Angels on the Adak; the novel sells, deckhanding on F/V Saturday

If there has been an angel fighting alongside us for the life and goodness of the Adak, his name is Mike, and he owns a direct-reversible steel tugboat called the Thunderbird. A boat which actually works and operates as a tugboat. When he’s not towing or not assisting cruiseships, or floating off dead sea lions and advising the Alaskan government on native subsistence, Mike has been  selfless with his time and deep knowledge, which he brings to bear upon the woeful Adak. When she wasn’t getting fuel, he figured it out: clogged filter. When the engine block was cracked, JB Weld. And when she flooded, spray it all down with freshwater. Even the electrical box.

But perhaps his best piece of advice had not to do  with engineering, but with – what some might call – superstition. On a sunny Saturday evening, a couple days after the fire, a bit over a week after the flood, he motored by in his skiff, and handed up three Mason jars of canned jars of king salmon. Compared to my mealy-looking cat-food creations, his were works of art.

He tilted his head toward the boat. “They say a stalk of devil’s club brings good luck.”

And so that’s what we did. Affixed a stalk of devil’s club over the stern deck.

Things haven’t been the same since.

——-

On June 30th, the day before the king salmon opener, I got it in my head to do some fishing on a troller. A west wind blew, creating clear warm days. Reports from the grounds said it might be a record fishing year. And I needed money for Adak repairs and mooring badly.

We were doing good saving on food costs heading down to Medvejie hatchery and hooking/snagging king salmon. The renters appeared happy – here’s a pic of one jumping off the top deck of the Adak. 

A buddy had a line on a boat, the Sachem, that might be needing a deckhand. I went down to the harbor on the Sunday before my radio show to find the engine of the Sacehm running, but no one aboard. Went up to the studio, did the show, with plans to return. As I left the station, I got another text.

“Before you go to Sachem, try F/V Saturday. She’s got East Hope Gurdies. Crescent Harbor.” East Hope gurdies being the Mercedes of gurdies, brass spools for retrieving troll wire.

So I changed course, searched down the Saturday, and met Karl Jordan, sparkly-eyed stocky Sitka wrestling star, fourth-generation troller, my age. He was jogging around the boat, if such a thing is possible, with a sheet of yellow legal paper in one hand, ticking off chores.

We sat down in the galley for a couple minutes. I felt bundled up in jeans and a flannel to his T-shirt and Carhartt shorts. He had landed from Bellingham on the late flight the night before, and had been charging since, preparing for the opener. He hadn’t been planning to troll, but had heard about the good fishing, and got 8 weeks off from his job working maintenance.

“Well, I’ve got a 6 pm ice appointment. Can you meet me here at 5:30?”

And so I had a job.

Back on the Adak I threw gear in a bag. Arranged housing for Cal, got my crew license from Murray’s, and bought a couple pairs of socks and orange gloves. He had said we’d be out for a week, and maybe three weeks  after that. I called folks to give them the heads up that I’d, in all likelihood, be away from cell range for a bit.

“Is it going to be weird working for someone after being your own boss for a decade?” one friend asked. I had inherited the quality, I suspect from my father, of not doing well working under others.

“We’ll see.”

Hours later Karl we were steaming out of Crescent Harbor under sunny evening skies. As he ran the boat he explained how he liked to tie up at the processor, midship line around a pier, stern to forward, with enough slack to move with the swell. He spoke  patiently, clearly, without condescension or attitude. An hour after that we were on the flybridge, eating pasta and drinking beers, watching the sunset, scheming about plans for the following morning.

And he went on to make very clear his philosophy of work.

“I’ll let you know if something should be done, and will try to give you a few minutes heads-up when I ask, so we don’t get frantic. Don’t try to anticipate. I like to have fun, work hard, and catch fish. I want you to be here because you want to be here.”

And I knew we were gonna be good.

——————–

We had a good opener, catching fish off Point Amelia, working up and down the line. We had some swell, a bit of chop, enough to keep folks fishing on the inside. I kept expecting to get sick, but my stomach cooperated. I started off doing my best to mimic Karl, who ran the gear without stopping the wire as it came in – unhooking leaders, arranging the snubbers and flashers, dropping the hook onto the gear setter in one fluid motion. Accelerating the hydraulics as the bugs flipped back out, one after the other, working at about four times my pace. It was more like a dance than anything, how he operated – like watching a practiced carpenter: no wasted movement, the flatness of muscle memory, how it all looked easy. When I worked the hydros it felt janky, wheezing and brakes, and the clips – it was like he was using magnets, how they fit themselves between the brass markers as the wire went back out. It was humbling, to say the least.

