Chasing Alaska: A Portrait of the Last Frontier Then and Now

by C. B. Bernard

  He parlayed that seasonal job into a career, and a few years later bought an existing business that included the A-framed, glass-fronted hillside lodge in which we’re sitting. It’s a beautiful building, spartanly furnished and decorated, and the windows offer stunning views of Sitka Sound. If you’re here for breakfast, you can watch the Frontier fleet leaving the harbors for the fishing grounds each morning.

  “Back then, when I first took over, I was concerned about growing,” he says. “I always wanted more people, more guests in the lodge, but having a couple years where no matter what you did, you couldn’t make any money? That totally took the wind out of my sails. Now I’m not that motivated. Instead of just trying to get bigger all the time, I’d rather have my fingers in lots of different things.”

  In addition to the lodge and its fleet of fishing boats, Mac recently bought a Cessna 185 floatplane at auction for well below market value. In the off-season he found a flight school in Oregon that he liked and did nothing else for a month but learn to fly a plane. Then he repeated the process to earn his instrument rating. Now he needs just a few more hours on floats to qualify for the liability insurance required to fly passengers, opening the door to fly-in fishing and hunting trips for clients. He also bought the Dragon Lady, a converted 80-foot World War II Coast Guard sub chaser, and is fixing it up as a base for guided overnight hunting trips. Last year he purchased commercial fishing and crabbing permits for a couple of his boats, and this week an instructor visiting the lodge will certify him and his guides to take clients diving for sea cucumbers and geoducks.

  He has more cookie jars than fingers, and he’s counting on that diversification to help Frontier Charters weather the storm that’s coming. Recent regulatory and permitting changes have already had dramatic effects on the charter-fishing industry, and additional changes under consideration by state and federal regulators might chip away at his livelihood even further. Halibut regulations are particularly concerning. A high-value target for commercial and subsistence fishing, halibut grow large enough to lure anglers willing to pay for a chance at a trophy, which makes them Alaska’s most popular ocean sport fish too. They’re unassuming looking, these halibut, but everybody wants a piece of them. New rules governing their harvest might reapportion the pie for interest groups.

  To understand the proposals, it’s helpful to try to understand the snake pit of regulatory agencies crawling over one another to manage the resource.

  A tangled alphabet of acronyms governs Pacific halibut, including the International Pacific Halibut Commission (IPHC), the federal North Pacific Fishery Management Council (NPFMC), the double-barreled National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G). Think of how often the right hand of a typical bureaucracy doesn’t know what its left hand is doing. Now picture the Indian goddess Kali with her many arms—and that doesn’t even include the stakeholders in the fishing and tourism industries.

  As of February 2011, all charter boats fishing halibut in affected areas must have the new federal Charter Halibut Permit. Implemented by the NMFS “based on recommendations by the NPFMC to meet allocation objectives in the charter halibut fishery,” according to NOAA, this program purports to provide stability in the fishery. “NMFS anticipates consolidation in the charter halibut fishery,” an announcement declared ominously. To qualify for a Charter Halibut Permit, guides need to have logged at least five days chartering clients for halibut in 2004 or 2005 and in 2008. This limited-entry approach caps the size of the fleet by prohibiting new halibut guides.

  You can transfer the permits, with a few exceptions, but they’re not cheap. In 2011 they were selling for somewhere in the neighborhood of $35,000 to $40,000 each, the price expected to rise as the industry sorted itself out. Because all five of his boats were fishing halibut during those qualifying years, Mac was eligible to purchase five permits, the maximum allowable, making him something of a power player.

  At the same time, the regulatory pigpile also began implementing significantly more restrictive catch limits, and halibut-centric parts of Alaska began to wonder whether they were aimed at conservation, as claimed, or the decidedly more political goal of allocation. Commercial longliners catch nearly 90 percent of the halibut in Alaska, but their catch has been declining. Comparatively speaking, the charter fleet plays only a very small role, but the traditional measure of the catch limit contributed to charters taking an increased percentage of the overall share. Moves against that arrangement have generated heated debates and angry confrontations in parts of the state.

  In Southeast, Mac and the other guides already labor under a one-fish bag limit imposed in 2009 and size restrictions limiting that fish to 37 inches. That’s about a 22-pound fish—tiny for a halibut, which can grow to over 9 feet long and more than 500 pounds. Hundred-pound fish are common, and every year fish over 200 pounds—called “barn doors”—are caught. A 50-pounder can break a man’s leg as it flops around a boat, and fish bigger than that can sink the boat itself, so they’re routinely gaffed, harpooned, or shot before they’re brought aboard. That’s what clients pay good money to come to Alaska to catch, a fish so big you need to shoot it; not the pumped-up flounder that small “chicken” halibut resemble. Guides worry that limiting clients to one small fish will deter them from paying for expensive trips to fish in Alaska. For charter guides already battling high fuel costs and a dismal tourism economy, such restrictions look like the beginning of the end.

  “I’m sure conservation is a part of it,” Mac says, “but I don’t think that’s all of it.” He points out that as a rural Alaska resident, he’s subject to very different regulations than his clients. For halibut, he’s allowed thirty longline hooks for personal subsistence use, and he can catch and keep twenty fish every day without size restrictions. The new restrictions seem to target solely the guided sport fishermen, which makes it pretty clear that it’s about allocation. “Does that make any sense, those gaping holes in the regulations? If you’re going to say ‘This is what we’ve got to do,’ at least close the loopholes. I don’t think everything’s shaken out here yet. The old business model . . . was all about how many fish you could catch. Now, with more size restrictions and more regulations, it’s going to require a different kind of thing. You need to provide a better overall experience.”

