My brother in law came in to join his son for week two of the nephew’s trip here. We traveled all over south Lynn Canal, north Chatham Strait and eastern Icy Strait. We went to the Tenakee dock for a couple hours so they could walk around town while I processed fish. In that time, we met the son and his son and wife,  of a family friend, who I’d never met but whose photo we had in our house because he sends his mom a firewood cutter’s calendar each year from Silverton, CO. Then our good friend Winston pulled in to chat as he was waiting to get fuel to take out some whale researchers on his charter boat with his wife Renee. Then my former workmate and her husband pulled in on their ~28 foot boat with a 200 lb halibut. I don’t think I’ve seen a halibut that big in person, and it was a beast. Enormous. The photos don’t do it’s size justice to seeing it in person. I don’t know how three of them managed to get it aboard.  The nephew did me a favor and painted the tug name, Jeanne Kay, on the bottom of the punt that rides on the swim step of the boat and hides the boat name. He did a great job. Even though it will scrape off, I should be able to repaint using the shadow of his job and make it come out okay, as I would really butcher it if I did it from scratch.

The huge halibut really impressed the crew and they now were motivated to do some halibut fishing.  We headed over to anchor for the night at Strawberry Island, where my nephew and I anchored the year before and caught a halibut. We anchored up there, and put out the rods. They caught a nice halibut about 30 lbs. But the horseflies!  They swarmed the boat. I’ve never seen them like this. The temperature was in the 70’s and sunny, but if the doore was open even a crack, the flies came inside. So after we toughed it out for a few hours, we decided to move back to Freshwater Bay where we were the previous night.

We anchored again in Pavlov, and got our second night of great brown bear viewing on the beach behind the boat. A couple deer came out and lounged around after the bears were gone, too.

The next day, I picked out an underwater hill of about 90 feet across the bay. We anchored there, and started fishing. Two rods were set up for halibut, and I fished a buzz bomb lure on a salmon rig for rockfish. After we caught a few rockfish, there was a commotion on dad’s side. Suddenly, the rod in his hand was throbbing up and down. He had a halibut. A nice one, too.

I got beside him and helped him adjust the drag so it was loose enough to give, but made the fish work. He fought the fish for probably 15 minutes when we finally saw it. Oooh. A nice one. The nephew had already readied the harpoon and was encouraging his dad playing the fish. When he got the fish to the surface, I thrust the harpoon. But a poor strike, and the tip didn’t go all the way through. The fish didn’t like that, and ran again. I retrieved the tip, put it back on the harpoon handle stem, and the next time he got he fish to the surface, I made a good strike, and could see the tip toggled on the opposite side of the fish. We had her. I slowly paid out the harpoon line while the fishing weight banged against the side of the boat. I was careful not to just let the fish swim freely with the line, as that’s what my friends had done and the 200 lber had snapped the harpoon line. Luckily the hook and line were still with the fish, and they had a second tip and eventually secured it.

I stunned the fish on the head with the back of the gaff handle. I was able to pull the fish up and over the rail and onto the deck. Then I cut the gills and the nephew poured water from a bucket onto the gills for the next 20 minutes to bleed it well. This paid off later as the flesh looked good when I removed the fillets. They measured the fish and reported the length to me – 57 inches. I looked it up on the halibut length weight chart in the tide book, and that translated to about 90 lbs. Wow.

Now we were in a predicament. We were 2 days from the scheduled return to Juneau. But the screwy federal regulations for halibut do not allow you to butcher the fish more than cutting off the 4 large fillets you get from the fish – 2 from each side – on board your boat. We couldn’t cut these up into portions that would fit in the freezer, so we needed ice. I pulled the anchor, and we headed for Hoonah.  Dad took a rest after the big fish workout.

Hoonah Cold Storage, like Alaska Glacier Seafoods and Taku Fisheries in Juneau, put out flake ice each day in a tote for use by the public. For free.  So we pulled up to the HCS dock right next to the city dock, and hauled 8 buckets worth of ice to the boat. I layered the ice with the fish, and it was beautiful two days later when we got back to Juneau. We idled from the HCS dock to the Hoonah city dock, and the crew took a stroll around town while I puttered around the boat.

That was the last fish we caught, as the crew said they had all the fish they would take home. I took some of their surplus fish to Mike and Christina, who run the Salvation Army Store, after I got the boys on the jet home with their fish.

You’d think 92 years would be a ripe old age to die. Not for Paul, it wasn’t.

I talked to him a few days ago. My usual report in on current fishing or sports or politics. Paul sounded good. He had nearly all of his marbles, right to the end. Since I spoke with him often on the phone and not on video chat, and saw him a few times a year in person, I wouldn’t see the physical declines those closer to him would, and maybe his passing was more expected by them. He was one of my best friends and I spoke with him more often than I did my family, and was closer to him than my own dad.

