The Bay

This is where I’ll be for the next month. I’ll be living and working on a 32-foot gillnetting boat with three other people – Frank and Connie, who are married, and another deckhand named Sierra. Sierra is from Cordova and this is all I know about her. We’ll be fishing for sockeye salmon.

I guess Bristol Bay has the largest commercial sockeye salmon fishery in the world. As I’ve never experienced any kind of commercial sockeye salmon fishery, or any fishery for that matter, I guess I’ll get to see what this means firsthand.

I leave tomorrow. I fly from Wrangell, to Anchorage, to King Salmon, where Frank and Connie will pick me up and we'll go to Naknek. This will be my first time as a deckhand. I guess I’ll learn a thing or two about boats and commercial gillnet fishing.

Kevin’s ‘But is Bigger than My ‘But

Last weekend Kevin, Scott, and I went to Salmon Bay, which is off of Prince of Wales Island, and fished. And fished and fished.

When we weren’t fishing (and actually a lot of times when we were), we were eating, drinking, looking at ridiculous testosterone-filled magazines (that may or may not have brought us luck, but certainly made for some good conversation), playing Scrabble (or rather I was playing Scrabble – Kevin and Scott were putting tiles on the board that spelled basic three- and four-letter words), and enjoying the natural surroundings.

We were going for salmon and halibut, but as luck would have it, the halibut were biting but the salmon were not.

I ended up catching four halibut and keeping three. Here are the first two I caught:


While you may think my ‘buts look good, take a look at Kevin’s:


Kevin’s fish weighed in right around 90 lbs. A harpoon and a gun had to be used on that one – intense.