Not to mention landing fish. I watched how he took a good look before doing anything, seeing how the fish was hooked, where it was hooked, before deciding to bludgeon it and gaff it, or gaff immediately if it was hooked softly in the side of the mouth. When I tried to gaff the fish seemed I ended up getting the hull more often than the fish itself.

Two days. Four days. We unloaded with the Deer Harbor II, where I worked five years before on a short trip between Cross Sound and Sitka. Back to Sitka, where we spent four more days hauling the boat out, painted the bottom, caulking seams, replacing zincs, cutting off twine around the prop, and beautifying her. Karl mixed straight copper into the paint; the quart cans were like neutrinos, the shock of small matter weighing so much.

Back into the water we went. Groceried up the following morning and ran back up Peril Strait, spelling one another – about four hours of sleep, set the sleep alarm, this obnoxious box that would blink a red light for a minute before screaming at you unless you leaned over to push a small red button.

I have so much to say about trolling – the ghostly whirr of the lines, searching for that two tenths of a volt used to electrify the boat to attract fish, how salmon hearts, still beating, would hang from a white bauble of flesh in the emptied cavity of the fish, pulsing in the air, so difficult to cut out with the knife. But for now I will say that we fished three days on the northern side of Icy Strait, Homeshore, doing well bringing up cohos and chum and pinks, an occasional halibut on the last few hooks, brown wavering ping-pong paddles of white flesh that we shook off. For dinner we went through our ground beef and curry and pasta sauce. We were fishing alongside Karl’s father Eric Jordan – one of the best-known and respected trollers in Southeast Alaska. And whenever I had the chance I would read the memoir of Karl’s grandmother, Marilyn Jordan, who came up to Alaska from Iowa with a Norwegian, and began what would be love-affair with Alaska and trolling.

On the last night we tied up in Hoonah and had beers at the lodge. Walked through the town with Karl’s parent’s and cousin. Hoonah had scored an influx of cruiseship money, and new buildings were being constructed all over. The sun set over the harbor. Karl got a 24-pack of Rainiers. His mother smiled at a few native guys drinking beers on their boat. They had three five-gallon buckets filled with halibut filets.

“Good thing you guys are here!” she said, smiling. “Otherwise the ravens would be all over these fish.”

One of them looked up at her. “We are ravens.”

And there you have it.

The following morning we ran south in the sun along Chatham Strait, toward Security Bay. Ten trollers had been selected and put on a list to revitalize a traditional troll fishery, where Karl’s grandparents went to work fifty years ago, at Security Bay. Slowly, over the course of fishing alongside the Jordans, it was dawning on me the coup I had achieved in landing this gig. Karl’s style of leadership was hands-off, giving me time to suss out tangles, to figure stuff out for my own self until it became intolerable. And his father was – how else to say it – “fishy,” the highest compliment one could give a fisherman, akin to calling him a genius.

Of course when I did things on a constant basis, things that were just wrong, Karl said something.

“Can you please make sure that cannonball doesn’t knock against the gunwales?” This after it had happened so many times it was starting to annoy me. Indeed, like any good leader, he guided by example, doing the work and letting others catch up. Finally, I ran a line without stopping the hydraulics. The Jay-Z on satellite radio helped. As if my body was slowly being broken in. Movements started to feel more grooved and natural, more fluid. Instead of taking twenty seconds to sever that thread of the heart, it now took  one.

We arrived in Security Bay. And off the bat it was fish on every hook – and, to be clear, we ran two bag lines, and two float lines, each with about 18 hooks. So a lot of fish. How wonderful to be fishing alongside these coasts, and then, in the few minutes the eyes would stay open before sleep, read about Marilyn, Karl’s grandmother, fishing and experiencing these same waters on the Salty fifty years before.

The following day we had just under 5000 pounds, with 1400 fish. Then up at four again and we pulled without stopping, trading off eating PB&Js for lunch, ending up about 20 hours of straight running lines with about 2000 fish and 6000 pounds of pinks, along with some coho, chum, and sockeye. We caught a couple kings and halibut, which we held onto, because we were down to just rice and fish for food. Whales were like popcorn, surfacing all around. Sea lions followed us, eating fish.

That night we sat around in our underwear, drinking Rainier and eating raisins and nachos, in that bleary delirium of body-wrangled exhaustion. It had been over a week since the last shower. I hadn’t changed clothes in three days.