The photo of Paul and I was taken when I went down to his house to watch the Egg Bowl with him, I think. Paul loved sports and that, and fishing and hunting, were our main topics of conversation. I think he cherished the “Old Piss” shirt I sent to him more than anything else I ever did for him, along with the $500 van I bought from Rorie that he said was so perfect for him he’d hug it everyday. I saw the van over by Steve’s apartment when he was helping me scavenge at the Petersburg dump, one of my favorite activities when I was in town,  on a Sunday a few months ago. If you don’t know the meaning of Old Piss, it might be because you never lived in Mississippi, but I’ll let you look that up yourself. My late friend Jimmy introduced me to the phrase.  We both went to Mississippi State.

I met Paul in about 1988.  On a dusty road in Sierra Leone. All of us on motorcycles. They were going one direction and me the other.  I was about 22,  in the Peace Corps in the same country as his younger daughter, and he was there visiting her with his older daughter. We chatted briefly in the West African heat and humidity, and then went our separate ways.

A few years later, I found myself moved to Juneau and working as a state fishery management biologist for the salmon troll fishery. Each season, we’d take a trip to ports around southeast Alaska to talk to fishermen about the upcoming season. When we stopped in Petersburg, a shorter man with glasses walked up to my boss and said “Well, this is a long way from West Africa”. Or something like that. My boss soon realized Paul was looking for me, and he came over and that reintroduction started an increasingly close relationship that lasted til the day before yesterday.

Paul grew up in various places – Nebraska. Montana. California.  If I remember right, he told me he stuttered as a kid, and found he liked running as it was a sport he could do alone and not have to be part of a team where he’d have to talk. I think long about his 8th grade year, the gym class was doing some kind of running test of sorts, to see how fast each could run some distance.  Paul apparently impressed the crap out of the gym coach, which lead to a high school career in California and a later college career at Cal. Paul followed track and field the rest of his life, and could tell me who were the standouts even to the high school level in the US.

Paul graduated in Geology from Cal and then went to Korea just after the end of the war, and worked in the engineering corps, building bridges. When he got to Alaska, he worked in geology around the state. He showed me an article in a geology type journal of a story he was a part of exploring Mount Fairweather, out between Cross Sound and Yakutat. He also worked up on the Yukon River and out of Dillingham doing exploratory geology for mining companies. Later he was a surveyor for the Alaska Pipeline, laying out the corridor for the pipeline out of Valdez, which is where he also bought his first troller, The Wooden Shoe, if memory serves.

I can’t remember if it was before or after the girls were born, but he said he wanted to get a job where he didn’t have to travel so much for his family, so he went to UAF and got his teaching credentials. He got hired on in Petersburg as a science and math teacher at the high school, and taught there til retirement. On his own initiative, he started a surveying class at the high school. He said some kids who didn’t care much for school otherwise would have to buckle down and pass some preliminary math class requirements before they could take his class, and many did. He was so proud of his students who went on to become surveyors. The highlight of the class was a trip to the nearby LeConte glacier. He talked the helicopter charter service in town to flying them out there each year for free (I think). The annual surveys became, of course, very important right up to now as baseline data for the glacier’s retreat over the past 40 years. There’s an old “Rain Country” KTOO video episode of him and the students there. He was named Alaska Teacher of the Year, which I only know because there was the award certificate hanging in a frame in his house. I’ve never met someone as humble as Paul. He’d never tell you himself about his accomplishments or awards like this. But he would always talk proudly of his daughters.

His girls graduated from little Petersburg high school and never looked back. One commercial fished in Yakutat during the summer, and her marriage to the local APR reporter in Petersburg took the two of them all over the world for his work as a foreign correspondent for NPR. The younger daughter was the state’s first Rhode Scholar and worked for USAID all over the world as well, from Indonesia to Africa. One currently lives in Turkey and the other in Zambia. Paul visited both daughters all over the world until the travel got to be too much for him. By then, his girls and nephews and son in laws were well established and could take extended trips back home to Petersburg, where Paul was still able to go out with them fishing for salmon on his troller, right up until last year.

I met Sara here in Juneau through a mutual friend from UAF.  When we started our short dating courtship, I mentioned my friend in Petersburg and she said she had a best friend since high school from Petersburg. My friend was Paul. Her friend was his oldest daughter. A seemingly big life coincidence, but not so much in our big state of few people.

