Just for the Halibut

My serial-blogger wife demands an Alaska report. I was going to wait until I scrounged up some pictures, but that may never happen. You see, I forgot to bring a camera to the most beautiful place I have ever been, so you are left to your imagination. As I am a little forgetful, I am going to attempt to recall the week chronologically, even though I had no watch or calendar on the trip. This may come across more like the gospel of Mark than that of Luke, but at least you will get some highlights.


BACKGROUND: A guy at our church used to work on a crab boat in Alaska way back when. Now he is old and has connections in the area and he has recently gotten access to a group of cabins and a lodge owned by the natives. He takes men from our church up there every summer for "The ultimate Alaskan Hunting and Fishing Experience!" The bummer is that it costs a bazillion dollars and I could never go in my wildest dreams. Then, it happened- a father of one of the junior highers told me I could go completely free of charge, if I wanted to. I said, I would love to as long as it's okay with the Boss (Heidi). She said yes and so did the guy who signs my paycheck, and so I went.





FRIDAY THE 3RD: Wolfgang saved the day by bringing me to the airport. At 3:30am, the McDonald's window worker recognized my father-in-law's voice (he has been going every morning for the last I-don't-know-how-many-years) and yet oversized order (3 breakfast burritos instead of his usual 2!?) and gave him more chocolate chip cookies so he could share with me. Nice gesture-I didn't eat any; the coffee, breakfast burrito, and McMuffin were enough. 4 airplanes of decreasing size finally brought me to Seldovia, Alaska (Oakland> Seattle> Anchorage> Homer> Seldovia). Check out the last plane I came in on- TINY! We got situated in our tiny cabins and I was glad to be staying with some younger guys I know- Andy Ottinger, Eli Farrar (the guy I replaced as junior high pastor- he know lives in Oregon), and Ryan McDowell (will be in his wedding October 12th). The first night they had to shoot a black bear that was persistently getting into one of the vans.
Ryan and I decided to declaw the thing (gross, but cool), some other guys decided to skin it, and we all decided the meat was worth keeping.





SATURDAY THE 4TH: Breakfast and devotions and then it was off to the ocean to fish for silver salmon. We were in skiffs about a 45 minutes down the coast; water was pretty flat, and we had a good day of fishing, although it was a little cloudy. Didn't catch any silvers, but we did get a bunch of pink salmon and some rock fish. We ate them that night- fresh is better.



SUNDAY THE 5TH: We went to a dock where a boat came and picked us up to take us to the "Island Church," or as Ryan and I decided to call it, "Fellowship Island." Church starts at 11 on Fellowship Island and then fellowship follows for the next 4 hours. You cannot leave fellowship island; it's an island, so you must fellowship. I was tired from not really sleeping ever (Alaska or California) so this was tough. The horseshoe pit kept me alive. We finally returned and a couple of great things happened: 1) I found out my phone has reception in and around the area we are staying- go Verizon! 2) We got to eat the bear for dinner! So yummy. Our chef Dan lived up to his last name- Goodman. That night ended with the wood-stove powered sauna and a freezing cold outdoor shower- the most refreshing thing ever, except for Gold Bond,toothpaste, and Icy Hot all at the same time.



MONDAY THE 6TH: The wind had kicked up the night before and the water was really choppy so we couldn't go out on the ocean again. Instead of ocean-fishing, Ryan, two other guys, and I got dropped off at the mouth of a stream connected to the bay we were in. We hiked up about an hour and fished in a few great holes. We had to scare off a big black bear to fish one spot. All the pink salmon had "run" about a month prior (run = they go upstream to spawn and then die) so there were a ton of salmon. As you walk along you are basically kicking salmon out of your way. They are all at different stages of their death, and their flesh is actually decomposing as they continue to swim around. It's so gross looking. They fish are all pink and red and green and white as the flesh actually rots on their body. You don't want to catch these. If you do, sometimes you can actually rip the hook right out of their mouth because the flesh is so soft. Seriously disgusting.



TUESDAY THE 7TH: We were supposed to go Halibut fishing today but since it was so windy the day before, the charter boat decided to rather avoid the waves of death and go the next day. Instead, we decided to take out our two skiffs and see if we could get lucky and be able to make it to a spot where the silver salmon were supposed to be biting. As we got out of the bay the waves started getting bigger and before we knew it, it was 6 feet or so. The guys in the other skiff were freaked out when the waves started getting them wet, so they turned back. We kept going and the waves got to be 8-10 feet. We ended up not catching anything and the other guys in the boat were getting seasick so we turned back as well.



