by Will Hobbs
Hand over hand, I tried to draw the prize in. The fish was so strong, it took line from me as it torpedoed back and forth across our wake. “Send it back down and tire it out?” I yelled over my shoulder.
“No, no, bring it in or you’ll lose it! Do I have to do it myself?”
I gritted my teeth, braced, and pulled harder. “No chance!”
The battle was only getting started. Three times, I had the fish nearly close enough to club. Three times, I leaned over the stern with the gaff club poised, only to have the king, in a splashing frenzy, take line away from me. It seemed to have a lot more strength left than I did. It was all I could do not to let up for an instant. A moment’s slack and the tyee would be gone.
The fourth time, eye to eye, I anticipated the explosion that would come as the fish saw me raise my club. I bent my left wrist so the king couldn’t pull the line straight out of my palm, and I held tight. With the club in my right hand, I came down hard, striking the giant salmon square on the top of the head. From the vibration in my elbow, it felt like I’d connected with concrete.
Now came the supreme test. Was I strong enough to land the thing? Once I committed, I was going to have to give it my all, and then some.
The time is now, I decided grimly. I spun the gaff in my hand, slammed the gaff hook through the side of the salmon’s shaking head, then braced and heaved the giant up and over the rail. Just enough of its body fell into the bin for the momentum to bring the rest with it. Not for a second did it just lie there. Immediately, the great fish was beating its tail, slamming the bin, writhing and flopping every which way, so violently it nearly flopped over the side of the boat. Quick as I could, I jerked the hook loose, then clubbed the salmon two times and once more for good measure.
“Ninety-five pounds if it weighs an ounce,” Tor said. I stood back panting, exhausted.
As if the school underneath us was scattered and demoralized by the loss of its chieftain, the bite paused, and for that I was grateful. Tor went back into the wheelhouse. No doubt his back was killing him.
The mammoth king lay still, gasping, its jaws working open and shut. I turned my face away from its fading glory, and went to the other side of the cockpit to clean fish. I needed to give the tyee ten minutes to fully die before I could safely deal with it. There still might be enough life or reflex left in that fish to break my arm or worse.
Everybody in Southeast knew the story of Joe Cash, the troller who landed a halibut over the side of his boat, a hundred-thirty pounder, only to slip on the slimy deck and bang his head on a winch. There the man was, all alone, lying unconscious in the bin with the dying halibut. The thrashing of the fish broke Joe’s leg so bad, the bone ruptured an artery. When he came to, he had lost so much blood, he didn’t quite make it to his radio before he died.
I sprayed my smaller kings clean, heaved them forward into the port rinse bin, then crossed to the starboard side to work on the chieftain. It was so heavy, it was all I could do to pick it up and center it in the cleaning cradle, which it dwarfed.
I severed the gill connections, ripped the gills out, and tossed them over the side. Out spilled the salmon’s still-beating heart and a handful of needlefish from the cut throat. I held the king’s heart in my palm and felt a huge sadness wash over me.
If you do it with reverence, I reminded myself, there’s no reason to be sad. That’s what my parents had taught me.
With a flick of my wrist, I tossed the heart to the sea. A gull caught it before it hit the water.
Sometimes the needlefish were still alive, still bright-eyed and wriggling. I would flick them into the ocean, hoping they would live. These were dead.
As I slid the tip of the long, sharp cleaning knife into the vent of the enormous king salmon, it jerked, from reflex. It always bothered me that there’s no way to know at what point the fish is truly dead and incapable of feeling pain.
I opened the cavity, ripped out the gut package and tossed it over the side to the screaming gulls. A few landed on it at once.
I sliced the blood canal along the length of the backbone, flipped the knife around, and stripped the congealing blood with the spoon on the other end. I reached for the deck hose and rinsed the inside of the fish with salt water.
Tor was above me again, leaning on the hayrack, looking down. Fishing had been his life. He must be feeling reverence, same as me, for this magnificent creature. I wished he felt the same reverence for his Russian plaques, and Rezanov’s journal. If he did, he’d never take them for himself, or sell them on the black market. He’d share them with the world instead.