Paul and I corresponded here and there after our reunion meeting in Petersburg about 1997. My first big break was getting invited to the annual duck hunt with Tyler. He was always somewhat secretive about where he and Tyler went, so being invited into the club was a big honor for me. It must have impressed his daughters that I was let into the exclusive little club. Over the years, the three of us hunted in their spot. Paul on one end of a tree washed up there for decades. Tyler on the other. The first time we went hunting, we hauled box after box of shells from the little boat to the dead tree hunting blind. More shells than most people would shoot in a lifetime. I was right on that account. He’s given me countless shells in the last decade that I’ve mostly passed on to friends and family that duck hunt.  Then Paul said I hope you don’t mind, but the way we hunt here is we throw out the dekes at low tide when we get here, and wait for the tide to float them, and then the ducks start coming in. Which takes a while. So we like to have a beer while we wait. Next he said, I hope you don’t mind, but while we’re waiting and drinking a beer, we like to listen to the Seahawks game (it was a Sunday), which was carried by the local Christian station in Petersburg. I said “Paul, I think we’re Siamese twins separated at birth!”. What a crew.  I could see I would fit in here.  Tyler would occasionally ask Paul if the game had started yet, and Paul would reply “No Tyler, It’s Time to Pray!”.   Paul was a crack shot with a semi-auto Browning that was a lot of gun. The barrel went out there forever from the stock. He gave me that gun a few years ago. We went on more hunts over the years with Tyler, and later with Paul’s son in law and the son in law’s brother.

As he aged, my visits were more often to the house, either on trips passing through Petersburg, or on the annual gathering to watch the Superbowl. Dick, Kris, Steve and I were the usuals, and Paul went all out with platters ordered from Hammer and Wikan.

I unfortunately never met his first wife – the mother of his daughters.  She passed away young from cancer before Paul and I were good friends. So, so many of his stories started with “Me and Neva”. She was quite an outdoorswoman from the stories. He later married Penny, who ironically and tragically passed away from the same cancer as Neva. She and Neva could not have been more different people from what I gathered. Penny was a thespian and loved being in the local theatre and Little Norway festivities. She even got Paul to like her little red dog. She was so welcoming when I’d come down to visit, and a great cook.

I last saw Paul when Kurt and I took the boat to Craig in April. Paul and Erik took us to lunch at the great little diner near the harbor in Petersburg. Paul couldn’t figure out how to use his card to pay for lunch (which he always insisted on doing), and when he tapped the card and the payment went through, I said “welcome to the 21st Century, Paul”. Both he, and state Senator Stedman, who was seated in a table nearby and doesn’t know me from Adam, laughed. We always had fun.

I last talked to Paul a few days ago. He was recovering from illness caused from not remembering to take medication for one of his health conditions. This was not his first time from recovering from something, and he sounded like he’d rebounded and was his old self again. Kurt noticed he was alot more frail than when we’d stopped to see him 9 months earlier bringing the newly purchased tug up from Ketchikan. I guess I did, too.

But old age didn’t get Paul, really. Being old did, though, as he had a bad fall that he couldn’t recover one more time.  I thought he would, but I didn’t realize how bad this incident was as compared to others in recent memory. His daughters were both at his side when he passed, and I’m sure he was content going quickly. I’ve lost several friends and family and friends in their 50’s and younger  – Jimmy, Jeff, Heather, Terry and Emily – in just the past few years –    I thought I’d be better prepared for a 92 year old’s transition, but I guess I’m not. I thought for sure he’d make it to 100, and sometimes wondered if I’d go before he would. Really a privilege to be his friend.

Todd and Renee came to town for a week, including 3 days out on the boat. We headed to Chatham Strait on day 1, and on the way, came across a group of about 14 humpback whales bubble net feeding. The whales were some distance away as we motored on our way, not headed in any particular direction when they dove. They surfaced literally a stone’s throw away from us. I put the boat hard over to starbard to move away from them, then immediately took the boat out of gear. This was an instinctual reaction from my years of work as a whale watch guide. The whales stayed at the surface, then swam right behind the stern of the boat, taking their time. It took awhile before they were 100 yards away and I could put the boat back in gear so we could be on our way.  These encounters never get old, and it’s more exciting with friends who’ve never witnessed this event before.

We put down the fishing gear once we rounded Point Retreat, and soon had a fish on. We caught fish the rest of the afternoon. Most were pinks on a yellow with red stripe hootchie. I had them switch to a chartreuse hootchie and we got a couple cohos, so I switched the other side to chartreuse, too.

About 4 pm, we headed to a very remote state parks cabin, which is my favorite. It has two bays separated by a sand bar, and the cabin is just off the sand bar.  Todd told me a funny story about “Minnesota Nice” on the way over. His step daughter was about 12 at the time, and they were at a cook out. There was one hamburger left, and as the guest, they asked Todd if he wanted it. He said sure, he’d take it if no one else wanted it, eager to please the cook and his offer. When he got his burger and returned to the table, his step daughter was beside herself. “You don’t say yes if someone asks you for the last hamburger. You say no first, and then let them negotiate with you and ask you four or five more times before you accept.”  That killed me.

