Seattle skyline on our way out of the city

I’m leaning over the rail, somewhere so far out in the Gulf of Alaska that the sky and ocean have become an endless gray entity. The ten-foot swell is picking up and my stomach is in knots. I lay down at the galley table where I know I have easy escape access to the outside.

Vulnerable moments like these provide easy entertainment for the ‘lesser sick’ crew members. So, Glen (our engineer) pulls the classic move. Leaning over the Galley table where I am curled up in the fetal position he maliciously offers me some warm mayonnaise to subsequently tame this ocean spell. Ha! Just the word itself was enough to spur on another bout. Here it goes, my initiation back into the commercial fishing scene.

That’s exactly what crossing the Gulf was for me. Chinese water torture to be exact.

the part I wanted to jump ship

Touchdown Chignik. Beached the boat to unload stuff

The weather fortunately was not as bad as we anticipated. The treacherous part however was the time I spent horizontal swaying to the rhythm of the waves for hours on end. What usually takes me a day or so to get my sea legs under me took well over three days.

My dad was on a mission. With the smell of fish in the air he didn’t waste time. It took us 6.5 days, a total of 158 hours to travel from Seattle to finally Chignik, covering a whopping 1,160 miles. Cruising at an average 10 knots we drank up 500 gallons of fuel a day. That makes for a delicious fuel bill of $8,000. Holy Toledo is right!

Catch a glimpse of this in action on the TRA Episode: The Journey North