Fishing Around the Clock or We Can Sleep When We're Dead

Day 7 of Josh's recovery. And Jake said his thumb is getting better too.

We set the nets this morning at 3 AM, an hour after the drifters opened. Our opening goes until noon, but we'll run out of water before then. We'll probably pull our gear by 9:30 or so.

It was a fast incoming tide this morning which always gives me the willies when we're out there on foot in it. We came in after the set. When there's not much activity in the net, we might as well come in, warm up for a couple of hours, wait for it to get light out if possible and then head back out. David walked in a little bit ahead of me and I try to bring up the rear, just to be sure no one is left stranded on the mud flats. I noticed Erik standing there, gazing ahead. He said he was enjoying watching Dave's footprints in the mud fill with the incoming tide. As if the tide was chasing him. It was sort of mesmerizing to watch. And I counted. 13 seconds elapsed between when one footprint filled and when the tide rose enough to fill the next one. I think that's a pretty fast moving tide.

I've always discouraged the crew from walking out to meet the low tide. I can see where it would be interesting to do - sort of like climbing a mountain. And even when it's moving fast, it doesn't move faster than we can walk. The problem is that there is no margin of error. If you get tired, you can stop to rest, but not for very long. If you twist an ankle, you have to just keep walking on a twisted ankle. Because - and here's the thing that's hard to grasp given the lives most of us live now - the ocean is indifferent to us. We can out-walk it or not. We can have a twisted ankle or not. We can have equipment stuck in the mud or not. The tide is coming in and it's just not negotiable. It will not wait or give us a break. It'll come in right over the top of us, no problem. Or if we're out of the way of it, that's no problem either. It's not personal and we're not special. So my advice to the crew is not to ask for trouble by getting themselves into a situation where the way out is a pretty thin trail.

Now it's nearly time to head back out at 5:30 AM. I'll try to rest for 20 minutes first.

Back in by about 7 AM - we had about 600 lbs in the four sites. I don't think it's possible to go through a fishing season without hearing or saying, "We can sleep when we're dead." Some people say, "We can sleep in the winter." We all recognize that if it sounds like a ridiculous work/ sleep schedule, it's only because it is. It's easier to survive the sleep deprivation with the wind in your face and the salmon in your hands but sometimes, after days of exhaustion and little sleep, we start having little visual dots while picking, little REM episodes while pulling the nets, and other little disconnections from what we're doing while we're doing it. These, especially the last two, are not good in this industry and so we have to call a time out ourselves. It's hard to do, though, in a fishery where the fish are passing through and you don't know whether they've just started or are about to end. The idea is to fish while the fish are here so that in the winter, we don't have to regret the fishing we didn't do when we had the chance. Hence, we can sleep all winter or when we're dead. Sleep is not the priority during the fishing season.

We pulled a salmon from this morning's catch for breakfast before we go out to finish the tide at 9 AM. I cleaned it in the tide and am grilling it now between paragraphs. I just had some - I don't know how salmon can be any better than that. Mmmmm. I think David will return home with a couple of coolers of salmon in the second week of July. I do hope the run will have peaked by then - I'm counting on his help during the heavy part of the season. It's great to have people I can count on. I already knew that David and Josh just don't stop going. Erik doesn't stop either, even when he has nothing left. I think Jake, Chris, and Jeff will find that in themselves as the season progresses - they certainly stayed with it, and cheerfully!, when we had that big tide. And of course, Trina learned long ago how to outlast the tide and we already know that Bob never stops. It's a really crackerjack crew. I do miss Sarah.

Got in at about 10:45 AM. Not so many fish - 961 lbs, for a total of 45,696 lbs. We go again at 4 PM. It's tempting to break into two crews, but the fish are coming and we just don't know when, so I think we keep everyone going out. Maybe we'll start dropping out one person per tide so they can get a full period of sleep once every nine tides. It's also possible that ADFG may decide to close us down for a while. So we will all fish while we can.