The Lost Art of Alaska Fishing

By Anna Young

True stories of the history of Alaska commercial fishing, illustrated with over 100 watercolors and drawings. These are true stories. Captain Anna Young's artwork and writing has been accepted as the true history of fishing in the Bering Sea by the Museum of the Aleutians in Dutch Harbor. Her art and books on the history of fishing in Prince

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ruggedisland Productions
• Release date: Feb 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9780986167416

Anna Young

Anna Young graduated from Oconto Falls High School (Wisconsin) in 2001. At age seventeen, she began using prescription drugs and escalated to heroin. She also suffers from bipolar disorder. Young lives in Green Bay, Wisconsin, with her father, her mother, and her dog, Eleanor Rigby. Visit her online at ppfaceannagrace.blogspot.com.

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The Lost Art of Alaska Fishing - ISBN: 978-0-9861674-0-9

Rugged Island Productions

PO Box 1763 Cordova Alaska ~ 99574 [e-mail]

Copyright © 2007 by Anna Young. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems without permission in writing by the publisher.

Sea Stories

Sin City

Scalloping

F/V SUGAR

Southeast Alaska

Herring Festival

Wreck of the GW KING

The Outer District

E/V BROWN SUGAR

King Crab

Tenderman

F/V ENDEAVOR

Driftwood Bay

F/V WIDGEON II

Jellyfish

F/V ARROW

Deadly Derbies

Motley Crew

Captain Sugar

Wild Kelping

SALTY’S

Fish Spotting

The Shrimp Pimp

Old Timer’s

Storm Party

Chartering

Honeymooner’s

Ice Boat

F/V MYRA

On The Rocks

R/V ALTER

Tanker Conflict

Trip from HELL

Cook Inlet Crabing

F/V NO PROBLEM

Gillnetting

Too Much

Introduction

Artists are observers, witnesses, and messengers. Practicing the skills of this universal language, drawing, painting and sculpting is a lifetime endeavor.

Having always been an artist and a lover of the ocean, especially the boats that navigate her, I was already well on my way to becoming a maritime artist, although I didn’t acknowledge this until I left Anchorage.

After selling my successful business in Spenard, Anna’s Wiggery and Boutique, I relocated to Seward with my two-year-old son and a stack of art books to continue my studies. We joined my mother who was a new first grade teacher there. This would give me the freedom I would need when I realized the truth of the saying, You must know something to paint it.

It became painfully obvious in my early boat sketches that I didn’t understand how the rigging on the boats worked; therefore, I couldn’t get it right in my sketches. I would just have to go out fishing more to get an understanding of how boats and rigging really worked in order to do realistic renderings of them.

The ocean was always calling me back, so my quest to go to sea in search of subject matter seemed a natural and necessary next step.

I’m not sure just when it was that I lost sight of my original goal, but the more I got out into the wilderness, the more fascinated I became with the wildlife, boats and rigging, and the Alaskans that got me there. And I ended up hopelessly hooked on the fishing life style.

The Art

Being mostly self taught in the beginning, I still consider it a miracle that I was able to figure out how to transform my original rough sketches into detailed drawings while transferring them onto watercolor paper. This method allowed me to keep my original drawings which bring back vivid memories of the finished paintings, as well as the Sea Stories that happened on my never ending quest to know my subject better.

The paintings from this era of Alaskan history are mostly gone now. Some were sold, and even more, bartered for things and help I needed along the way. Many were loaned out for safe keeping. Unfortunately, many of these were destroyed in house fires, so common in Alaska winters, and some paintings were even stolen.

Many more drawings remained unfinished as inevitably, the boat would fire-up and take off or another would move into the way, or it would start raining. The harsh Alaskan weather is not always conducive to outdoor work but while working on other boats I had great views out the wheelhouse windows and galley portholes, until our boat moved.

I have used these original drawings and unfinished pencil sketches along with some letters and other writings done back then, to remind me of the times they were created and some Sea Stories that happened to me along the way. I write in hopes of conveying the wonders of nature and humanity in those days of innocence, before altered forever by the EXXON VALDEZ oil spill. This environmental holocaust destroyed one of the greatest pristine wilderness areas in North America. It also devastated the most wonderful lifestyle ever imaginable, that of the Alaskan Fisherman.