The fishing picked up again, and I landed fish like there was no tomorrow. We had over fifteen thousand pounds of king salmon in the hold, not to mention the silvers. The trollers kept thinning out as the barometer continued to fall. By early evening there were only three boats in sight. With a couple of hours of daylight left, Torsen told me to pull the gear.
“Can we reach land?” I asked. “In case the weather comes up overnight?”
“And have to run back out to the grounds for the last day?” he answered with a scowl. “I’m talking about moving over to the east bank, that’s all. Lituya Bay will be in better reach if we need to run there. Don’t be in such a hurry to tuck tail. Don’t you want to see what the outside water can do when it’s riled up?”
“Not really,” I said. “I wouldn’t think you would, either.”
“I’ve seen it all, kid, I’ve already seen it all.”
I had hundreds of fish to deal with before I could sleep. It was dark by the time I got to the dishes. Tor was snoring. My sights were set on home; that was all I really cared about. My body felt like raw meat pounded with a hammer. My mind was rum-dumb from exhaustion.
Every night on the Storm Petrel, what sleep I got came to a screeching halt after a handful of hours, either with the anchor chain or the blaring of the VHF radio. This time it was different. My dreams went on and on, from one bizarre situation to the next, much longer than they should have. The last one, the dream I woke from, was about my sister and the glass float. Maddie and I were beachcombing together when she discovered it. We dug it out, and as soon as we did, a sea lion appeared just offshore, barking.
“He wants to play!” my little sister cried, and then she did the last thing I would have guessed. She threw our prize to the sea lion. The lion immediately started playing with the ball, pushing it back and forth with its snout, disappearing and then breaching high in the air, the ball flying even higher. This was a Steller’s, a big bull, easily ten feet long. Maddie was clapping her hands and laughing. I was yelling, “He’s not going to give it back!”
“Sure he will,” Maddie said, and just then the sea lion took off with it. Out past the kelp beds the animal stopped, faced us, tossed the ball up in the air, and seemed to beckon with a flipper. Before I even knew what had happened, Maddie was swimming out to the sea lion, in the freezing cold water. Not only that, she was being swept out to sea by a riptide.
“Maddie!” I screamed. I jumped in and swam after her, knowing it meant both of us would drown. In an instant, the riptide took me, the land was vanishing, Maddie was calling. I couldn’t see her; I was all wrapped in kelp and it was strangling me as surely as an octopus. I was going down.
I got so frightened I woke myself up.
And discovered sunshine spilling down the ladder.
My watch said it was 7:15 A.M. All confused, I threw off my sleeping bag and climbed the stairs.
Where was Tor? Why hadn’t he woken me? What about the storm, the storm that had been brewing?
I found him on his bunk, sound asleep.
I looked over the bow. The ocean, thank goodness, was calm, but it was an eerie, dead calm. There wasn’t a boat in sight. The emptiness, the stillness, the silence, were terrifying.
I shook Tor’s shoulder. He blinked himself awake and saw broad daylight. He looked panicky, which scared the daylights out of me. “The barometer,” he said. “What’s
it reading?”
“Twenty-eight and a half.”
“Read it again.”
“Twenty-eight and a half!”
We both ran onto the deck. The sky was streaky and red like a river of spawning sockeyes. There wasn’t a boat in sight. The Pacific was dead calm, holding its breath.
“God help us,” Tor said. “We have to get out of here.”
17
I WENT BELOW AND THREW my clothes and boots on. By the time I got back up, we were under way. Tor had us on a GPS course for Lituya Bay. I cleared every bit of loose gear out of the cockpit and snapped a tarp over it, so it wouldn’t get swamped if we ran into big waves.
“Of all times for me to oversleep,” Tor bellowed as I returned to the wheelhouse. He slammed his fist on the table, as if that would help. “It must have been those useless pills Grace gave me.”
Torsen grabbed the tide table booklet. He studied it intensely, staring at one page and pulling at his beard. At last he set it aside.
