In 1985, I was back in Alaska for my second time. I was working on a commercial fishing boat out of Bristol Bay using gill nets to catch salmon. Gill nets are designed so that when the fish swims into its webbing, its head gets lodged and it can’t pull out. When we’d pull the gill nets over the side, we would use something called a fish pick that resembled a curved ice pick to pull the net from around their gills.
One of my favorite things to do is digging for Razor Clams in Cook Inlet, Alaska. Cook Inlet was named for none other than legendary explorer, Captain Cook, who happened along this way while looking for the Northwest Passage in 1778. While searching for the elusive passage, something that was never there to begin with, some of Captain Cook’s crew were nearly swamped and drowned by the extreme tidal change in an offshoot of the inlet.
The three of us loaded the gear, packed the couple hundred pounds of caribou meat into the rear of the plane, and taxied across the tundra. As the pilot turned the plane to fly into the wind for takeoff, he suddenly decelerated and said; “Boys, we’ve got too much weight in the plane. We need a plan B.”
One of the scariest nights I have ever spent was in a small, fenced-in camp in Balule, South Africa, on the southern banks of the Olifants River in Kruger National Park. At night you can hear the lions roar from as far as five miles away – it’s an AWESOME sound.