Resurrection Bay

Most of Blying Sound including Resurrection Bay sank eight feet or so after the 1964 earthquake, killing all the trees along the shore line. Feral geese feast on seaweed at Lowell Point, and the background shows how Fourth of July Creek looked before the shipyard, prison and logging mill were developed across the Bay.

Sin City

Back in the late 60's when I showed up there to start my art career, Seward was referred to as Sin City. Old Alaskans were quite the wild rampaging party generation back then, and they liked to come down to Seward to gamble in the summers, at least until the Federalizes staged a sting.

They planted agents in all the open Blackjack games in town, and in the backroom poker games of several bars. As the clock struck midnight the agents all showed their badges and made something like fifty arrests for everything from bartenders paying off on pinball machines to everyone involved in the poker games. My friend Bobby, skipper of the CHIGNIK BELL, got busted for paying off on a pinball machine while bartending at the Yukon Bar that night.

F/V CHIGNIK BELL

This big bust slowed things down for a while, but since the bars didn't close till 5:00 A.M. there was still plenty of fun to be had by the serious partyers that always seem drawn to deep-seaport towns. Maybe it's because going to sea can be quite isolating and the bars are also a replacement for a home, family and office. Almost all fishing jobs are secured in the bars. There were eleven bars, and almost as many churches in Seward, which had a population of only around 800 at that time.

Resurrection Bay on Alaska’s Gulf Coast, where Seward is located, is one of the best natural harbors on the entire west coast of North America. It is about ten miles long and kept ice free all winter by the warm Japanese Current. The bay is protected from ocean swells by three large islands at its entrance, Fox Island, Hive Island, and Rugged Island.

My first night in Seward I met the Eads, in the Showcase Lounge, under my mothers apartment. They soon became what would be called in Hawai’i, my Hanai Family. Chas, Carol and Ava were my age and we quickly became close friends. Before that evening ended Chas was playing the guitar and we were all singing along to Seward favorites like, "The Deacon Went Down," and what became my all time favorite:

I like Alaska Fishermen I like humpback salmon -- good old humpback salmon, Caught by Alaska Fishermen

Their father and uncle, the Eads Brothers, owned and operated many boats, and a shipyard out at Lowell Point. My first chances to go to sea in the wilderness areas of old Alaska were on their larger boats, wild kelping, crabbing and tendering smaller fishing boats.

My first trip out to sea was on the ANNA A skippered by Chas. He had a full crew of green horns; none of us had much experience at sea except Chas who had grown up working on the family boats. He always let us learn the hard way, possibly figuring we would learn more from our mistakes. Which in theory worked; I guess it worked, as two out of four of us, Tom James and I, ended up making careers as professional mariners.

The Eads always took time to go beach combing and exploring the old canneries that were derelict now, but still pretty much intact. At San Juan cannery, in Prince William Sound, (PWS, or just the Sound for short) there was a huge old wooden tub or vat. This vat was about 4-5 feet in diameter and at least that deep and it was still full of tar that was used to dip the natural fiber nets into before storing them in the net loft for the winter, a method used to preserve the web of fish traps long before seine nets.

Cape Resurrection

The matriarch of the family, Martha, had been raised in King Cove, a small Aleut fishing village out west, almost to the Aleutian Chain. She always said, When the tide is out the table is set.

Seafood on the Half shell

Get your cast-iron skillet SMOKEN! Shuck off one side of the shell leaving the meat exposed- salt, pepper and dip in bread crumbs. Place them in skillet shell side up. As soon as the bread crumbs are brown it's done - crispy outside and steamed underneath.

You don't even need to dirty a dish - just use the shell as a bowl and slurp down all the delectable juices.

We learned to eat lots of strange subsistence foods from her and her sisters, like sea cucumbers, sea urchin eggs, sea weeds, and anything in a shell could be cooked on the half shell; in the Eads family it's still traditional to have big feeds of Alaskan foods.

Seward people always seemed to love each other more than any place I'd ever been. They always helped each other with no questions asked, and no pay-backs expected, like my first trip on the ANNA A.

