’t get my hopes up. How does that old adage go? Red skies at night - sailor’s delight…but red skies in the morning - sailors take warning? I do recall thinking just that at one point, but who really takes heed to the warning of the old timers?
Theron started yelling at me from the kitchen, “Saej, if you take one more minute to put your goddamn boots on I swear I’m going to come in there and wrap them around your neck!”
“Shut up, drink your damn coffee, you’d have me waiting for you to finish it anyways.” I mumbled though the open window. I quickly put all of my gear on, hopped into my hip waders and rain pants fireman style, jammed my gloves in my pocket, and sauntered out the door to start the four-wheeler. I was standing by the Honda, (which is what we call our ATV’s) trying to pop a smoke out of a pack. It was a soft pack so digging around in it is a real pain. You have to just kind of kick it up a couple of inches and catch the cigarette before it comes all the way out and falls on the ground. Then it happened. Of course, it wasn’t any cigarette - it was the lucky cigarette, which is the one you flip upside down when you first open a pack. It landed right in a puddle next to me; it was ruined beyond repair. That was just not a good sign for the day.
Commercial fishermen and superstition are like peas and carrots; you just don’t find one without finding the other. So you can see why I was on my toes for the rest of the morning, watching Theron like a hawk as he oared out to our skiff. I watched in case he fell…or had a heart attack… or lightening suddenly struck. My mind was basically prepared for the worst possible thing to happen without a moment’s notice. I feel like I should explain here that it wasn’t just the cigarette that made me so nervous. Something about that morning was just not right, something was making me edgy. Unfortunately, I just wasn’t certain what it was at that point. It seemed like I was worrying for nothing though, because we got into the boat without a hitch.
That morning the nets were loaded with fish and it seemed like there were heads and tails sticking out all over the place, just waiting for my eager fingers to pluck them out of their tangled prisons. I began to convince myself that maybe I had been worrying about nothing after all. We were picking like crazy, putting in phenomenal poundage, the sun was shining, the wind was blowing briskly; what more can you ask for? So what was tickling the back of my head, telling me that something was just not right?
In this midst of all this work, this glorious weather, this adrenaline rush at the prospect of making cash hand over fist – I forgot entirely about the morning’s warnings. We continued to pick fish for hours, working our way to the end of a net and then back again. We headed to another fishing site where we had a net set in the water. We had loaded up four or five brailer bags, which is anywhere from five to seven thousand pounds, give or take. If we could only do that every day for the whole season; we would be making it big. Theron and I were extremely happy about our progress that day and were more than ready to deliver our catch.
When we fill up all of the space in our skiffs and hit our weight limit, we have to take the fish we caught and drive our skiff to a larger tender. These are anywhere from 40 to 100 foot long vessels with huge refrigerated holding tanks to store the fish. In turn they take the fish to an even larger vessel to be processed. We put all of our fish in large bags made of vinyl coated nylon netting, which the tenders lift and weigh with cranes attached to their hulls.
That was when the trouble began. Theron took the helm and we pulled out from under the net. As we were on our way, we realized the tender had anchored all the way on the other side of the point. Normally that wouldn’t have been a problem, but the wind had turned and started to blow. That was when the off feeling I’d had earlier kicked back into gear. However, there is just something about risking your life for your livelihood that just attracts me like a moth to the flame. We went for it, ignoring the fact that the weather had most definitely turned against us.
We started for our goal and the waves started to get deeper. They started coming at us from behind. This is especially unfortunate - boats are typically designed to take waves from the front. Theron was made for this kind of work, though, seamanship in general is in his blood. He handled the waves and the current like a bird in flight, ducking and weaving avoiding all obstacles. Well, I shouldn’t say all of them, at one point a huge wave formed and crested right at the stern, covering half of the skiff, myself included. “Should I start baling?” I shouted, almost laughing. “No,” Theron said, “I think we will be O.K.!” There is something so intoxicating about living on the edge like that; all of the uncertainties wash away and death stops being an option. It is a fight for survival, but at the same time when you know it’s not your time, it’s not your time.
I found myself in water almost up to my knees, wondering how we were going to pull though this one. Not that it seemed like that big of an issue at the time; we had been in situations like this before and come out of it fine. It was kind of ludicrous really, Theron and I standing there smiling at each other as if we didn’t have a worry in the world. It started to get tricky though, we had to turn the boat around so we could dock properly along side the tender. I have all the faith in the world for Theron, but when you put too much weight in the bow of a boat bad things tend to happen.
Theron managed to turn the skiff and was bringing us along side of the tender. From there, I had to take hold of the securing lines to tie off the bow of our skiff so we could off load the fish. This is a crucial step in docking next to a tender, since they draw a lot more water than the small vessel that we have. That creates an undertow around the ship that can kick the boat in a 180 turn, and pull it underneath the larger ship. That is one of those worst case scenarios that don’t happen often, but why would anyone risk it. Certainly not me, not with all of the omens in my head.
Then another huge wave started to swell right in front of us. “Saej,” Theron yelled,”Heads up!” I saw the wave right at the last second, and threw myself to the stern of the skiff to take as much weight of the bow as possible, while Theron punched the throttle trying to lift the front end enough to clear the wave. The water crashed over me in a cold torrent, soaking me through my rain gear, but we cleared it, barely. I tied off the skiff line and went about to hooking up the crane boom to the first brailer bag, but then I looked ahead of us to see a wave forming in the distance, a wave that made the last one that just hit us look like ripple in a lake. My hands flew as if some infernal force were driving them, I tied off both sets of brailers in the first compartment in the bow of the skiff. “Go, GO NOW” Theron and I screamed at the crane operator. He just managed lifting the bags enough that I felt the boat become slightly more buoyant, when the wave hit us pouring over the bow and soaking me again. We had made it, with the weight in the bow gone; we would have no problem weathering the rest of the storm. “Was that the one?” I asked Theron. “Yeah, Son, that was the one.”
Our moment of revelry was broken by the old Grizzly Adams looking crane operator laughing, “Well fellas that looked like a close one to me!” “Yeah, it was pretty God Damn close! Good job brother!” Theron responded in kind, looking kind of like he had just won the lottery. I smiled at him shaking my head, we had done it again.
Commercial fishermen all over Alaska defy the elements and Mother Nature to make a couple of dollars, some make it, and some don’t. We had made it again.
Courtesy of Saejin Blair
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