Fishing Up North: Stories of Luck and Loss in Alaskan Waters

by Brad Matsen

Overview

This second edition contains new and updated stories from the super-heated days when fishing fleets turned king crab into fortunes, and the annual circus of Bristol Bay’s monster salmon runs, to the dangerous life of the open-ocean trawler. The true stories in Fishing Up North: Stories of Luck and Loss in Alaskian Waters capture the flavor of the modern fisherman’s life and fortunes in the waters off Alaska. You’ll find firsthand accounts of frightening weather, good fishing, terrible fishing, great days, and sweet living from the decks of crabbers, trawlers, longliners, trollers, and gillnetters. This book and others like it have inspired film crews to trek to Alaska and cover the crabbing seasons for reality TV shows. Commercial fishing’s home ports—Dutch Harbor, Kodiak, Naknek, Cordova, Petersburg, and Sitka—are classic fishing towns, where docks, bars, and even quiet living merge in colorful portraits about life on the last frontier.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780882409849
Publisher:	Alaska Northwest Books
Publication date:	08/01/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	242
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Brad Matsen has written about the sea and its inhabitants for forty years in books, film scripts, essays and magazine articles. He is the author of the New York Times best sellers Titanic's Last Secrets: The Heroic Discovery of the Abyss and Jacques Cousteau: The Sea King among other books, and was a creative producer for the television series The Shape of Life. His articles have appeared in Mother Jones, Audubon, and Nature, among other publications. He divides his time between Seattle and New York City.

Read an Excerpt

“Sometimes I hate it, but other times I love it,” Tim Sanger tells me at dawn on the run home. He is on the wheel as we ease through calm seas at nine knots off a coast that inspires well-being just because you feel so lucky just to be seeing it. To the north, the snow-white peaks slip into the sea from crests that march like a saw blade across unusually clear blue sky in the flat light of an early Arctic morning. In February, the sun glides in a low groove across the southern horizon, a mere rumor of heat and light. “I was as green as they get when I get when I got on this boat last year,” Sanger says. “Now I know there isn’t any other way to get the feeling I got when we got 70,000 pounds of halibut in one twenty-four-hour opening. I looked down in the hold and saw all those fish and I realized that I caught every one of them. And then there’s the paycheck. I guess fishing is kind of addictive.”

Table of Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS Prelude: Getting Lucky Map Ch 1 The Beast of Ugly Seasons King Crabbing, Dutch Harbor Ch 2 Talking Price and the Cruel Sixteen Salmon Gillnetting, Bristol Bay Ch 3 The Billion dollar Bottomfish Dream Groundfish Trawling Ch 4 Kenny and the Council Westward Hilton Hotel, Anchorage Ch 5 Flying Fish and the Death of a Plane at Egegik Salmon setnetting Bristol Bay Ch 6 A Beautiful Place to Be Salmon Trolling, Southeast Alaska Ch 7 Fishing with Modest Ambition Codfish Trawling, Kodiak Ch 8 Fishing the Flats, Salmon Gillnetting Prince William Sound Ch 9 The Dream Comes True on the Chain Pollock Trawling, Dutch Harbor Ch 10 The Resurrection of The Rebecca B Codfish longlinging, Gulf of Alaska Ch 11 Kelping for Crude The Exxon Valdez Spill Ch 12 Derby Days, Sleepless Nights Halibut Longlining, Southeast Alaska Ch 13 Salmon in the Trees Salmon Spawning, Alexander Archipelago

Editorial Reviews

"Brad Matsen is a polished writer with a quirky sense of humor and an uncanny knack for the precise metaphor." 
                                                                                            —Homer [Alaska] News.

From the Publisher