Never Cry Halibut. Bjorn Dihle
a fish to the surface in Frederick Sound that must have weighed 1,500 pounds, and it just spat the hook,” an old man said. He shook his head as if he still couldn’t believe what he’d seen.
“When I was a kid, I hooked several that were about that size, maybe even bigger, but they all got away,” I said, one-upping him.
I got a job longlining for halibut in Cross Sound with Joe and Sandy Craig on the Njord the following spring. The halibut I’d caught the previous summer had tripled in weight and multiplied in quantity. On our first day of pulling sets, I was eager to show off my knowledge and skills.
“Halibut!” I cried in the early gray morning as we bobbed in rough seas. Excited, we all grabbed our gaffs and waited as Joe hauled up the longline with hydraulics.
“Gray cod,” he said.
“Halibut!” I cried a few minutes later.
“Rougheye,” Joe corrected.
“Halibut!”
“Err…starfish,” Sandy said and gave Joe a worried look. When the first halibut came to the surface, I frantically whisked the water with my gaff until you could barely see the fish in all the foam. Joe gaffed it in the head, yanked it over the stern, then dispatched it with a perfectly aimed blow from a lead pipe. I had no money, and they didn’t want to pay for a floatplane to take me back to Juneau, so they were stuck with me.
Despite my ineptitude and the fishery’s often stressful nature, I learned to love wrestling with halibut and wallowing in their blood and slime. The Fairweather mountains beckoned white through the slate-gray world, but I only had eyes for the ocean. When I thought I saw a halibut coming up on the line, I swallowed my urge to cry out and grunted instead. I popped off wolf eels, seven-foot sleeper sharks, skates, and all sorts of strange benthic creatures from hooks. I learned to decipher species of fish as they rose from the murk with a quick glance. I gently freed octopuses, only to have them wrap their tentacles around me in what seemed like a refusal to return to the ocean.
“Stop hugging that octopus,” Joe said, laughing as I tried to convince the creature to let go. When we motored back to their home in Elfin Cove with our day’s catch, Sandy and I baited hooks and watched sea birds following schools of bait fish and whales sound. Listening to the ocean, the chug of the diesel engine chug, and Sandy telling stories from her decades of commercial fishing and exploring northern Southeast Alaska, it was a rare afternoon it didn’t feel good to be alive.
Toward summer’s end, realizing the richness of the experiences they were facilitating for me, I felt I ought to be paying them. Perhaps out of philanthropy, they took me on for the next several seasons until they retired from halibut wrangling.
After that first summer, I never looked at halibut with naiveté and wonder again. I enjoyed longlining but no longer found it that exciting. I pulled flopping monsters over the stern then dispatched, bled, and stashed them before going back to work without another thought.
One afternoon, as we were motoring back to the dock, I was slicing bait and tossing guts to an entourage of sea gulls. Glancing at the boatload of dead halibut, I realized I hadn’t cried halibut in years. Several of them weighed well over a hundred, even two hundred pounds, but I felt none of the satisfaction and awe I had as a kid when I reeled in a ten-pounder. Sitting on the kill-box, with the gulls shrieking behind the Njord, I remembered being six years old and clutching a rod. My dad had just given me the all-clear, so I opened the reel and listened to the sound of the line spooling out as the lead weight zinged the bait down into the ocean’s depths. The weight hit the bottom, and I felt connected to an invisible and mysterious world. A few moments later, at the slightest disturbance, I could no longer contain my excitement and yelled “Halibut!” Now, decades later, I stared out onto the broad expanse of ocean and felt a bit nostalgic. A halibut flopped in its death throes. I tossed a clump of kidney into the screeching flock of birds and went back to work.
FISHEMATICS
I REMEMBER when I began to realize the danger of combining math with fishing, something Today’s Journal of Fishermen’s Accounting calls “fishematics.” I’d just exited a floatplane at the Elfin Cove dock and shaken hands with Joe Craig, with whom I’d signed on as a deckhand for the summer.
“If you tell anyone our catch numbers, I’ll put you on shore to fend for yourself,” he warned half-jokingly as we climbed aboard the Njord. I was bad with numbers—which, not long after, I learned made me much more likely to become an expert in fishematics. I’d taken the same math class every year in high school and never passed. My poor teacher had burst into tears several times when trying to convey complicated mathematical formulas like counting to me. I’d grunt, hit my desk with a stone, grab a spawned-out salmon I’d found on my way to school, and offer it to her try to make her feel better.
Naturally, with my dim wits and Joe’s good humor, we became great friends. He didn’t even get annoyed when he’d ask how many salmon we’d gotten after a pass and I could only shrug if the count exceeded ten. He’d always laugh when he asked me to measure a halibut and I spread my hands apart however long in estimation. Sometimes, he’d let me out on the shores of Yakobi and Chichagof Islands to run around and play with the local brown bears. I was in heaven. Finally I’d entered a world where math was viewed for what it was: a crime against humanity.
A haul of coho salmon waiting to be gutted, gilled, and slushed aboard a power troller in Cross Sound.
Fishematics were a different beast altogether, though. I couldn’t remain under Joe’s protection forever. After the season, back in Juneau, I began mixing with certain fishermen who loved talking fishematics. At first I felt like I was listening to a foreign language, but soon I mastered the different theorems, postulates, axioms, and equations. I was overcome with the bubbly feeling of belonging, but I soon became plagued by philosophical questions. If a fisherman doesn’t catch any fish and no one’s around to see it, did he really not catch any fish? What is the meaning of fishing? Why are there fish rather than no fish? Do fish shape our nature more than fishing does? What is fishing? What is fish? I tried to use fishematics to solve these problems, but the deeper I delved, the more questions arose. It got so bad that I was on the verge of having a nervous breakdown.
On street corners, in alleyways, and in bars, I frequently found myself locked in fishematical debates over the size and quantity of fish, many of which I’d never even caught.
“I don’t like to talk about myself or the fish I’ve caught,” I’d said, squaring off against a crusty old-timer who looked like he’d been fishing for at least eight decades. “But thirty-seven years ago, in Frederick Sound, I caught a 164-pound king.”