Gone Fishing

I went fishing so I haven't been updating the site lately. Misty, Jonathan's sister asked if I could help out on the boat she works on, the Island Pride, out of Petersburg, Alaska. It is a 58 foot limit seiner(salmon) but is rigged up with a sorter and freezer for shrimp season. I have never worked on a commercial fishing boat so this was a whole new thing for me. I have read about the all the horror stories of working without sleep in excrutiating pain in horrible weather. Fortunately, the spot prawn fishery in southeast Alaska is managed by bankers (not really) because you can only work your gear from 8am to 4pm. Very nice, got lots of sleep. The weather while I was on board was calm and sunny, the best weather we had all summer. It was so sunny it was hard to see the buoys on the water surface for the reflection. Pain, okay I was sore, very very sore, but mostly good sore.
My first days on the boat were really busy because we had to get the boat set up...freezer, shop, sort room, rack, make bait bags, shop, move pots(60-125 pounds each)and then move them again, shop, get the lines together with the buoys, and shop more. There are a million things to remember to get ready befor they leave the dock.
We were loading bait from the cannery down to the boat roof onto the maindeck and into the hold. I had to catch about a thousand frozen sub-zero humpies(red salmon) from Dean, the captain, on the top deck and hand them to Chris in the hold. A few "slipped" out of Dean's grasp right onto my head. The best one hit me right in the mouth and split open my lip. So as I'm staring up in the sky to catch the next humpy, the shredded remains of the inside of my mouth just kept getting stuck in my teeth and there was blood over it all. Misty couldn't stop laughing, and we couldn't stop working. By the end of the day it looked like a really good silicone implant. I should whap a frozen humpy across my face more often.