Friday -- Alaska Letters

                Friday turned out to be probably the most epic day of my entire life.  I started out with a shower, and some writing about my adventures from the previous day.  Eventually, around 11 or so Marcus and I went to get breakfast at Amelia’s.  By now it was practically lunch.  I ordered a sandwich, and it came with clam chowder, and I want dad to know that I actually ate a good portion of it.  I always like having breakfast with just Marcus because he’s really interesting and cool.  We talked a lot about families and stuff, because his family is really nomadic too, so they’ve lived all over the place.

                Then we went and I grabbed my truck, and we headed to the plant.  He was following me in his truck, but by the time that I got there, it had started to rain so I just went straight inside to Tim’s office.  I didn’t see Marcus again for like four hours.  I don’t know where he went, but he was busy doing stuff.  Tim gave me some information about how the co-op works to read.  Basically the co-op is the collection of boats that have all agreed to use Westward Seafoods over any other processor.  When they did the American Fisheries Act, they got locked into their quotas, and had to form these co-ops.  Tim does a lot of management for the co-op, which contains more boats than the ones for which we do accounting and management down in Seattle.  We talked about the whole rationalization process, and why they would do it, and it was all interesting in an inherently boring kind of way.

                Eventually Tim and I sort of ran out of desire to talk about the co-op, so he went to get some food, and I went to see if Carolyn had opened up her shop yet or not.  She hadn’t, so I called again, and today she had to get her check engine light fixed, so she said she would call me when she got in.  Which was fine, because I still needed to go say hi to Brynn at Harris Electric.

                I hopped back in my truck and drove over there, and she was in.  She looks WAY too young to be 30.  She’s got a daughter who is 12, and I’m like, no way.  She’s really nice, and I like talking to her because she laughs easily and stuff, but it’s situations like this that remind me why island/small town life is really kind of bad, especially for kids who grow up there.  They can’t help but get into trouble, or get pregnant or something like that.  She’s not married, and she’s had a few boyfriends, and I’m just like… That’s really sad.

                But anyway, she’s a lovely girl, and she thinks my idea for a bra boutique would be awesome.  She said even Anchorage doesn’t have a really good store, like a Macy’s or anything, so you can’t even get a proper fitting somewhere in Alaska.  You’d have to go all the way to Seattle.  She invited me to a UFC party she’s having at her house.  She bought the fight on pay-per-view, and is having a couple people over.  It should be fun, and now I have Alaska friends.  J

                Carolyn called, so I left Brynn and went down to the Dutch Harbor Mall.  I think I already mentioned that it’s right across the street from my hotel, which is good because I was supposed to be grabbing my computer to do stuff with Tim when I got back.  Anyway, I parked at the mall, and went in, and she does have just the coolest stuff.  It’s all like, native made, or handmade by somebody, and there was just so much to look at.  I got a sea urchin Christmas ornament that Carolyn had hand painted, and several gifts that I won’t say what they are, and a really nice earmuff warmer that is blue and green.  Carolyn said that the lady who makes them brushes her (goats?  Sheep?  Alpacas?  Don’t remember) and spins, dyes and knits the yarn.  Mine was a proto-type, so it was a little cheaper than some of the others.  I put it on right away, and it is very lovely and warm.  It’s exactly what I need here because a hat is too hot, and it’s really just my ears that are cold anyway.

                So when I go to get back in my truck, the car won’t turn over.  The radio came on, and it was trying and making this kakakakaka noise, but it wouldn’t start.  I think it must be in the starter because obviously the battery isn’t dead.  I called Tim and he came and got me in the Chelsea K truck, and we went back to the plant.

                When we got in, Marcus was hanging out in Tim’s office, and while they were talking about what to do about the Westward One truck, I organized the books in the outer office by size.  Marcus made fun of me, and Tim was like, is my office still bugging you?  And it was, because we hadn’t done anything with the boxes that we were keeping after we took out everything we were throwing away.  So he let me move some more stuff, and I lined it up against the walls and got it off the floor, and put all his power cords (there were a LOT of power cords) in a box, and showed him that he had two paper punches and three tape dispensers and two boxes of staples but no stapler.  So he’s kind of all lined up.  There was one pile of paper that he was still working on, and I tried to straighten it, and he’s like, don’t touch it!  But I put it in a neater stack anyway.

                Brynn was texting me about our respective plans for the rest of the night, and eventually we decided that we would go catch lunch tomorrow (Saturday) before the UFC fight, and then she would go back to work and I would come over for the fight.  Marcus and Tim and I went to The Grand Aleutian for dinner, and had so much food.  It’s a testament to how much I’m getting used to Alaska-portions, because I ate WAY more than I did when we were there on Monday night.

                We had duck comfit flautus, which were delicious, and I had another wedge salad and that bacon steak (which was just as good the second time), and this time I ate most of my vegetables and appropriate starch, and I was even thinking about getting some dessert.  It had been raining most of the day, so we had kind of lost hope that there would be time to go fishing before I left.  But during dinner, the skies began to part, and it got really beautiful outside.  Tim and Marcus were both looking slightly wistfully out the window.  I was chewing, so I gestured a fishing rod, and they agreed that if I asked so directly, I deserved to get to go.

                So out we go to get ready.  I called home, and talked to everybody.  I shouldn’t have warned everyone that I would catch a Halibut for them, because I set the bar really high for myself.  Every one of them asked if it was still light out.  It was 8:30, so of course it was still light out.  It’s still light out at home at 8:30.  But whatever.  (For anyone who is not in the family, this fishing trip happened at midnight, and the sun still hadn’t set, ok?)

