Until today, I have been a reluctant fisherman, or at
least a reluctant writer. As you may or
may not have noticed, my blog has been nothing but photos the past few
weeks. This started out innocently
enough, lack of sleep or time to write due to copious amounts of fishing time,
cool photos seemed the perfect solution.
But, now that I am back on land and the storm of the season is over, I
am still tempted to just post photos, again.
Then I decided to roll my sleeves up and try to figure out why.
I can’t deny there have been some rogue waves the past few
months. As some of you may know, my mom
past away back in April after a yearlong battle with cancer. Two days after the funeral, I hauled my ass
cross country from Ohio to Alaska, some 4000 miles, driving 14 hours a day for
7 days straight to make the 1st fishing opener in Cordova.
Fishing took off like gangbusters and it was full fart from
the get-go with 48-hour openers and shitty weather to boot, kicking all of our
asses the whole time. (There were some
fish caught, though.) This was about the time my now ex but then current
boyfriend check out of my life so fast he left skid marks. After getting our asses kicked on the Flats
for a month, we heading to the Sound where we proceeded to put in 20-hour days,
fishing over 500 hours in 32 days. It
takes you normal folks about 4 months to put in 500 hours of work; we did it in
a month! Again, we caught some fish and
made some money but I won’t say it weren’t hard earned cake. That last week I tweaked my low back the day
before our biggest. Set. Of. The. Season!
Honestly, our net was sinking. I
took near fatal doses of Vitamin I (Ibuprofen) and moved around like Mr. Roboto to get through the
pain. I had to dose myself at each
change of time to get through. High
tide, take two. Low tide, take two more.
But, now I’m back in town, my back is on the mend, and I’m
back to mending gear. Having weathered
those storms, the forecast is looking good.
V10. After 2 days of sunshine and
4 trips up the ski-hill, the tide has finally turned! I met self discipline (SD meet Jen, "nice to meet you" Jen meet SD, "grumble, grumble") but I lost 5 pounds, I’m
going to a Poetry Workshop in a few weeks held in my most favorite place in the
whole wide world, McCarthy Alaska.
(Gearing up for Fisher Poets early this year!) I’m having fun flirting
with a hot man from Anchorage, I’m applying for Writer’s Residencies and looking into going to Bali then hiking in Nepal and inquiring to be
on some T.V. program I know nothing about (wish me luck!) So, finally, I have something to write to all
you about. I couldn’t quite make myself
do it until the tide had turned.
But hey, when a fisherman gets a water haul, she just turns
around and sets the net out again.
