Day 4: Halibut Fishing

Luscombe
Originally uploaded by sasnook.

The next morning I woke early, just as the sun had risen (yes the sun goes down in the summer in Alaska, well at least for a few hours). Chris and I said good-bye to Jeanne and pushed the Luscombe out into the bay and moments later returned to the air. As we flew back the weather was slightly above IMC, we saw sea lions and a whale. We skidded back into the bay shortly after seven and I found myself drinking a cup of coffee with Bill back at Paul and Angie’s recounting my adventures from the previous day and Bill informed me how the crew had done halibut fishing.

That afternoon, I joined Bill, his son Paul, Hyrum and Cole to the cannery to cash in on the halibut they had caught. It was quite the operation, and being such a huge state for fishing I was glad I had been exposed to this. They have bins of fish waiting to be headed and then gutted by a line of Asians and then tossed into a large wheel barrel, which are then weighted and eventually put into cans to be sold in grocery stores. In the end they had caught a little over two thousand pounds of halibut.
That evening Angie had a wonderful little get together, where she had made homemade pizza and I met more people that lived in Kodiak. Angie and Paul are such sweet people and I really enjoyed meeting them. At this get-together was another young pilot from the Chicago area, named Tyler, whom I spoke with for quite a while, asking him questions about how he is working on moving up to Kodiak to fly amoung other things. Paul told a thrilling story of a crash that he had been involved in 15 years prior in the mountains of Kodiak island, all three men survived without a scratch even though the airplane was a ball of metal in a ravien after hitting a float on the mountain side, spinning around and tearing off the wings. As this story ended, Cole had come to pick me up to take me to the music festival, where I met more pilots and people my age that we living on Kodiak.