Outwrite Outdoors

Gigantic swells of water lifted the small boat up and down as though it were a bobber being toyed with by a bluegill. But this was icy, thirty-nine degree water in the southern end of Cook Inlet near Homer, Alaska that kills by hypothermia in less than ten minutes. With each passing second the swells grew until finally from my seat, as the boat dipped down into the trough of the wave, all I could see before me was a grayish blue wall of water rising above my head and rushing to meet me fast. Then, as the wave neared the boat, we were lifted unto it and raised fifteen feet into the air.

Saved again by the dynamics of water and wave structure, I reached down into the cubbyhole behind me for the life jacket that I had stashed there. I pulled it on and made sure the straps were tight and properly adjusted. I was suddenly glad that I had not eaten the cheese spread that I had brought along for lunch.

The day had started off quite pleasant. I had awoken to sunshine and fair warmth, as much as Alaska will give. My uncle had hired a guide to take me halibut fishing that day but it was necessary for the weather to cooperate. I say hired loosely because the guide was doing it as a favor to my uncle because he had helped him with a client earlier that summer. I was assured that everything was all right and that I should just relax and enjoy myself.

I met Jon Stentel, self-proclaimed master halibut guide, in town just a while later. A tall man with curly, brown hair and a thick mustache, he immediately reminded me of a high school gym teacher, and I would learn soon enough that that is exactly what he did during the winter months. He had an engaging personality and he put me at ease right away.

"Hi, " he exclaimed. " You must be Derrek."

"Yep, and you must be Jon," I replied.

"Ready to catch some fish?"

"No," I said flatly, " I thought we were going to the ballet?" Then I laughed.

"Larry warned me about you," he chuckled. "Let’s get some fish."

I hopped into his truck after throwing my gear into the back, and we headed down the road.

The place where we were going, I had already seen on television. It is aptly named Deep Creek because a very deep creek flows out into the ocean at the beach. Due to a proximity to good fishing grounds and a campground, a lot of the halibut boats launch here. I had seen it, though, for another reason. There is a very interesting way that the boats are launched. There is no traditional boat launch, with a concrete driveway or anything. The boats are launched right into the ocean off the beach. Before 1990, the only way to do so was with a four-wheel drive truck, and even then, it was no guarantee that your truck would make it back out. More than one truck met with a watery demise here. Then a local logger had an idea. He had been hired several times to pull stranded trucks and boats out of the surf. He decided that he could use his heavy log skidder-tractor to launch the boats for those willing to pay a small fee. Soon, anyone with any sense was paying for the service due to its practicality and added safety. But it wasn’t fool proof. Accidents did happen occasionally and that’s how I had come to see the place before I had ever gone to Alaska. A wave had once caught the tractor just as it launched a boat and pulled the whole thing under water. The resulting videotape of the incident made it to America’s Funniest Home Videos.

With the boat safely launched and underway, I had time to examine the craft. It wasn’t pretty by boat standards. In fact it was quite ugly in a utilitarian sort of way. It had been designed for the sole purpose of fishing and was, in fact, designed by my captain, himself. He had a friend who was a boat builder and the two of them made the craft, the Merry Seas. The Merry was a sturdy boat. She glided across the water smoothly and quietly. She was the color of raw aluminum, and the only striking graphic on her was the 150 horsepower, Yamaha outboard motor that pushed her along. She was twenty-three and one half feet long from her bow to her stern and as wide as a Lincoln Town Car from Port to starboard. The boat was appointed with four seats behind the walk-through center console and two more at the bow. It was in one of the forward facing seats that I positioned myself for the hour ride to the fish. I set back and took in the scenery and almost allowed myself to fall under the temptation of slumber.

Wham!

"What was that?" I was more than a little concerned.

"Damned if I know. I think we hit something," Jon replied. Sure enough, a log was drifting in the surf and we happened to slam into it with the prop of the motor at full throttle. There appeared to be no damage, however, and we were able to continue. I, as well as Jon, hoped that nothing was wrong with the motor. Too much can go wrong out here to be stranded and powerless.

We reached the spot that Jon thought would hold fish and set the anchor. The anticipation on my part was starting to build and Jon’s enthusiasm was infectious. He pulled out a large cooler that he kept the bait in. He said that at the depths the halibut were at, scent was the most important element. I soon found that he meant the bait was going to smell really bad. Imagine a herring that has been left out in the sun all day. When he opened the cooler, I thought he had cut the cheese. The smell got into your nostrils and just seemed to stay there. It was as if it was a living thing, a predator that slowly killed its victims by stinky suffocation.

