Day: July 26, 2014

A boy’s first Alaskan salmon is a coming of age milestone, like his first date, only less pretty, usually anyway.

A proud mother looks on.

She, Caleb (pictured), Andy, and myself joined an all day salmon fishing charter aboard the M/V Aurora that took us to the far end of Resurrection Bay, and beyond. Fishing was slow, slow for up here anyway, but by no means dismal. In addition to the haul the other fisher-people on the boat took in, our group of four managed to land ten silver salmon and many rockfish.

The murderous proof:

We fished among whales, one of which surfaced very close to the scrum of charter boats constantly maneuvering around each other to get over the “hole” where the fish finders indicated the salmon were. It’s an unsettling experience to be aboard a forty foot vessel bobbing up and down atop Pacific swells, and then suddenly see an oily-black behemoth longer than the boat itself surface not fifty feet away. It causes you to re-estimate quickly your position in the food chain. Not that Humpbacks are carnivorous, but one errant move by one of those beasts and you can imagine a boatload of people being tossed into the frigid water where hypothermia would finish them in fifteen minutes or less. Yet somehow the whales know precisely where the boats are and are not inclined to malicious behavior.

Captain Chris strictly forbade bananas on our boat. I had to jettison the three I’d brought in our lunch cooler before we departed from the dock. Neither he nor his deckhand, Shelby, would touch them. Superstitious? Possibly. But Capt’n Chris had anecdotal evidence associating bananas with bad outcomes on the boat, and sometimes associations are all you got.

The clouds parted briefly here and there to reveal some bluesky but closed up just as fast and the day overall was overcast. Still, it doesn’t get any better than this, zooming over Resurrection Bay powered by twin turbocharged diesels en-route to the silver salmon killing fields.

We fished til 4 pm then called it quits. All the way back to the port of Seward Shelby cleaned everyone’s fish. The endless draft of seagulls ensures that nothing goes to waste:

For this and his overall attentiveness to his customer’s wants/needs — bating hooks, netting fish, untangling lines, witty remarks — we all tipped him generously. Capt’n Chris, too, who contributed just as mightily to a very satisfying day on the water.