I've been promising I'd recap my two-week working vacation in Naknek this past summer so after an e-mail from Homeboy Howie regarding the National Geographic TV series COWBOYS OF THE SEA (ripped off from the Bon Jovi song that opens Deadliest Catch) I actually pulled out my notes and made some progress.
Tender Moments: Part One
Friday, June 29th, 2007
In the past when I’d go to Bristol Bay I’d be crammed into a PenAir flying tube with a direct shot from the Rock to King Salmon but that wasn’t an option so its ADQ-AKN via ANC. And ANC means 41/43 as in 631 East International Airport Road (fist bump).
First things first.
The Shwanee’s wife hooked this brother up with an ERA Homeboy Pass so I got outta town for zero chips but I had to take the new middle of the night flight so I landed in Anchortown about an hour before the cops showed up at Ice-T’s house on Rhyme Pays. I was so tired and didn’t want to wake my ride so I just napped on the floor in the airport for a few hours near the visitor information booth. When I woke the was an open ceiling panel above me and a ladder near my feet. A worker had been accessing some wires above me while I slept. Uncool Ted Stevens Airport Worker Guy, uncool.
Paul snagged me from ARRIVALS soon after and when and took a proper nap on the couch until noon. Hit the cinemaplexoramatheaters and saw Evan Almighty when the guy who jumped ship from The Daily Show becomes Noah and a US Congressman (so he’s sorta Jesus yet sorta Judas). I give it three stars. I can’t make stars on this keyboard I guess. I’m told Jim Carrey was supposed to do this one too but for some reason didn’t. I hope they call me for Nick Almighty when fire and brimstone fall just south of Berkley and everyone dies. The end.
Stopped by Henry’s of Anchorage looking for fellow fantasy football foe Chef Derek who I was told in New York and later hiding in Maine. He can’t hide. After that we took the car home and then walked to the soulless Peanut Farm sports bar. The big screens are cool and all but the place feels like a Red Cross shelter sometimes.
Crossed the bush street bush and bush bush went bush inside at 8pm. Bush.
FEMALE READERS, THOSE TAKING HEART MEDICATION, and THOSE OVER THE AGE OF 62 SHOULD SKIP TO Tender Moments July 1st, 2007. Not really.
Nikki. Karma. Kennedy. Sasha. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And thank you. Maybe one of the best nights I’ve ever had at a gentlemens club. Its also a good sign when a high percentage of strippers use normal sounding names. Unnamed friend and I were there for five hours and never saw a duplicate dancer on stage the entire time. How good was it that night? A GIRL was placed on the Velvet Box for her birthday (double shake-n-bake fist bumps). Normally that would top an evening at Da Company Store but oh no, oh no no no, they took it to a whole new level. They took it higher.
Two words. Lotion Show. Probably responsible for global warming.
Saturday, June 30th, 2007
Left at 1am and hit the minim art in the Chevron station on the corner where I nabbed some Powerade, a sandwich, and a bear claw. Yummy.
“Woke up quick, at about noon,
jus’ thought I had to be Naknek soon”
- Eazy E.
Got to the airport and the place looks like O’Hara that time of year. Tourists deep. Peek around the corner between the old and new sections of the airport to see if by some miracle Cheers had been resurrected. Nope. I don’t think The Big Normski is ever coming back. Does anyone makes a 40oz beer glass?
Up, up and away to King salmon on the biggest PenAir plane I’ve ever seen. Took a little over an hour to touchdown but getting off in King Salmon always feels like throwing an interception (football analogy, not Egigik). My dad would always say “In five minutes it feels like you never left,” and he’s right. The terminal was remodeled but the swarm of sqitos was just as it was when I was last there in 2001. The cannery had a cab waiting for me and a few other guys got in. One was a kid from Seattle who reminded me of myself maybe ten years younger. He talked about the “purity” of working on a boat and how he got so much more than just cold hard cash out of the experience.
The cab dropped one guy off at Leader Creek, the next at Yardarm Knot which was once Wards Cove’s Red Salmon Company plant where I spent 14 season on our family g-netter the F/V Vanessa. That place looked EXACTLY as it did in 2001 and it looked EXACTLY like it did in 1988 when I first came to Naknek for Season One-El Greenhornio. There aren’t enough gigabytes in Alaska to hold all the tales of fishing with my dad and friends (shots out to Solly, Keith, Mike, and Jerm, NAKNEK4LIFE, BIATCH).
A couple more stops and finally I get to the cannery I’d be tendering for…Baywatch. It still makes me snicker. In the two weeks up there not a day went by without one Pam Anderson or The Hoff reference. Baywatch is kind of an alternative cannery, not one of the big dogs, kind of like the Jones Soda of Bristol Bay trying to get a piece of the pie. The cannery itself looked like the 8 Mile trailer park lifted out of Detroit and set on the bluff above the Naknek River. I would soon learn the place was even more ghetto in operation than appearance.
One of the gals in the office escorted me down to the dock where I was to board the boat I was on, the F/V Fayette (homeport Kodiak, recognize fool) to serve with Capt. Ron and The Shwanee. However when I got to the ladder the tide had already reached point of no return and the Fayette had departed five minutes earlier. Another tender, the massive Wild Island (homeport Kodiak, recognize fool) was nearly dry clinging to the pilings and this massive figure steps out from the tophouse and shouts “ Hey Nick, they already left!” Its Capt. Rob, my high school basketball coach from my freshmen year. Like Picard jumping to warp he starts telling stories and recalling hoop misadventures from 9th grade (including the classic shot in Soldotna my friend took that went over the backboard and got stuck resulting in uncontrollable laughter. That friend is now a powerful lawyer in Juneau and will remain unnamed).
