Just for the...
By ANDREW CREMATA
Captain Steve and I were passing through a narrow corridor of still water walled by rising green mountainsides. Wisps of fog were nestled into rocky crags a couple hundred feet above as the unnamed passageway between Lisianski Inlet and the wide-open Pacific Ocean tapered to a bottleneck.
Up ahead, a sea lion bobbed up from the surface and in an act of magical buoyancy propelled most of his body from the water to give us a more detailed glance. At the time I could have sworn he looked incredulous ñ that, in his mind, there was no way any boat would be in the area on this particular day.
The nonplussed sea lion had little effect on Captain Steve who murmured from the corner of his mouth, "ìDid you see that?"
While it could have been easy to perceive the sea lionís appearance as a bad omen, there was no need to fear. I was with a professional ñ a rugged Alaskan commercial fisherman since 1977. A no-nonsense seafarer with a steely glare, bare, polished skull, and hardened physique.
We would catch halibut because we were hardy, seasoned, manly men. I could feel the muscles in my body flex at the mere thought.
I came to Pelican, on Chichagof Island, to take in the experience of angling in some of the most fertile fishing grounds in all of Alaska. The biggest lure was the prospect of battling big halibut – something we Skagwegians seldom have the opportunity to do locally.
It's not that there arenít any halibut around Skagway, itís just the likelihood of catching them is only slightly better than acquiring a suntan.
I caught my first halibut last fall near Ketchikan, but they were only "chickens" – 20-25 pounders.
This trip would be different. We were boldly going in search of the big ones. With a professional leading the way there was nothing that could slow us down.
Then I saw the waves.
Emerging from the constricted inlet, a series of small barrier islands came into view. Terrible, surging swells breathed heavily between their rocky shoals. A sudden wind hurled froth from the rabid waves into the air, soaking the windshield of the boat with a wet, salty glaze.
Captain Steve paused momentarily to turn on the wipers of the 32-foot vessel, which was getting smaller by the second. He turned to me and said, "I think it'll be all right," and throttled headlong into the melee.
As we rolled and twisted forward I turned back toward the edge of Alaska's southeast coast and wondered if I would see it again. The endless ranges of mountains would disappear behind the swells only to emerge again as we crested the next wave.
We surged onto one roller a little too fast, and plunged hard off the other side. A moment of free-fall brought the roof of the cabin squarely down on my head. It would have hurt badly enough by its own right, but the weight of the boat driving the hard plastic knob on the top of my baseball cap into my cranium added a whole new dimension to the pain.
Captain Steve was standing, focused on conquering the surf, driving us onward, and I could swear he was smiling. When he started to tell me various stories from his commercial fishing days, stories of narrowly averted horrors on the water, I figured he was either worried or having a little fun at my expense.
"I was asleep one night in my bunk," he said. "My mate was in his bunk on the other side of the room. It was pitch black."
"Now I'm a heavy sleeper, but my mate is trying to wake me up saying, 'Do you hear that?'"
"I tell him I don't hear anything. Go back to sleep. And he says, 'No, do you hear it? It sounds like glub, glub glub.'"
"So I'm thinking to myself, 'glub, glub, glub... glub, glub glub.'"
"Glub, glub, GLUB!"
This was the first halibut of the trip. Subsequent halibut were not photographed due to soreness, exhaustion and head trauma.
I couldnít help but wonder why he would choose this exact moment to share a story of almost sinking. Fortunately for Captain Steve and his mate, they were able to repair the bilge and pump the waist-deep water from the boat.
We too were fortunate as the wind and waves laid down a bit after a couple hours. We were anchored in 300-feet of water soaking chunks of fish meat on the bottom, waiting for strike.
Captain Steve knows his fishing because it didnít take long to catch a halibut, and another, and another. It seemed like every fish was larger than the last - a sixty-pound fish, then a seventy-pound fish, and on up from there. There was a downside to this.
Catching halibut in 300-feet of water sucks.
That might be an exaggeration, because if it were really true I would have stopped after the first fish.
Catching halibut in 300-feet of water is only for masochists and the deranged. While I qualify for the latter, I am certainly not a fan of pain. My muscles were throbbing after the first fish. With each new bite I began to hope the fish would get away, but those blasted circle hooks make the fish catch themselves, and once theyíre hooked youíre obligated to reel them in.
Captain Steve smiled wilder with each fish brought to the surface. In a whirlwind he would harpoon the halibut on the side of boat, tie it off with a massive shark hook and reach over with a rusty knife to bleed the fish by slicing its gills. When the fish was devoid of blood, he would hoist it onboard, hogtie it from mouth to tail and stand over it ñ shoulders back, chin up, and hands on his hips.
Captain Steve was far more exciting and entertaining than pulling on flatfish for hours on end, and I wished I'd had more time to hear his stories.
Since returning to Skagway I have been eating halibut prepared in some very creative ways and thinking back on Pelican.
If Skagway had better halibut fishing opportunities I might be tempted to go out there and give it a try once again.
Thank God the halibut fishing here stinks.