Fishing Up North, livre ebook

This second edition contains new and updated stories from the super-heated days when fishing fleets turned king crab into fortunes, and the annual circus of Bristol Bay’s monster salmon runs, to the dangerous life of the open-ocean trawler.
The true stories in Fishing Up North: Stories of Luck and Loss in Alaskian Waters capture the flavor of the modern fisherman’s life and fortunes in the waters off Alaska. You’ll find firsthand accounts of frightening weather, good fishing, terrible fishing, great days, and sweet living from the decks of crabbers, trawlers, longliners, trollers, and gillnetters.
This book and others like it have inspired film crews to trek to Alaska and cover the crabbing seasons for reality TV shows. Commercial fishing’s home ports—Dutch Harbor, Kodiak, Naknek, Cordova, Petersburg, and Sitka—are classic fishing towns, where docks, bars, and even quiet living merge in colorful portraits about life on the last frontier.
“Sometimes I hate it, but other times I love it,” Tim Sanger tells me at dawn on the run home. He is on the wheel as we ease through calm seas at nine knots off a coast that inspires well-being just because you feel so lucky just to be seeing it. To the north, the snow-white peaks slip into the sea from crests that march like a saw blade across unusually clear blue sky in the flat light of an early Arctic morning. In February, the sun glides in a low groove across the southern horizon, a mere rumor of heat and light.
“I was as green as they get when I get when I got on this boat last year,” Sanger says. “Now I know there isn’t any other way to get the feeling I got when we got 70,000 pounds of halibut in one twenty-four-hour opening. I looked down in the hold and saw all those fish and I realized that I caught every one of them. And then there’s the paycheck. I guess fishing is kind of addictive.”
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Prelude: Getting Lucky
Map
Ch 1 The Beast of Ugly Seasons King Crabbing, Dutch Harbor
Ch 2 Talking Price and the Cruel Sixteen Salmon Gillnetting, Bristol Bay
Ch 3 The Billion dollar Bottomfish Dream Groundfish Trawling
Ch 4 Kenny and the Council Westward Hilton Hotel, Anchorage
Ch 5 Flying Fish and the Death of a Plane at Egegik Salmon setnetting Bristol Bay
Ch 6 A Beautiful Place to Be Salmon Trolling, Southeast Alaska
Ch 7 Fishing with Modest Ambition Codfish Trawling, Kodiak
Ch 8 Fishing the Flats, Salmon Gillnetting Prince William Sound
Ch 9 The Dream Comes True on the Chain Pollock Trawling, Dutch Harbor
Ch 10 The Resurrection of The Rebecca B Codfish longlinging, Gulf of Alaska
Ch 11 Kelping for Crude The Exxon Valdez Spill
Ch 12 Derby Days, Sleepless Nights Halibut Longlining, Southeast Alaska
Ch 13 Salmon in the Trees Salmon Spawning, Alexander Archipelago