A fisher from the Baywatch fleet comes along side and Rob talks them into getting them to take me across the river to the tender. There is gear and boats all over the place as they are in the middle of an opener which took me off guard since overheard someone at the airport an hour before say everything was slow and shut down.
I hop on board the old Rawson and we motor off towards the Bumble Bee plant on the other side of the Naknek in search of the Fayette when I get a good whiff of some whiskey. “Wait a minute, are these dudes drunk?” Nick asked Nick.
Yup.
Minutes later we spot Capt. Ron’s vessel that is already in the fray of fish transferring. They don’t even notice me until we are almost there and The Shwanee has a big grin on his face. On I go and soon as my water taxi takes off he says something along the lines of I can’t believe Rob sent you with THEM/I can’t believe you made it in ONE PIECE. A guy off another tender later said it best when he told me “I wouldn’t ride on a tricycle with them.”
So I toss my bags in the cabin and in true Bristol Bay style its go go go mode. Shwanee explains my deck responsibilities and we go to work as a boat pulls up. As a gillnetter my entire fishing “career” I’d always wondered what it would be like to play for The Dark Side (cannery) and buy reds instead of sell them. It was surreal seeing all the boats stressing around us, pulling web and fighting the current while we just sat there anchored in a peaceful stance.
Soon I start seeing the boats from my past, vessels from me ol’ Red Salmon Co. days. The F/V G.G. was the first one I noticed. Those guys burned two boats in less than 12 months one time. Soon I spy the F/V Royal Salute that belongs to Clan Gronn, a Kodiak family and they were the only other islanders at the plant beside my dad and I back in the day. The Salute is like my Bristol Bay Tony Gwynn, a Hall of Famer (if there were one for gillnetters) that always puts up impressive stats and I always admired. 1/3 of the pictures I took up there were of that single boat.
After only a few hours I find it strange to be on a tender and not actually fishing fishing. Its like being invisible but there is one aspect I like and that is I don’t have to worry about $$$. Good day, bad day, whatever, I’m making the same cheese everyday and thus there is little pressure or stress. Or did I speak too soon…
A massive tin can (aluminum 32 footer) pulls up to deliver but we’re already packed full. The captain of the Ferndale, WA based boat that starts with the letter “V” goes on a four star Alpha male major jackhole screaming blowout at Capt. Ron who out of character lets him have it right back. High five. They storm off and I recall the book How To Be A Dick In Bristol Bay. Must reading. Turns out the “V” is one of the Eggigik highliners for Baywatch and they are cool wit’ us the rest of the season. Word.
As for the actual deck work I really had one job; pull the cord. Shwanee would hyrdo the bag on, weigh it, and flex his guns while I simply would yank the “puckering string” as I’d always known it (tag line) and the fishys would go in the tank. I can’t think of an easier job. The girls at 41/43 work harder. This did become challenging once the main hold was full and we had to revert to the back tank that had an opening about the size of a manhole in yer basic sidewalk. Shwanee was impressed by my ability to maneuver the bailer bags in place and dump them with only minor spillage and thus keeping the offloading at high speed. I'm a Kodiak boy, it comes natural. We both took pride in getting gillnetters unloaded faster than any other tender which fits into my personal work philosophy…
SPEED FIRST, SAFETY SECOND
As I mentioned earlier, we are plum full and can’t take any more fish so our duty is for the most part done until we can get to the cannery and get pumped off. Sounds better than it is. I get the lower starboard bunk and immediately fall in love all over again with the sound of a diesel engine at sea. Its like a lullaby but louder and with less words. Nick takes a nap.
Sunday, July 1st, 2007
The tide is high and we’re moving on. We head to the Baywatch plant which for the record is the most ragtag operation I’ve ever seen. It looks like the 8 Mile trailer park from the white rapper flick but on the tundra. They don’t even have a proper dock to deliver at. Instead there is a rusty scow called the Connie Lou tied perpendicular to the “real” dock and we have to squeeze up against its nasty square bow to get to the pump. The pilings aren’t even really driven into the muck but somehow bolted onto a base and they as durable as Nicole Ritchie playing fullback in the NFL. If it were my birthday I would have lit them on fire and blew them out. The Connie Lou, the pilings, the whole freaking place was an OSHA inspector’s wet dream. I felt safer when we were anchored up then at any time making physical contact with Baywatch. For reals.
That afternoon one of the top reasons for making the trip to the greater Naknek/King Salmon metro area was check marked on the list. My first D&D Pizza in six years. I got a Hawaiian. It was as good as I remembered. Why can’t we have a place this good in Kodiak? WHY!!!!??? The waitress tells us that an apple is more refreshing for the body than coffee. Really. After forking out $20.95 for the medium pineapple and Canadian Bacon we hit Naknek Trading. I have nothing to trade so we leave. Actually we bought groceries.
When we get back to the boat there are some Russians tied to us and one is telling the story of his friend who paid for a hooker with a personal check but the check bounced so the hooker went to his house to get paid and the wife answered the door. Everyone was laughing so hard I don’t even think I heard how the story ended.
That evening we made a return trip to “town” (Naknek is too small even for the word town, yet somehow I have trouble calling it a village, not sure what to classify it as) and end up at The Fishermen’s Bar. They have PBR. The bartender named Viola asks me if I want to buy a cardboard salmon to hang from the ceiling. There are about 200 of them above me covering most of the bar and one each one people write in Sharpie whatever they please although 90% of them were boat names. Not me. I whipped out ten bucks and made a JOCK OF THE ROCK fish that was placed right over the glassware where everyone could see it. I was a proud papa. There are two other bartenders, sexy thin Hannah and the mysterious one who’s name I never attained. Once again I wonder why Naknek beats Kodiak on so many levels.
Part Two to be posted by Halloween
