You stirred up some deep memories for sure.What you do is not a job it is a lifestyle.A life style where you are not always in control,mother nature is.Those times where mother nature was calling the shots and I was not sure if I was going to live or die put the biggest smile on my face.It is not something you can explain to those who have not experienced it.It always took a week or two to settle into life back home.You have to decompress.I always went straight to the woods.
I will always remember shopping for my truck.Wandering the dealers with enough in the bank to pay cash,wearing my Alaska tennis shoes and a old pair of sweats.The old saying you can not judge a book by its cover applied.Still makes me giggle.
People would tell me what hard work it was and I would say that it is not as physicle as it is mental.You want to go home so bad it hurts but you can't.things get bad.weather sucks.You can't find fish....you swear you are not coming back....but you do because in the long run you are addicted to the lifestyle.Forget about any real relationships.It rarely works and even if it does it just adds to the pain.
We had a secret cod rookery that could damn near fill the boat.We would shoot haul in one shot.Turn out the lights and hide as close to the island as we could.I wish I could tell ya where but I would be turning my back on a man who I trusted my life with.That is a love not many can understand.
Time to go.I will be following you here and may god bless!
Man; those are some pretty powerful words. And quite frankly, however hard it may be to acknowledge - I agree with it all. Fishing is all that I've ever done, aside from a short three month stint aboard a tugboat when I was 19. It's a weird thing, sometimes you want to go home so badly - and get the hell off the boat, but then you get there and are counting the days until you head out again. It's a twisted thing to admit when you'd rather spend a night in your bunk in **** weather than be stuck in traffic heading to Seattle.
It's taken me a while to admit to myself who I am; I hate that I love it sometimes - but I've made my peace with it. No one can understand it except for those that do or have lived it. Relationships can be a distraction - when I've got lives in my hands I can't afford to make bad judgement calls. I've got a label that I put underneath the autopilot that reads: "Don't be a cowboy, our lives are in your hands".
Don't need to know where those cod are, we don't fish the Bering Sea - just the Gulf. Just got a new school of pollock in the area of Katmai Bay - they're off the bottom in about 75 fa. - get spoiled, don't even have to put the net down to the bottom, take a lot of the stress out of towing.
- jake