Alaska Dispatches
# 22  —  25 June 2001

Halibut

I woke up this morning a man who had never caught a halibut. I go to sleep tonight a man who has.
It’s not that I hadn’t been trying; today was my fourth time out. Although I’m not sure how much of my third trip should count.
The first two outings were fantastic, even though I didn’t catch anything but devilfish and gremlins. For halibut we head down river and out into the Bering Sea, then ride the waves towards waypoints labeled ‘Hali2’ or ‘Fish4’ in someone or other’s portable GPS. On both days the seas got fairly rough, and it seems to be consistently chilly out on the water, no matter what the weather looks like back on shore. We eat lots of dried food and candy. I always bring my thermos of mint tea, but everyone seems to prefer Red Rose.
Entire days pass in Yup’ik; I catch a word here and there. We fish a spot for a while, tune into the VHF to learn where the action is when things are slow, and eventually move on to yet another place to try. Now and again someone on board lands a halibut, and each time my enthusiasm peaks. I double-check my bait and cast with renewed hope. It is quite a thrill just to be on the boat while someone shoots a 4 and 1/2 foot halibut with a .22 caliber rifle.
We use herring for bait, and I get a good deal of advice. Use the tail. Use the head. Use a fillet. Halibut are bottom feeders, so we cast with heavy weights on our lines. Again, suggestions are abundant. Leave the weight on the ocean floor. Jiggle it along the surface. Keep it still. Try to hang the weight a foot or so off of the bottom. For every piece of the process, each fisherman seems to have his own technique. As soon as you feel a slight tug on your line, jerk it back to catch the hook in the fish’s mouth. Wait until you are sure the fish is caught before you dare to move your line.
With so much competing mojo for setting bait, assembling hooks and sinkers, attracting and hooking fish, it is hard to decide what to try. Most of the advice is good-natured, and it seems that everyone wants me to get a halibut. Everyone except Jerry.
Jerry constantly teases me, mostly about being a white man, doing something dumb or thinking like a little kid. Yup’ik people talk about their “teasing cousins,” people with whom they have a relationship based on teasing. I guess Jerry is mine, although I tend not to reciprocate. In Yup’ik culture showing emotion is sternly discouraged, especially for men. It is a sign of strength to be able to take it, so I let Jerry go on and on without reacting.
Sometimes Jerry will yell at me. Once, in the steam, he even slapped me. He had told me not to yell from the heat, that it would make me grow old too fast. I was careful to follow his advice, even though plenty of other regular steamers like to belt one out when leaving the porch to go outside to cool off. I stepped out of an overwhelmingly hot steam and sighed, quietly, and Jerry slapped my thigh, telling me that he had told me not to do that.
At times Jerry seems to cross a line, to go beyond friendly teasing and enter a meaner realm. I’m just not sure what to make of the guy. In many ways I feel sorry for him. At 50 he lives alone with his mother. I know that he has done some time, although I’m not sure exactly what he did. The ultimate irony is that he is an usher and steadfast member of the Moravian church in the village. Perhaps he is taking out his rage towards white people, a rage not entirely undeserved. Perhaps he thinks he is helping me become a better person. Perhaps he is struggling with his sexuality in a repressive environment. Perhaps he thinks he is just teasing, and that we are buddies. Perhaps he is sick. I’m no doctor, so I tend to just take it. I don’t respond, even when the other guys warn Jerry that if he keeps it up I’m liable to knock his block off.
As we fish, several times I think that perhaps I have a halibut on my line, but it turns out that I have a devilfish, or even worse, have gotten my line tangled with someone else’s line. I realize that I will know it when I do have a halibut. If you find yourself wondering ‘could that possibly be a halibut down there,’ the answer is no.
I worry about letting go of the rod if and when I do catch a halibut. What if my first fish is a 6-footer? Halibut are notoriously strong; you shoot them before bringing them on board because they can break your limbs thrashing about. What if I am not strong enough to fight the fish, and it pulls me over the rail? I am anxious to test myself against these possibilities, but the first 2 times out, the long days go by, the time to go home comes and passes, we keep on trying until we eventually make our way back. I arrive home exhausted and somewhat disappointed, but not terribly so.
The third time out was a total fiasco.
I was the last one to make it to the makeshift dock, after a slight mix-up about our point of departure. The boat was full of fishermen anxious to get underway. As I hurried down through the deep muck toward the metal skiff, I felt my right foot sinking until the waterline rose above my knee-high boot. The icy water gushed in, thoroughly soaking my foot. I rushed home, changed my socks, hustled back and climbed aboard.
I had borrowed a rod for the day. As I got myself settled for the ride out to the sea, I noticed that the line was tangled on the reel. Through the course of the afternoon I would discover that it was tangled beyond repair. 
To make matters worse, I had been feeling marginal all week. I knew that the flu was going around but I didn’t want to turn down an invitation to fish. As soon as we cleared the first bend downriver, I started to feel nauseous.
I spent the whole day bent over trying to untangle my borrowed reel. I tried to work out the knots, one by one, with a previously unused attachment on my Leatherman. The work went slowly. I sipped tea in an attempt to calm my stomach. I had been on dozens of boats on dozens of waters large and small, and I had never before been seasick. There is a first for everything, as they say, and ultimately I felt myself losing the battle for control with my stomach. The day wore on with me alternating between puking over the side of the boat, experimenting with Yup’ik antidotes to seasickness (like drinking sea water), and struggling with the knots. Needless to say, I caught nothing; I didn’t even get my hook into the water.
This morning I picked up my very own rod and reel. Greg had bought a couple of set-ups for his store, and he offered me one at cost. I unpacked the rod and loaded and attached the reel myself, since Greg told me that it was bad luck for anyone else to touch my rod. I was excited to give my new gear a try, and my heart soared when the phone rang with an invitation to fish.
I attached the first piece of bait onto my new rod, dropped my sinker to the bottom of the water, and boom. I felt the tug, and although the rod bent I wondered if I had yet another devilfish on the line. As I started to reel it in, though, it pulled back and stopped me short. The fighting fish pull some line off of my locked reel. I didn’t want to say anything in case it wasn’t, but I knew it was a halibut.
I reeled and reeled, and finally caught a glimpse of the fish just beneath the ocean’s surface. It wasn’t huge, but it was a halibut. My hook was firmly lodged in its mouth, so I was able to lift it up out of the water and into the boat on my own. What a rush! My friends applauded. I could have happily gone home at that moment.
It was bumpy out there, so we didn’t go as far out as we normally do. On the way home Peter told met that we had been fishing close to the spot where I had gotten my first seal. As the waves crashed into our boat, throwing us this way and that, I wondered if I would be seasick again. Jerry wondered, too, and teased me about it. My stomach seemed to remember the incident, and kept warning me that it could wrestle control away from me at any moment, but I battled back and made it through the day. 
Peter caught a fair-sized halibut right after I did, but that was it for the day. The other three on our boat got skunked. It was a short day out, which was fine by me. Supposedly we may try again tomorrow, although everyone is talking about going for a moose that someone spotted upriver.
Right after we got back to town, I cleaned and gutted the fish and then went to the store. Everyone there knew about my halibut. It is a rather strange sensation, having everyone know your business so intimately and immediately. Perhaps that is what it is like to be famous, and I tell you, when you’ve caught that fish, it ain’t all bad.

©2001, Michael Thornton Wyman