The next morning I woke in the early sunlight to the smell of burning. I climbed up out of the bunk. The galley was filled with the bitter smell of electrical fire. Karl yelled, “is that smoke?” And we both turned into hound dogs, sniffing around the Dickinson stove and wheelhouse, trying to find the source. He unscrewed a panel and we found it – wires around the hot water heater melted through.

But the sun and fish were not stopping. The pace was upsetting, like sprinting a marathon. And we were out of food. We put in an order with the tender at Tonka Seafoods, but they lost it, and on the day the food was supposed to arrive it didn’t. Instead the one woman on the tender did a pretend striptease and gave us each a halloween-sized Payday, because it was Karl’s birthday.

Taping our fingers in the morning, the smell of glycerine of the Corn Husker’s lotion on the table, wet cold gloves ripped by hook barbs, the constant hum of troll wires. I began to be able to hear the sound, that slight high-pitched blip in the whirr when a fish bit. For lunch salmon with ketchup and mayonnaise. Karl told me stories of how his father, when Karl was a kid, would wake from his sleep to say a king salmon had just bit the starboard float line. Bags of peanuts and raisins. And indeed there it was, that wang on the wire. We split the last banana.

Occasionally sea lions would follow us, eating our fish off the hook. Karl would light up “seal bombs” purchased in California. They were like small-scale submarine impact bombs, going off with a dull thud beneath the water. And the sea lions would go diving off, disturbed. One morning he came out with one lit. He looked like Coyote on the Roadrunner, with his wide grin, a lit bomb in his hand.

“Fire in the hole!”

I turned as he tossed it. And then I heard another sound.

“Get down!”

I looked at him. He still had that grin on his face, but his eyes were wide.

“I’m not fucking around!” And I turned. The seal bomb had hit the roof of the baitshack, and was sparking in the gear. I turned my back and covered my ears. It exploded and bits of gear and paper shredded against my back. Ziploc bags and leaders were burned through.

“Fuck dude. Sorry.”

The work work continued, and it got grindy, painful, hands stiff, hours slow, muscles aching. I don’t know if it was exhaustion or lack of food or the hours of line after line of thousands of pink salmon, but we began to get giddy. Karl held up a skein of salmon eggs he had found on the deck, and slurped a bunch down. He held it out to me, and I did the same.

“Wait up. Where did you get those eggs?”

Minutes earlier, I had peed in the cockpit – like we did, so we could continue running lines. A bunch of eggs had clogged up the scupper, and the pee, which smelled of coffee grounds, had pooled up. I had reached down to clear the eggs away, and out the pee went into the sea.

“Right down there.”

He pointed to the scupper. I explained to him the situation. And we both started spitting and gagging over the side. This sort of thing.

And then, maybe a week in, something happened. Maybe it had to do with the tender finally delivering food, both our replacement order along with the original order – so we had about 60 eggs, a couple pounds of burger meat, hunks of cheese, and five (5) packages of chewy chocolate chip cookies. Anyways the sun was shining and it was raining at the same time. Florence and the Machine played on the deck speakers, that cheesy uplifting song “Only if For a Night.” We were both pulling, Karl on the starboard and me on the port. And the fish kept coming. Rain pocking the surface. Whales exploded, their maws covered in barnacles. One seemed to be following the boat – you can see its tail in the background of this pic. The volume of fish kept going up, and a rainbow appeared off the stern. And suddenly everything became very easy – muscles , the arms pulling of their own accord, a feeling of floating. The realization that nothing, ever, would be too much.

——–

I had taken to leaving my phone next to Karl’s phone booster in hopes of getting communication from Kent, my agent. And that day the seal bomb went off I got an email that he was setting the closing for the book for 1 pm on a Tuesday. 9 am Alaska time.

That night, after taking photos of the tender as we approached, backlit by the summer sun setting over the mountains on Baranof Island, I put my IPhone in a five-gallon bucket. Karl had set his hat in there, so I figured there would be no water.

Wrong I was. After unloading I found the phone, soaked in saltwater. All my notes from the trip, all the photos – the ones I’m using are either his, or ones I had posted previously on FB – were gone. Video of whales, video of Karl pulling and landing fish. And, worst of all, communication with Kent for the book closing. Not to mention my phone, although I had insurance because I know I’m wont to do perform these stupid acts.