“I take it the tide needs to be high for us to be able to get into Lituya,” I said.
“That’s right, you have to go into the bay on the flood. If the tide is ebbing, you can’t get in there.”
“Is the current rushing out of the bay too strong? Too strong for this boat?”
“That’s part of it. At the peak of the ebb, it can run twelve knots. You remember me telling you about the entrance, about the slot between the breakers? At high tide that gate is a hundred yards wide, but at low tide—shallower water—it closes shut. The surf breaks all the way across.”
“Is it like you were talking about, crossing the bar into the Columbia River?”
“Same idea. You’ve got to cross that bar. Even at high tide, especially when it’s windy, it can be tricky to get inside Lituya.”
Tor punched in KRU-55 out of Yakutat. The weather forecast would be coming up in a few minutes.
No longer was the sea dead calm. A breeze was blowing out of the southeast, and that wasn’t good. That’s the direction most of the big blows come from. They’re spawned out in the north Pacific, and by the time they reach the Gulf of Alaska, they’re churning with a powerful counterclockwise rotation. The arms that fly off them curl around and attack from the southeast. “So where do we stand with the tides right now?” I asked. “Are we on high or low?”
“Look it up for yourself!”
“I will,” I said, and reached for the tide tables.
Torsen eyed me as I searched for the right table, then said, “We’ve got half an hour of low left. There’ll be half an hour of slack, then six of high.”
“Which means we’ve got seven hours to get inside the bay. We need to be there by two-thirty this afternoon. Is that possible?”
“Weather depending.”
“There must be some other spot we can run to.”
“Cape Fairweather, but it’s fifteen miles up the coast from Lituya. If we had drifted north last night instead of south, I’d be thinking about the cape, even though it’s a lousy windbreak compared to Lituya Bay. But if we set a course for Fairweather right now, and the weather comes up, we’d be exposed a lot longer.”
“We might not get there.”
“You wanted to know. Now, do you feel better?”
The radio was beginning to spit out the weather forecast. They started with the Dixon Entrance, south of Prince of Wales Island. “Winds light to variable, with patches of sunshine.”
My hopes began to rise. We were going to luck out. Our barometer indicated we must be close to a bad storm cell, but our seas weren’t bad at all. The storm cell must be heading in some other direction.
As the forecast moved north, so did the wind speeds being reported. At last it was our turn: “Cape Spencer to Yakutat,” the radio blared, “small craft warnings.”
“Now they tell us,” Tor said.
“Tor, we’re forty-six miles from shore.”
“I know, I know.”
Minutes later, the first swell rolled ominously underneath us. It had come from the southeast.
The captain tuned the radio to Channel 16, the hailing channel used for emergencies, then switched to another, where fishermen were talking.
“I got up and tapped the glass at one-thirty,” a skipper was saying. “It took such a drop I spooked and took off running. I got my sights on Cape Spencer. This could be some kind of blow.”
“Roger that,” said another. “Good thinking, getting a jump on it. The rest of us, at least we’ll be snug inside Lituya before long.”
Tor turned the volume down. “We’re kind of out on a limb,” I couldn’t help saying. “The storm better spin off in some other direction.”
“This bird can fly in foul weather. The Storm Petrel has lived up to her name in more than a few blows. Plus, you’ve got a seafaring Norwegian at the wheel. That ought to count for something.”
The resolve in Torsen’s weathered face made me momentarily thankful that he was such an ornery piece of work.
For three hours, we made eight knots. The bow kept lifting higher and the swells came more frequently, but we were making good time. I did the math. We had come twenty-eight miles and had eighteen left to go, with four hours left before Lituya’s entrance closed. To get there with a cushion, at 2:00 P.M., with a half hour left of high tide, all we had to average was five knots.
Just as I began to breathe easier, the wind struck. Faster than I would have believed possible, it went from a breeze to thirty knots, and the sea was suddenly running with white horses. Out the wheelhouse windows, the sky to the southeast was turning a sickly blue-black. “How can it whip up this fast?” I asked.
