A Life Wasted

The Last Halibut Opener

Three weeks before the fall halibut opener Billy and I picked up two experienced crew hands on the docks of Kodiak. Neither was pleased about serving on my small ugly boat, but they had arrived in Kodiak too late to have options. We spent a week outfitting the boat and getting her ready for what should be the most profitable fishing trip I'd had.

The best halibut fishing grounds in the world were 100 miles east of the southernmost point of Kodiak Island. On the morning of the opener those grounds would be crowded with fishing boats. Tempers would flare and every boat would carry weapons. Shots would likely be fired. It was not likely anyone would be shot, but if history were any judge, men would die. They would die at the hands of an angry sea.

The main problem with those two twenty-four hour openers is that the date was set a year in advance. Nothing could change that date. No allowance was ever made for the weather. So if it was nasty, as it generally was on a halibut opener, then the boats would all go out and men would die. There was too much money involved. Every boat had to go out. With this in mind I made the decision to leave Kodiak Village two weeks early and reposition the North Wind to a small cannery on the southernmost tip of Kodiak Island.

Heavy storms were battering the Gulf of Alaska so we took our time and made our way south. The first leg of the journey was so wild that it gave the new crew guys a chance to gain confidence in their skipper and that old boat. About half way down the east side of Kodiak Island there was a large bay that looked like it was closed at the end. But I'd been there before and knew that there was a narrow passage between this bay and the much larger Three Saint's Bay to the south. This passage was more like a creek between the back of two bays. I only knew about the passage because of Billy's life long experience around Kodiak Island. Even with Billy's intimate knowledge of the passage, the small North Wind could only navigate it at high tide and then only with Billy on the bow pointing out the hazards and directing me to steer around them. The new crew was impressed when we cleared the narrow passage and entered the massively large Three Saints Bay.

At the point where the passage meets Three Saints Bay sat the small native village of Old Harbor. I don't know the population of Old Harbor but I'd guess about fifty people lived there. There was a public dock, several homes and a small one room store. That's it. The docks were about a mile away from the store. There is a dirt road that a truck could navigate, but we didn't have a truck so the only way to reach the store was to walk a mile through the wooded country side. Remember this is remote Kodiak Island. The place with the largest brown bears in the world.

To get out of the boat for a while my crew and I made that walk. I carried my rifle and Billy carried a shotgun. Neither would be enough to stop an angry Kodiak, but we felt better having them. Fortunately the only thing we saw was a few of Kodiak's lesser known deer.

We planned to stay at Old Harbor for a day or two to allow the seas to calm. When we moved on we would go out the protected waters of Three Saints Bay. This would allow us to avoid about a hundred miles of angry sea. It's rare that you can find a short cut at sea, but this was one of them.

The store didn't have much and what they did have was expensive, but they did have a free lending library of both VHS tapes and books. We didn't have a tape player but I did look through the books. One of the books was "Alaska" by James Michener.

"I've read that," I said to the old native woman who owned the store. "Some of it was about Kodiak," I said, almost to myself as I remembered the book. "Wasn't there something about Three Saints Bay in it," I asked, thumbing through the book.

"Yes," the woman said. She gave me the name of an old settlement at the head of Three Saints Bay that was prominently featured in the book.

"Was it very accurate," I asked.