Jon handed me a rod. It was short, about six feet and very stiff. Attached to the handle was a Penn reel, spooled with eighty pound, braided line. Nothing very fancy, but as I was learning about Alaska, simplicity worked. At the end of the line was a three-way swivel, and running off of that was a leader line that the hook was tied to. The hook was about the meanest looking thing one could imagine. Most hooks that I was accustomed to were "J" shaped. This monster was more "G" shaped and was cut from a block of stainless steel. It was as big as the palm of my hand and razor sharp at the tip. The only thing more shocking than the hook was the sinker. I had grown used to small, lead sinkers that you pinch onto the line. I was surprised when Jon handed me a three-pound, cannon ball with a snap on it. It needed to be that heavy because of the tide. Cook Inlet has one of the most violent tides in the world. The water may raise or lower as much as twenty-six feet at high tide and does so within an hour; three pounds is the bare minimum needed to keep anything near the bottom. With that in mind, I snapped the weight into place, rigged a whole herring on the hook and dangled the mess over the side. With a flip of the release lever on the reel and with my thumb in place to control the line as it peels off the spool, I set out to catch a halibut.

Jon coached me on how to do things right. He said that for as big, or small, as they are, halibut are fierce fighters but hit very softly. He said that a little tap might be my only indication that a fish was hitting. I let my sinker hit bottom and started to do all that he had said. No more than a few moments had passed when I felt a tapping at the end of my line. I gave it a few seconds longer as instructed by my guide and then I pulled hard on the rod to set the hook.

It took quite a while to get the fish anywhere near the surface. Not only was I fighting a tough fish but also struggling against the depth, the rod and the effect the tide had, pulling on the sinker as well as the fish. When I got the fish near the boat, Jon grabbed the line and dragged the still fighting fish into the boat. It had felt like a monster the whole time that it was on my line. I knew that I had a fish that was a least 25 -35 pounds or bigger. I was a little shocked when it ended up weighting about eight pounds. Eight Pounds? It felt like Moby Dick at the end of my line and it turns out to only be around eight pounds. And it was ugly. Flat, with a wide tail, it was solid white on one side and a mottled brown on the other, giving the fish a camouflaged effect when it lays on the bottom, waiting for prey. It also had one other peculiarity that I had read about but hadn’t seen until now: both of the fish’s eyes were on the same side of its head. I guess they don’t start out this way. When the fish is young, it looks normal, but as the fish approaches adulthood, it transforms into a flat, bottom feeder.

"Good eatin’ size," Jon said as he threw the fish into a large, blue barrel at the back of the boat. Then he yelled, "YEE-HAA, fish in the boat!" I just laughed but I thought he was nuts.

"Larry always joked with me that fighting one of these was like going up onto the roof of the garage and using an ultra light rod to reel up the refrigerator," I told Jon. "Man, he wasn’t kidding." The two of us laughed.

"That’s pretty close to the truth," Jon said. "I’ll have to remember that one."

We fished in that same spot for a few hours, catching more that were about the same size and a couple of larger ones. It was then that we heard a faint noise off in the distance that sounded like a gunshot.

"Who’s shooting out here?"

"Reel in," he said, "Fast!" He was grinning from ear to ear and looking through binoculars. He set them down and started to get the anchor ready to pull up. I guessed that we were moving but was totally confused. It was explained to me that really big fish have a nasty habit of thrashing around when they are caught. They are so big and strong that they can literally destroy a boat so most people shoot them before tying them to the stern of the boat. Three hundred pound fish usually don’t get hauled onboard. What made Jon so exited about the whole deal was that where there was one big fish, there was usually more. As with Kodiak Brown bears that are drawn to gunshots as a food source, halibut fishermen, especially guides, are drawn to the lure of big fish.

We raced across the open water to the new fishing spot. We weren’t the only ones to hear the shot. Several other boats came to roughly the same area too. It was odd to see anybody else because I had gotten used to the remote-ness. But it was somewhat comforting as well, knowing that we weren’t the only ones out here.

I dropped my line down to the bottom and noticed that it was quite deeper here. The reel must have let out over 250 feet of line and I was fishing straight down. I didn’t think that the sinker would ever hit bottom but it did with a telltale thump that I could feel through the pole. Almost immediately I felt a sharper thump on the end of the line. After I felt it a second time, I jerked the pole up as hard as I could. Line sizzled off the reel as I had set the hook on a very large fish. This one felt very different from the little eight pounder. A tug of war began between me and the unknown being from below. I would pull hard against the rod and then reel in the slack line only to have my foe from below strip off the line I had gained and then take out an additional fifty feet. I had no intentions of giving in though. It was a battle between the fish’s desire to live and my desire to land him. It was a battle that would not be over soon.

