This will have to go without pictures for now until I find a computer to accomadate me.
Well this one might not be as grand and glorious as the last one, but perhaps some of you will appreciate a more succinct account.
Much has happened since the last post. I lost track of the days some time ago but we left Port Angeles late in June to head up to Sitka via the inside passage. The first couple of days took us up along the coast of Vancouver Island, which I had only just traversed in the opposite direction on my bicycle. In fact the first night we anchored just outside of Nanaimo where I had spent several days relaxing and where I met Tara. All in all the journey took about a week to reach Sitka and the weather and the scenery was beautiful the whole way through. Without a whole lot to do besides eat and sleep I polished a fair amount of reading as we went, finishing Moby Dick after putting it down for about a month. I also read The Captive Mind by Czeslaw Milosz and the Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller. All three incredible in their own rights but I found Milosz's work the most enlightening as I know little about dialectics and totalitarianism both of which it covered deeply. On the fifth day or so I had polished off everything I had to read and after two more days before making Sitka I was the epitome of restlessness.
Our first stop in Sitka was exciting but brief. We had made it the day before the Salmon season was to start, June 1st, and as Sitka is one of the main ports for the southeastern fishing fleet of some 900 trollers it was quite abuzz with fishing folk and everywhere you went there was speculative talk on where the big King salmon bite would be come opening day.
I did manage a few hours to myself to find a good bookstore to load up on books, two library's with the Internet for free, a good cafe, and the local pub. Te library was parting out some books for a dollar and I picked up a Carnival in Romans which provided a detailed history of a lower class revolt in a town in southern France during Carnival in the the late 16th century. Certainly a departure from my foray into American fiction, but quite absorbing in its own right.
Back to the narrative the King season lasted about ten days in which we stopped once in Pelican and once in Yakutat to unload fish and get more ice and fuel. As we were in a rush to make the most of the season we were in the towns only long enough to get things done, and in fact I didn't get off the boat either time. We did have some luck and all in all we caught several thousands pounds of King salmon and I made enough money to pay of my lingering credit card debt and then some.
I wanted to give the folks back home a little glimpse of what my days are like but first I will indulge in a bit of whining. Far and away my hands took the biggest beating. First my left hand gloves get a few holes in it (hooks, teeth, spines, knife, etc) accompanied with relatively minor wounds to my hand underneath. This would be all right except now my gloves leak salt water and fish guts that inevitably turn minor wounds into gaping abrasions. Next the right, unaccustomed to hard labor, becomes incredibly sore between the hard grip on the lines and the long hours of work cleaning fish with the knife. The right hand wakes me up in the morning with cramps I haven't known since playing high school football. Fortunately solutions presented themselves in the form of a latex glove underneath the vinyl for the left hand to keep out the caustics and a steady influx of Advil to manage the swelling in the right. You all will be pleased to know the hands are fine now and undoubtedly stronger for the abuse.
Anyway a day in fishing. Ron either wakes me up early (a good sign as the fish are biting) or I sleep until I want to get out of bed (a bad sign that he needs no help). They day goes on until the fish stop biting which is often well after sunset. This makes for some long days (17 hours a couple times) in which it is all you can do to catch some sleep and a bite to eat when you just feel you can't stand up any longer. My job is to catch my fair share of fish, clean them, and then I drop them in the hold, arrange them into rows and layers with ice in between. In a good day day that's moving around over a thousand pounds of fish and about that much ice. When we a) fill the hold or b) run out of time as we can only keep the fish on ice for six days we go into unload. To unload I move our thousands of pounds of fish into a bucket that is lowered into the hold and then I shovel out the ton of ice left over. This said and done I scrub the hold with soap and water, bleach it, and fill it back up with crushed ice they send down a big hose into the hold. This by far is the most intense part of my job and I feel damn satisfied when I'm done. Ron says I go to fast but it is just one of those things you want to get over with. Last time we unloaded we started at two in the morning and it was well after six before it was all said and done.
Following the King season we took a couple days in Sitka to rest up and restock and I ended up catching a ride out to a little music festival last Friday night. I had a grand time playing frisbee, listening to the folk-country-blues-jam and meeting people (probably more than half the town was there)whose names are mostly lost to oblivion. I suppose I overcompensated for my social awkwardness with one or two too many beers and was more than relieved to find my way back to the boat that evening in one piece. Unfurtunately not before making at least one regretful phone call. C'est l'amour.
Since then we have been out for another five days to start catching Silver salmon (aka Coho). We didn't really get our full six days as the weather turned nasty and we did not catch as many fish as we could have but I will admit it was nice to slow things down a little. I began For Whom the Bell Tolls by Hemingway and damn is it good. I am not done yet and I am all ready blown away by his storytelling. I am now in the midst of the Spanish Civil War in a way that I am sure would be entirely impossible without having actually fought on the front lines. Its really amazing the sort of stock our hero is putting in the support of Red Russia especially after reading what happened in Soviet occupied Poland as described by Milosz. Milosz called it however when he said that those outside of the Eastern Bloc could never really known what totalitarian rule was without living under it. To his credit Hemingway was no big subscriber to dialectics but if the Spanish knew what a Russian Europe would really look like the Fascists might not have seemed worth fighting against. the lesser of two evils I suppose. All we have today is to choose between the Republicans and Democrats. The lesson in the end seems to be stay clear of the extremes on either side of politics, but boy does that sound like a cop out when you want to get passionate about something in this world.
That rambling about sums it up, and if you thought it was long you should have seen the other one (I had even worked in an intermission to break things up a little). hope this satisfies for a time. Keep a heads up for the next one which if I have the wherewithal might have a action shots of fishing in action. Be seeing you.