Two of the first hippies to come to Seward, John & Ginger, fell in love and wanted to spawn. They built a wilderness homestead out in Driftwood Bay and lived off the land along with the help of a lot of goats. Driftwood Bay is in Day Harbor, the next big bay east of and around Cape Resurrection from Seward.

It is almost always rough going around Cape Resurrection. Cape Res, as we call it, sticks way out into the Gulf of Alaska, where the big ocean waves slam into the sheer rock faces of the Cape and Barwell Island, and rebound right back at you. This can make it very hard to get supplies out there in the small double-ended skiff which John had built.

So Chas took a load of big stuff out for them on the ANNA A, on our way to the Sound, my favorite place in the whole world! There was a couch, stove, and quite a few barrels of fuel to get them through the winter. We unloaded the furniture into our biggest skiff but just rolled the barrels overboard and floated them to shore.

John & Ginger invited us up to their home, a work of art made with huge driftwood logs, and gave us some of the goat cheese they had made. We were all really impressed with the lifestyle they had made, and started our own dreams of living in the wilderness of Prince William Sound.

The whole "fandamily" as my friend Ava refers to their clan, and our small Seward fishing fleet, became the first herring egg on kelp fishing fleet any of us ever heard of. Our fleet consisted of a big processor boat with no engine of its own, towed around by Chas with the ANNA A, maybe half a dozen small seiners, and all the skiffs and outboards we could get.

A big seafood company in Japan sent several technicians to Alaska that would oversee the harvest and processing of the herring spawn on kelp. After the herring spawned, which would turn the water white with milky sperm, the millions of fertilized eggs would settle on anything around, rocks, pilings and hopefully on some good ribbon kelp.

The fisherman would harvest this by throwing out grappling hooks and dragging them across the bottom back up to the boats, hooking some long ribbons of kelp on the way back. Hopefully these would be completely covered with the tiny fish eggs. Everything looked like it was covered with little jewels. This is considered a rare delicacy, said to bring good luck and many babies, and is reserved for serving on New Years Day in Japan.

Martha was in charge of the cooking and processing, and all us gals were her crew. While waiting for the harvest we were free to beachcomb the outside beaches of Montague Island to our hearts content.

Bear Beach

Every day that it was calm enough to land a skiff on the outer beaches, and get off the beach with all the spoils of the day, we were out there! One such day I'll never forget...

We made an easy landing on a beach we had already combed, but this time Ava and I climbed up and over the point at the Northeast end of the beach and through the woods. Then we could climb back down on the next beach that was impossible to land a skiff on.

We planned to comb this beach heading NE until we got to the next rocky point, and again climb up through the deep rain forest until we could climb back down onto the next inaccessible beach. Over the last point was a much larger beach that Chas could land the skiff on and wait for us.

We had a great time exploring where possibly no other human had been since the Ancients, except maybe a few unlucky sailors that accidentally ended up on this rugged coastline of the Gulf of Alaska.

When we came down out of the forest onto the rendezvous beach, Chas and a couple of other guys were running down the beach toward us with their guns. They were yelling and waving their arms at us, so we hurried toward them. Then I heard something come crashing down out of the woods behind. It was Carl, the biggest guy from Seward, with his high-powered rifle and a couple of hand guns hanging around his waist. He was out of breath and all scratched up and muddy from chasing us through the woods and down the beaches at full speed.

Our fish-spotter plane had flown over when we were climbing through the forest and seen a big brown bear following our tracks into the thick slimy rain forest. The bear had picked us up climbing over that first point and had followed us all the way across the inaccessible beaches and over the points.

There were big bear tracks following right over your foot prints all the way, Carl said, catching his breath. The bear must have either heard the guys running down the beach yelling, or Carl running through the forest behind him, and faded back into the shadows of the thick rain forest just as Ava and I stepped out into the light on the rendezvous beach.

Montague Island is famous for its ferocious brown bears. They are probably the same species as Kodiak bears, mostly dark reddish brown and BIG! They are good swimmers and can cover great distances at sea. At first we were having big fires on the beach at night and partying on until the wee hours. But this was getting the attention of the bears and we were always cooking things that had new and interesting smells, like hot dogs and s’mores, which really got their attention.