The two of us were concentrating on the fish which was now showing signs of tiring. I gained yards of line with each lifting of the rod. Within moments I would see the mighty fish that I had gone to war with. It slowly materialized from the depths in the obscure way that water bends light and images. At first a brown blur focused into a very large fish. It was no three hundred pounder but it would at least go 150 and that was good enough for me. Jon excitedly shook my hand, congratulating my efforts as we admired the fish’s size and the simplicity of its form that was uniquely beautiful. The mottled colors of its topside reminded me of a landscape painting. If it had been just me, I would have let it go, but my mom was waiting back in Michigan for her boy to bring her some halibut so the great fish was dispatched with a single shot from a twenty-gauge shotgun. It took the two of us to drag the leviathan into the back of the boat. Exhausted, I threw myself back down into the chair and tried to catch my breath. That’s when I noticed that the boat was moving.

Going into the second hour of my struggle with the fish, neither Jon, nor myself, noticed that the weather was changing. Thick clouds formed over the tops of the mountain range to the west of the inlet and began to blanket the water with a massive, gray curtain. The seas themselves were starting to darken. The greenish hue that existed earlier dissipated in favor of a gray-ish, blue tint

" I think that we’d better get going," Jon said. I was not about to disagree with him. I pulled my life vest on trying not to remember that my uncle had joked that all they were good for out here was in finding the body after you’d died of hypothermia. The rods and all the rest of the gear was stashed below the seats and all that was left was the anchor. The way that anchors are pulled up involves driving the boat in a semi-circle with a float attached to the anchor rope. The float moves down the rope as the boat pulls away and then attaches to the anchor when it reaches the surface. That way, one doesn’t have to pull 250 feet of rope up with a thirty-pound anchor against the tide. On flat water, this is somewhat tricky. In the rough water we were in, it was dangerous. Jon had to time it just right and I fully expected a wave to capsize us at any moment, but it somehow worked.

"Hold on!" Jon yelled.

"Gee, thanks," I chided. Like I hadn’t thought to hold on. My knuckles were already white from the death grip I had on the seat. But I wanted to see what was going on so I stood up and held onto the console like Jon was doing. If I was going to die, I wanted to at least be on my feet.

Jon reached over and pulled the throttle back all the way and the boat rocketed out toward land. It was going to be a long and rough trip. The boat would streak up the back side of a swell and then launch off the top, sending us flying through the air for a moment before crashing into the water and repeating the process with the next wave. With each landing, my knees absorbed the shock, crouching me down to have to struggle up for the next wave. Gravity was working against me and soon my muscles ached from the stress. I looked over at Jon to see that he had an ear-to-ear grin covering his face, the thick mustache curled up at the ends.

"YEE HAA!" he screamed again.

He was having fun and I don’t know if it was his infectious personality or what but within moments, my fear gave way to exhilaration and I too let out a big "YEE HAA!"

My legs learned how to absorb the impacts without buckling and I was able to keep my balance. No amusement park in the world could compete with this ride. The boat was sturdy and big enough to handle the impacts and the motor had enough power to really fly off the tops of the waves. The water would spray up into our faces when we hit. It was too much fun.

I was sad almost to see the shoreline coming up fast before us. But Jon was really troubled. The waves were crashing heavy into the beach. He stayed out just beyond where the waves were breaking and radioed the guy with the tractor.

"We’re going to have to beach her," Jon told me. "He can’t get us out with the tractor. You might want to sit down for this because it’s going to be rough."

"I’ll be all right," I boasted. " I got my sea legs now."

Jon smiled at me but I could tell he was worried.

He pointed the boat toward shore and got ready to make a run for it. The waves were crashing at fifteen to seventeen feet high right into the beach and we somehow needed to get through them.

"Here we go," he said and full throttled the motor. We lurched forward on top of an incoming wave. It was as if we were surfing in the twenty-three foot boat as we rushed toward shore. As the wave crested and began to crash, so did we. Jon cut the motor and the boat landed on the sandy beach with a sickening THUD.

We had done it. We were back on solid ground and safe. The speed of the boat had somehow pushed us just a little further ashore than the waves and within minutes the sound of a tractor coming to us could be heard.

I looked at Jon. "That was fun, can we do it again?"

He just smiled at me.