That night I had trouble sleeping. As usual, Karl’s alarm, strategically place far from his bunk in the galley, went off at 4:29 am. He got up, put on coffee, went down in the engine room, and started the engine. That snarl of the cylinders that meant the beginning of another sixteen hours of work…I could hardly close my hands. My fingers felt like sapless winter branches. I had to get climb out of the bunk slowly, because my calves had gotten into the mood of cramping.

I had given Kent the number on Karl’s cellphone. My plan was to play music as we pulled off the phone, with the idea that we’d hear it ring on the deck speakers in the event Kent called.

“Let’s throw-em in,” Karl announced.

These words always came after Karl, after checking in with his father on their secret scrambled VHF station, watching other boats through the binocs, watching for balls of feed on the Fishfinder, looking at the flood and ebb of the tide, watching the winds, inspecting tidal rips, scanning for jumpers, made the determination that, beneath us, there might be salmon.

In went the drag-bags to slow us to troll-speed. In went the stabilizers – huge steel batwings that steadied the boat as we rode – then the floatline, then the main line. And we were fishing.

Before I finished breaking eggs into the blue-speckled campware bowl, the black rubber snubbers attached to the caprail, visible from the wheelhouse, began stretching and contracting.

“Fish-owwwwn!” Karl drawled, one of his customary sayings. He would say, “Fresh fish!” when we got a bunch on a line, and “Nothing too this fishing business!” when I messed something up and he explained it. And “the adventure continues,” when something unexpected happened.

I pulled on bibs, ripped rotten-smelling shell, clammy gloves, and started pulling lines. As usual, you could look down into the morning-stilled waters, and there they were, one fish after another, simulacrums, separated by a fathom and a half. Another saying of Karl’s: “Looks like we got some work.”

We pulled fish all morning, the thump of them flapping in the aluminum landing bins like heavy rain on a corrugated roof. Jay-Z played on the speakers. And it sounds unreal but it’s true – I kinda forgot about the book closing. The trance of unsnapping clips, de-hooking fish, bleeding them with a knife through the gills, sending them down the chute, and recording the numbers above the cleaning trough.

The music went down and on came the sound of a doorbell, Karl’s ringtone. And I remembered.

Karl stopped pulling and went into the wheelhouse, then came back out.

“New York is on the line.”

I peeled off the gloves and went inside. It was Kent.

“Jenna Johnson from Hougton Mifflin Harcourt wants the book.”

I couldn’t feel the phone in my hand as he spoke about bonuses and schedule. After I got off I didn’t know quite what else to do except go back outside and continue to pull fish.

“So? What’s up?” Karl asked, in the middle of a line.

“I think I just sold my novel.”

Karl smiled, stopped the hydraulics we had ourselves a man-hug there on the back of the boat.

“Does that mean you get action figures?” he asked.

That night when we unloaded I dove into the fish, feeling like a sultan after having got – in the most roundabout of ways – exactly what I wanted.

The next morning Kent called again to confirm the deal.

“I think I’m starting to irritate your skipper,” he told me, before going on. “I spoke to Jenna – and we’ve got ourselves a deal.”

———————-

We fished another couple days, before deciding, with Eric, to make a move back to Sitka. I had been communicating with French buddy Tibault, who I had met the year previous. He had been working on a seine boat, and was looking for work deckhanding. He hopped a tender in Petersburg, and came out to meet us on the water – the idea being he would replace me when my friends arrived in Sitka. So we unloaded our fish, picked up our special-delivery Frenchman from Provence, and bulled up Chatham Strait,  taking turns sleeping and running the bat. Arced into Peril, past Deadman’s reach, past Poison Cove, alternating with Eric’s boat for the lead. Eric got on the shortwave and told me stories of growing up hunting along Peril Strait, the time a big buck had played dead, pretending to be shot, then bounding away as Eric and his buddy knelt to clean the deer.

We arrived back in Sitka at noon, rafting up to the Adak. Spent a night raising havoc in the P-Bar, having fun with Rainier cans.

Then back to work, working on the chums by Vitskari Rocks, the three of us alternating running the gear. Having a record day on the water, come in under clear skies. Celebrating with fresh fish, radishes and onions from the garden, sushi parties on the back deck with a five-foot roll, the fish caught hours earlier.

The combination of sunshine and shorts weather and hard work and news of the book swirling together to give the days a dreamlike quality. Salmon ran upstream on Indian River, and Cal took a swim in their midst. We smoked kings, Cal on careful raven-watch. Falling asleep with the stern door open, lights of the tenders anchored in the harbor, the branch of devil’s club on the back rail, its leaves drying out, waving in the soft wind.

To this day, the luck continues, and I, for one, am deeply grateful.