Later in the day we went up Barabara creek [Ba-ra-baruh] and fished. I went downstream first and kept catching rotten salmon, so I started hiking upstream and crossed under the bridge we had parked on. One of the guys asked me to go upstream to get one of the guys (Eli) and tell him we were ready to go. I was happy to retrieve Eli because I secretly wanted to fish some more on my way up and back. I went up pretty far until I came to a fork in the creek. I was yelling for Eli and finally he heard me and poked his head around the corner and told me not to come up the side he was on because he was trying to get some fish. I went up the other side and saw a great spot ahead of me so I hiked up the stream another 100 yards and cast in. I was reeling in a second time when I heard a rustling noise and looked up to see a huge black bear coming out of the bushes directly across from me. My first reaction was "Get out of here immediately" but that thought was punctuated by the realization that "If you try to run, the bear will instinctively chase you and kill you and eat you." I adjusted from my sprinters stance and stood up straight with my shoulder back. I yelled at the bear once and he just flinched and stared at me. I reached down and picked up the biggest rock I could get and chucked it at Yogi. In my desire to kill the bear with a boulder, I had forgotten that you can't really get much velocity going by throwing a large stone; the first rock lobbed in and did nothing except startle him. Quickly I grabbed a couple more small rocks and threw them while yelling and the bear finally decided to turn around and go back the the bushes he came from. I kept throwing rocks until I couldn't see him anymore. Finally I felt semi-safe and got back to Eli and the other guys as soon as I could. I don't think I actually scared the bear away; I believe the bear just thought I was freakish and decided to leave me alone. Anyway, I am alive. PTL.



WEDNESDAY THE 8TH: Halibut day! We were at our charter boat at 5AM and were dropping our lines in by 7AM. I caught the first fish of the day- about a 35 pounder. We were swapping poles after we caught something and I was back on a pole in a few minutes and caught another good sized fish. Halibut are bottom feeders and so we were placing the bait on the ocean floor 200 feet below. Since they are so large and flat it can be a long, hard fight to get them in, especially if you have to reel. Thank God the Peggy N Me (our boat: ) had electric reels, so all we had to do was push a button to bring in the line. Some of the other guys were pulling up sand sharks, which you throw back in. I caught 3 halibut within the first half hour and didn't get any sharks on the line. The limit for halibut is 2 fish per person so our group of 4 could keep only 8. We got our 8 in about an hour and 15 minutes and then waited for the other 2 guys on the charter to catch their limit. The last fish of the day they brought in was obviously big, as it was putting up a good fight. The captain thought it was either a large sand shark or a skate (like a large sting ray) because the way it was pulling the line was not like a halibut would. A half hour into the fight, the thing finally surfaced- the guy had caught a 120 pound halibut by the tail!
Craziness! At 200 feet down he just happened to snag the biggest fish by the tail. To bring the fish into the boat the captain had to harpoon it in the center of it's body and then shoot in the head with a shotgun slug. Having caught our limit, we headed back to the dock at 9AM. We gave our smallest catch to our cook to make that night for the 15 guys on the trip and after eating all we could, there was still fish leftover. We split the meat from the other 7 fish between the 4 of us and we came out with 34 pounds of fillets per person! 3 of the other guys went the next day and caught their limit as well, but they came away with only 13.5 pounds per person so we got lucky. Halibut costs at least $15/lb (closer to $20 actually) so I came home with over $500 worth of fish, making the $235 charter cost well worth it.



THURSDAY THE 9TH: I was going to just hang out and go fishing on our last day but was talked into hiking "Red Mountain" with Ryan and some of the other guys. We drove about and hour to get to the base of the mountain and when we looked up at the peak, I was not impressed wit how high or steep it was. "Let's get it over with" was my attitude. It was much harder to get it over with than I thought. It was very steep and there was no trail; you had to climb loose rock up the majority of the mountain. Finally, at the top the view was spectacular and i was glad I was up there. We started back down and I was running down the top section when I realized I had left my fleece at the peak. I tried yelling back to Ed (a guy) who was at the top but he looked bewildered. So, I had to do the last ascent twice. On the way down I was very thirsty and I filled up my bottle in a fresh spring coming out of the mountain- the best tasting water I've had in a long time. After getting back down I jumped in the stream at the base.



FRIDAY THE 10TH: I came home. Yay!