Life in Prince William Sound | Alaska Commercial Fishing

I’m half asleep in the port bow of Seaview, a 54-foot salmon seiner anchored somewhere deep in the remote wilderness of Prince William Sound in Alaska. My subconscious senses that sleep will soon be over. Then, right on schedule, comes the sequence I would grow to know well over the coming weeks: the engine hatch creaks open and the genset roars to life, followed by the low rumble of the main engine. I keep my eyes closed, listening, trying to ignore it all. My skipper, Michael Hand, climbs into the wheelhouse to retrieve the anchor, and 150 feet of chain comes thundering over the bow roller, shaking the foredeck just inches above my face. The anchor is up, and Seaview is underway. It’s time to fish, and the crew needs to get their asses up, including me.

There is no lower rank on a fishing boat in Alaska than a greenhorn deckhand, so I knew I’d be thrown to the wolves arriving so late in the season, trying to learn on the fly among seasoned crew. Yesterday, my plane landed in the small fishing town of Cordova after flying over endless mountains, rivers, glaciers, and coastline. Within thirty minutes, I had sound-deafening headphones on, roaring 26 knots across Prince William Sound in Nelly Hand’s gillnetter jet boat, catching up with Seaview to fish the last few weeks of the pink salmon season.

Skipper Michael, skiffman Maxwell, and deckboss Megan, who happens to be my girlfriend, had been fishing since late June, working hard to reach the season goal for the boat of one million pounds of salmon. The gillnetter dropped me off just in time for dinner, and the next morning we fished for sixteen hours straight. It wiped me out so hard I fell asleep on the dinette bench with my deck boots still on. I’ve always considered myself a hard worker, until I came to Alaska and worked alongside fishermen.

Things got much easier as I learned some technique for stacking those yellow, jellyfish-tentacle-ridden corks that float the seine. The fishing is all a bit of a blur. Typically, a day goes 12–16 hours, yielding anywhere from 5,000 pounds on a bad day to upwards of 80,000 on a good one. No breaks, rain, wind, exhaustion, and worst of all, the jellyfish raining on your head as the seine runs through the power block. On the good fishing days, all you see are dollar signs flopping around on deck; on the bad days, you question why the hell you came here in the first place.

Our days off between openers were spent traveling to new fishing grounds or anchored in pristine bays surrounded by raw, expansive wilderness. There was an abundance of fish unlike anything I’ve ever seen in the ocean. We didn’t go to land much, but when we did, we harvested chanterelle and chicken mushrooms with plenty of blueberries. Megan coined and ran the Seaview Bakery, where she made cakes, pies, banana bread, and cheesecakes to keep crew morale high through the long days.

Since I’ve been home, friends have asked me if I’ll do it again. I say… too soon. Ask me sometime in the spring when all my fishing money has run out, and I may have an answer.