Every once in a while someone would need to go off in the bushes and that was scary. So some of the guys would go in first with flashlights and guns, yelling and firing off a few rounds to scare the bears away for a while. But they were getting braver and braver every night until one got too close and scared one of the guys and he shot it. These huge animals are hard to kill with one shot and the bear got away, wounded. This was not good! Having a wounded bear around is very dangerous and cruel to the bear as well.

The next morning a hunting party was organized to track it down and put the poor thing out of its misery. Almost as soon as the skiff landed on the beach and the guys started into the woods, we heard loud growls.

The wounded bear hadn't gotten very far. It was just up at the top of the first little hill above our burnt out fire which we had left in haste the previous night after the incident.

There was a small clearing below the knoll, probably left by an avalanche, years ago. A plan was hatched to have the guys hide back in the thick rain forest on both sides of the clearing and then the guy that shot the bear would come out at the bottom of the clearing and try to get the bear's attention and draw it out in the open. They thought that he might have to yell at the bear, maybe even shoot off a round or two to get it mad enough to come out of hiding.

Chas also ran the SEAFARER

I was allowed to come along with my camera if I stayed way back to the side, at the bottom of the clearing, hidden back in the deep forest. Ava would stay on the beach with the skiffs; she was the only one of us that had any sense back then.

Well, we sure had wasted our time trying to figure out how to get the bears attention. Before we were even in position, our trigger happy friend stepped on a twig or something. Then I heard the loudest roar imaginable, sounding like a jet plane. Its vibrations rumbled our bones. The loud snapping of branches being broken and rocks landsliding down hill was followed by the sound and vibration of heavy artillery blasting out of the woods on both sides of the clearing.

I only got one glimpse of the bear charging down the hill, its mouth wide open with slobber and blood flying out. It didn’t even seem to be touching down now, just falling forward at an incredible speed, frozen in time in a charging position.

Our trigger happy friend wasn't so brave now. He was running for his life into the woods on the other side of the clearing, Thank God! The bear kept steering right for him and was changing course in mid air so as to stay aimed right at him.

Finally the bear dropped dead to the ground only a few feet behind its intended victim. It hit the ground with such force it shook all the trees around and I could hear and feel the thud behind me as I ran screaming through the thick slimy rain forest back to the beach.

One fine day it was pretty calm, maybe almost calm enough to get to that far beach to the southwest. We had zoomed past it offshore and wondered if we could land on it. Even from the distance we could see big glass balls sparkling in the sun. Lots of them! Some still had rope webbing on them and there was a shipwreck near the far, jagged, rocky point. A huge rusted anchor was so far up on the beach you could see it at any stage of the tide.

Our adventures in the past few weeks had taught us to look clear up into the rain forest. Anything that floats would get tossed completely over the pile of huge driftwood trees from all over the world all woven together by the big winter storm waves, and past tsunamis.

We were chomping at the bit to get on that beach and today looked like the best chance we would get. The herring could spawn on the kelp any time now and the party would be over.

We begged Chas to give landing a try. Finally he agreed with conditions: since the beach was too steep and rocky to even think about pulling the skiff up on, he would have to stay in the skiff. Plus he got his pick of our spoils, after Martha of course.

It's just going to be a drop off, Chas informed us as he eyed a calmer place inside the rocks next to the beach with lots of huge boulders further out to break most of the bigger waves. He circled around as we made plans to jump off, turn the skiff around, and head him back out.

He finally saw a break between the bigger sets of waves and we went charging in riding one of the smaller waves straight into the giant rock breakwater. Somehow Chas was able to zigzag around through the boulders into the calmer water, inside near the beach.

The rest of us jumped out into water up to our hips and turned the skiff right back around and Chas punched it, getting to the rocks just as the next wave hit, lifting the skiff over the rocks safely on it's swell.

We were just like little kids on a first trip to Disneyland. We collected a lot of glass floats and piled them up near our rendezvous point in no time at all. Since Chas was still nowhere to be seen, we kept exploring further down the beach to the shipwreck.

We were now only looking for the more rare collectable glass floats. These are the long slender ones with knobs on either end to tie a line onto. There's lots of color variations for all the