                So we all show up at the dock, and we had roused this poor Rick character out of his house to give us the keys to the little environmental skiff.  Tim brought us some fishing rods and The Alden, which is what we call our halibut fighter, which is basically a piece of PVC pipe set into a leather belt so that you can put your fishing rod in your hip without killing yourself while you bring in your fish.

                This is a little boat, maybe 15 feet long, and it’s got a little wheelhouse and not much else.  Marcus navigated us away from the big fleet boats and the plant, and I finally got the picture of the plant I had been hoping to get.  The plant is huge, and now I can show you.  We start heading out to, where ever we went, I’ll have to check a map and guess.  We could see Mount McCushion (sp?)  which is an active volcano and actually shuts down the airport some times.  I guess we get little earthquakes all the time.  I haven’t felt any, but that’s pretty normal.

                Tim brought some beers, so we’re all in this little dingy trying not to wear our freshly cracked beers.  Marcus let me drive for a little while, and I had to ask him to hold my beer, and I almost said that every good story starts with “Hold my beer.”

                This is going to be one of those stories.

                We pick a spot near this waterfall, and we’ve got a pretty good wind pushing us about 3 knots out toward the Bering Sea, and we should be right over some humps where the fish are.  Tim gives me a fishing rod, and is like, well, reel it out til it hits the bottom.  This took forever, and was made worse by the fact that there was something wrong with the spool (turned out it was screwed down to tight), so I was paying out the line by hand.

                This took forever, and I still don’t think I ever really hit the bottom.  But I felt like there was something on the end, so within probably 30 seconds of thinking I had hit the bottom, I started reeling it back in.  This also took forever.  I’m reeling and reeling, and it is really, really difficult.  Whatever is on there is pulling back pretty good.  So I’m reeling, and hauling on the line and reeling up really fast on the way down, and it’s just taking forever.

                Tim eventually got me The Alden, because I seemed to really be working for it, and I have bruises in both my hips from going without at first.  He checked my line, and at first he didn’t think there was anything on there, but eventually, when I was really working for it, he started to think I might have actually caught something.  He was saying all these fish names, and I guess they started really small, and were getting progressively bigger as he’s watching me work for this fish.

                It was twice as exhausting, because my left arm is trying to stabilize and haul up the line, and my right hand is really working to get the reel around.  I felt like I was never gonna get this fish up.   It’s been probably, five minutes of pulling on this fish, and I was very close to giving up.  I was going to make Tim bring it in because my forearms were on fire, and here comes a Fucking Halibut.  A real Fucking Halibut (that’s a technical term).

                It’s gigantic!  And it’s all flopping all over the place, and we pull it in with one of those giant spikes on the end of a shovel handle, and Marcus takes a picture of me with this Fucking Halibut.  Somebody clubbed it over the head to get it to quit flopping around all over the place.  Its blood is still on my pants.  I kind of wish I had hit it, since it was my fish, but that’s ok.  We dragged it up to the front of the boat, and I went and sat with my fish for a while.

                This whole process took approximately 15 minutes.

                Poppers, I hope you’re proud.  I was not trying to rub it in, but both Marcus and Tim were just shamed by the fact that the first thing I ever fished in my life was  a Fucking Halibut.  I wore The Alden like a beauty queen sash, and walked around.  Also, I was wearing my fisherman’s sweater and my ear muffs, so I look so Alaskan in these pictures it’s not even funny.  I also forgot to tie my hair back until it was too late, so now it’s a tangled mess.  I’m a sea-woman now.

                I was kind of rubbing it in a little.  I said that me and Chuck Norris don’t go fishing, we go catching.  Stuff like that.  Marcus said that normal people get little stuff and then work up to a big fish, but it was like I went straight to the triple dog dare (in a minor breach of etiquette, he skipped the triple dare, and went straight for the throat!).  God, I had never been so excited in my life.  I am the happiest person ever.

                We had another hour or two of day light (because it was only 9:30 when I caught my fish), so we went back and tried that spot again, and then we jetted around and fished elsewhere.  No one else caught anything (it was the triple dog dare that did it).  It suddenly got incredibly warm while we were out though.  We got really close to the waterfall, and if the wind hadn’t been whipping by so fast, it would have been uncomfortably hot.  It’s the weirdest thing to be being swept away by wind, but it’s hot so you never get cold.  We’re all stripping off layers and stuff.

                Once you catch a Fucking Halibut, you don’t really have anything else to catch, so as the sun was going down and it started to rain, we headed back to the plant.  No one was there, because none of the boats were in, so we had the entire fish plant to ourselves.  We weighed me and me with the fish, and I had to stick my hand in its gills, which was very uncool, but I have a picture.  It weighed 14 pounds. 

Unfortunately, Marcus employs several people who all do their jobs correctly, so no one had left any knives or anything around.  We had to roam around this big silent plant until we found a knife.  I watched while Marcus cut off these giant fillets of my fish.  I rinsed them off with a hose, and we got my four fillets (and two tiny, scallop sized cheeks) into a surimi bag and put it in a Westward Seafood box and found a freezer to  put it in.  Again, everyone did their job and locked stuff, so we had to find a little freezer that Tim hadn’t known even existed.  I suspect Marcus did it on purpose for just such occasions.

We’ll be able to bring my fish home in an ice box thing, so I’m very excited about that.  I would have loved to eat it with the crew of the Chelsea K, who got in at 2 this morning, but I had to bring it home.  So we left my fish in the plant, and I gave Tim and Marcus a hug and thanked them for taking me fishing, and Marcus and I left and I bounced off the walls for another hour before I finally crashed and went to bed at midnight.