After anchoring the boat, I filleted fish and Todd wrapped them, then they went in the freezer. Then we launched the punt to go to shore. After never failing me, the kicker would not start. It wouldn’t even fire. So I rowed Renee and Todd in one at a time with the gear.  When I got there, I later realized I’d not brought the spatula for making pancakes in the morning.

I fried the frames from coho salmon we’d filleted, and also fillet pieces of coho and pink salmon. Sara had packed a tomato and basil salad and some shrimp seviche to go with it, along with some potato chips I brought along. I realized that, along with the spatula, I’d forgot any spices for the salmon. This is the stuff Sara does not forget. I improvised and used crushed potato chips, which turned out fantastic. When we finished eating frames, I asked if I should cook the fillets, and Todd said I should. Those two ate those themselves, and I was happy to hear Renee say how much she liked the pink salmon and that it tasted mild like trout. So many here turn their nose up at pink salmon, but I know better. Pink salmon, taken out on the ocean and then bled and chilled like you’d take care of a king salmon, are fantastic table fare. And getting an unbiased affirmation like that made me smile. We had chocolate for dessert. We slept on camping pads in the cabin. I’d brought those to save space on the boat. Not the best, but okay for the night. Next time it will only be full size foam pads, and I’ll figure out a way to keep them on the boat roof and dry.

We got up at a leisurely time after a stiff night of sleep. Lots of coffee before I got to making pancakes. Then Todd asked if the boat had dragged anchor, and I realize it had. We’d set a crab pot behind it, and the boat was now even with the buoy. I jumped in the punt and rowed out, and reanchored the boat with a lot more scope this time. And I grabbed the spatula.

We ate pancakes cooked in olive oil and some venison summer sausage til it was all gone. Then packed up for another day of fishing.

We headed back to the Admiralty shore, and put the gear out at Naked Island about 11 am.  It didn’t seem that 15 minutes ever went by when we didn’t have a fish on. By 330 pm, we’d reached our limit of pinks and had a couple decent cohos, too. The kids called uncle. This is enough fish and we don’t need anymore to take home. I’d hoped the chartreuse hootchie would catch more cohos than pinks, but it did not. We headed to the Funter Bay dock to tie up for the day.

On the way, I decided to set a 2 hook halibut skate. It was my first time doing so. I set out a little anchor, then snapped on a ganion line with circle hook and octopus bait, then another hook and bait, then another anchor, and then fed out line til the anchors were both on bottom, and put on a buoy.  Next we set a crab pot filled with salmon  heads and bones amongst many other pots, and tied up to the dock.

I started filleting our catch, Todd portioned and rinsed it twice, put the fish into colanders to drain, then Renee wrapped the pieces in plastic wrap and we put them in the freezer, separating them with chunks of beach combed plastic trays so they froze properly.

Next I got dinner on, and Renee vac packed yesterday’s fish. Tonight dinner was moose brauts Jerry’s meats made from the moose I caught on the Yukon River in April, with lots of garnish choices, including onions and bell peppers I sauteed. I put those and some pickled rhubarb on mine, and some mustard. I have not found anything I don’t like pickled rhubarb on, and will need to can a bunch more to have enough for the year. The couple enjoyed the moose.

We retired early and we all were asleep quickly after a full day.

I got up first in the morning and got the coffee on. This was the first of 4 pots we’d drink today. Next, I started vac packing yesterday’s catch, and Todd soon joined me. We drank cup after cup of coffee. When the fish was done, we headed to check our gear. The dungy pot was full of juvenile king crab, which was great as Renee had never seen them. She took lots of photos for her 4th graders to see in the fall. We released all the crab, shook the bait from the bait jars, and headed for the halibut skate. There was nothing on the first hook, and the octopus was gone. Next came the anchor, with a big loop in the line. The second hook should have been next. Why the tangle?  Because there was a halibut on the second hook!  I got the fish to the side, conked it, and gaffed it on board.  Exciting to get my first halibut on a skate.

We headed back to town. The whales were in the same location as the way out. We watched the big group dive and surface several times, but they never “set” as they call it, coming up with their mouth’s wide open under the bubble net.

We got back to the harbor, and I got a good spot near the ramp. We offloaded the gear, carted it to the truck, and headed for the house.

Sara greeted us in a mask, with masks for us. She got Covid and so was keeping her distance. She had to cancel her coveted trip to Antiques Roadshow in Anchorage, as well as a ride on the train in Fairbanks to celebrate the centennial of the Alaska railroad. Pretty disappointing. None of us had any symptoms and I tested negative so far. Fingers crossed.