This new edition contains new stories and updates from the super-heated days when fishing fleets turned king crab into fortunes, to the annual circus of Bristol Bay's monster salmon runs, to the bucolic life of the open-ocean trawler, the true stories in Fishing Up North: Stories of Luck and Loss in Alaskan Waters" captures 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 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, Sitka, and Seattle --- are classic fishing towns, where docks, bars, and even quiet living merge in colorful portraits about life on the last frontier.
Prelude:
Getting Lucky pg 7;
Map pg 10; Ch 1,
The Beast of Ugly Seasons - King Crabbing, Dutch Harbor pg 13; Ch 2,
Talking Price and the Cruel Sixteen - Salmon Gillnetting, Bristol Bay pg 25; Ch 3,
The Billion-dollar Bottomfish Dream - Groundfish Trawling pg 47; Ch 4 K
enny and the Council - Westward Hilton Hotel, Anchorage pg 61, Ch 5,
Flying Fish and the Death of a Plane at Egegik - Salmon setnetting - Bristol Bay pg 81; Ch 6
A Beautiful Place to Be - Salmon Trolling, Southeast Alaska pg 107; Ch 7,
Fishing with Modest Ambition - Codfish Trawling, Kodiak pg 129; Ch 8,
Fishing the Flats, Salmon Gillnetting - Prince William Sound pg 147; Ch 9,
The Dream Comes True on the Chain - Pollock Trawling, Dutch Harbor pg 161; Ch 10,
The Resurrection of The Rebecca B - Codfish longlinging, Gulf of Alaska pg 177; Ch 11,
Kelping for Crude - The Exxon Valdez Spill pg 195; Ch 12,
Derby Days, Sleepless Nights - Halibut Longlining, Southeast Alaska pg 209; Ch 13.
Salmon in the Trees - Salmon Spawning, Alexander Archipelago, pg 224.
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.