“Just does,” the captain replied.
The wind was gusting to fifty knots now. Tor’s big troller didn’t feel so big. The Storm Petrel was beginning to heel over on her beam ends. “Shut that half-door out to the deck,” Tor ordered.
Spray was whipping off the sides of the boat and over the afterdeck. I closed the bottom half of the door, then returned to the table and looked out over the bucking bow. I did a double take at what I saw half around to starboard. To the southeast, a white wall of water stood up above the ocean. “Tsunami?” I asked, feeling sick and weightless.
“Look closer. That’s a whole bunch of waves, driven by the storm front.”
“Coming our way, Tor.”
“Yes, they are,” he said calmly. He was standing tall, like a battlefield commander. I felt the bottom drop out of my stomach. The Storm Petrel couldn’t retreat. Outrunning the wind, that was impossible.
Visibility dropped suddenly to half a mile. On came the wind-driven rain and the spindrift. It was getting so dark, so fast, I’d never seen anything like it. “Kid,” Tor said urgently. “Everything that isn’t nailed down in this wheelhouse, get it inside a cupboard or get it down below.”
“Will do,” I said. I went to work in the galley first. Then I cleared the tabletop.
“My bunk. The bag and the mattress and everything. Stow it below.”
I stuffed Torsen’s loose clothes and his sleeping bag into his duffel. Once down the ladder, I wedged it into the bunk opposite mine. I went back up for the mattress, grabbed it, and found myself looking at the Russian plaques. “What about the plaques, Tor? What should I do with them?”
“If they fly around, they could take our heads off. Put ’em at the bottom of the closet across from the fire extinguisher, or on the floor of the john.”
Fast as I could, I stowed everything that had to be stowed. “Thirty seconds,” I heard Tor call. I threw the loose silverware and the dishes into drawers, and I slid into position at the table in time to brace myself for the first wave.
“Hang on!” Tor yelled.
The first one came down on us like a falling building. I was amazed that the front windows didn’t blow out. Then came more waves. Water hit the windows like gravel, forcing itself inside through every seam.
“How do you like this, Billy?” a crackling voice on the radio aske
d.
“I’ll like it a whole lot better when we’re inside the bay,” another voice answered.
With the seas blowing, it was impossible to see more than fifty yards ahead. On the crests of the waves, the wind caught us full and forced the bow sideways. Tor responded every time by cranking hard on the wheel and goosing the throttle. It took a full burst of power for the rudder to swing us back into the waves and the wind.
A gust slammed us amidships, and the Petrel nearly lay over on her side. I had a death grip on the tabletop. “What does the wind gauge say?” I yelled over the shriek of the wind.
“Seventy knots.”
“That’s eighty miles an hour. Ever been in a storm this bad?”
“Never. Let’s hope it doesn’t get worse.”
It did. We were taking a horrible beating. Tor had to fight to stay in the seat behind the wheel.
When I didn’t think it could get any worse, a wave bigger than the rest reared up and came down hard, right on top of the wheelhouse. Tor was thrown to the floor. His books went flying out of their spill-proof shelves, the ceiling was raining salt water, cabinet doors flew open. Canned goods rolled out onto the floor, glass was breaking, water was hissing on the stove top, charts were thrown everywhere, and then came a crash from down in the engine room. We were spinning in the surf, totally out of control.
18
TOR PICKED HIMSELF UP and climbed back into the captain’s chair. The boat had been spun so far around, we were quartering before the wind instead of into it. Still in motion, we were about to be hit broadside by the next big wave. With wheel and throttle, Torsen added to the Storm Petrel’s momentum instead of trying to reverse it, and gave the wave our butt end.
The Petrel’s stern took the brunt of the wave squarely. The wave rolled over the back rail and washed across the deck. If the cockpit hadn’t been tarped, it would have filled, and the boat would have become hopelessly back heavy.
“Should I clean up all this mess in the wheelhouse?” I shouted over the whine of the wind.
“Forget about that for now. Go below and see what came loose.”