  The McDowell report found that an overwhelming 89 percent of Sitka’s charter-fishing clients are male, and during dinner it’s immediately apparent. Michelle, the lodge manager, is the only woman in sight tonight—or most nights, she says. Mac hired her a few years ago to pull the strings on the complicated marionettes of the business like tracking clients’ flights; shuttling them between the harbor, lodge, and airport; getting fishing licenses and tags; coordinating meals; making sure the processing crew cleans and packs their fish; and attending to miscellaneous needs. She seems perfectly comfortable in a room full of men attacking steaks the size of hardcover books.

  The men all slouch in T-shirts, hoodies, sweatpants, and baseball caps, with varying degrees of windburn or sunburn, depending on how long they’ve been in town. They eat everything put in front of them and relive the day’s fishing adventures. Some wear tiny round patches taped behind an ear, prescription Scopolamine to combat seasickness, and a few reek of cigars—mostly the ones from Texas.

  The politics and social classes of the angling world can be confusing. Fly fishermen disdain bait fishermen. Salmon fishermen look down on trout fishermen. Commercial fishermen hate charter fishermen. Even I can’t keep it all straight. I wonder whether guys like Mac, who have both commercial and guide permits and fish using any gear necessary, are destined for self-loathing.

  Here’s what I do know: When it comes to fishing, hunting, boats, and the outdoors, guys like Mac and his guides play on a different level. They’re major league, and I’m a kid with a bat. When I spent a couple days w
ith some of them on a Frontier boat, the skill and pace of the fishing astonished me—almost unrecognizable to a guy who considers a single trout adequate compensation for five hours of casting delicate dry flies. They’re all licensed as captains by the US Coast Guard and have an encyclopedic amount of knowledge and experience on the water and in the woods. If we still lived in an age of earthly exploration, they’d sign up for the expeditions, like the guys Joe encountered in the Arctic. Fishing is a job for them, but they love what they do, and do even more of it off the clock. If I devoted as much time as they do, would I get better? Of course. But I could dedicate my life to it and still never achieve their level of skill. Some people are just born to things, and either you’re fishy or you’re not.

  Mac introduces me to his newest guide, Maurice—pronounced “Morris”—the third brother in his family to work for Frontier. When I first bought the Monkeyfist, his two older brothers became friends and patient, if occasionally mocking, mentors. I spent a miserable night atop a mountain in a late fall storm with one of them and Mac, flirting with hypothermia on a deer trip gone awry. If Maurice is half as good as either of his brothers, Mac’s going to have a banner summer. They grew up in a family of hunters and fishermen, and all spent time fishing commercially like their father, who still runs a troller. The eldest brother, Jonathan, has his own charter boat north of Sitka in Whaler’s Cove.

  “Monkeyfist, right? I’ve heard about you,” Maurice says. He’s twenty-eight and built solid, with a dark beard and short hair. He wears a faded Oregon State University sweatshirt. “Where you living now?”

  “Portland,” I say, and he shakes his head sadly, like he’s trying to decide whether to stab something or strangle it.

  “I’m in Gresham,” he says, the next town over from Portland geographically but culturally a world apart. “I don’t go to Portland unless I have to.”

  “Your brother Ryan lived in Portland for a while.”

  “Yeah, and it made him soft. He beefed up, all fat, and started to dress funny, too. We called him a metrosexual.” He spits out the word like food that’s spoiled.

  I mention pictures that Ryan recently e-mailed me showing him with some of the biggest rainbow trout I’ve ever seen. He caught them in Idaho, where he lives now.

  Mac gasps and exchanges an expression of disgust with Maurice. “Ryan’s a trout fisherman now?”

  I’m not sure which they consider worse, metrosexual or trout fisherman, but Ryan can expect an intervention the next time he visits.

  Sitting at dinner with a pair of fathers and sons traveling together from the San Francisco Bay area, two brothers and their boys on their first fishing trip to Alaska, I ask who caught the biggest fish. A big teen named Josh, with a diamond earring and crew cut, raises a meaty hand.

  “I caught the rarest too,” he says. “A white king.”

  One in a hundred chinook salmon have pale flesh rather than the typical red. No one knows why, though theories abound. Once considered undesirable and sold for pennies on the dollar, a marketing genius’s idea to call them “ivory kings” repositioned them as a rare and therefore more expensive market offering. Devotees claim they fight differently when hooked, taste different when eaten, and contain more nutrients and valuable omega-3 fatty oil than their red-fleshed siblings. But they’re exactly the same fish.

  Across the table, Bill and Bill Jr. are smaller and wirier, and there’s a fairly clear alpha-dog relationship between the brothers and their sons. Josh’s dad, Tracy, beams as he talks about his son’s fishing exploits. He’s as gregarious as Josh is reticent and physically a blueprint for his son. Pay attention, Josh. In twenty years you’re going to look just like him.

  Bill Jr. says politely that he’s had a great time in Alaska. His father seems quieter than he should be, muted by something that happened on the boat. Tracy razzes him a bit, but neither will tell me the story—so I push a little.

  “Get skunked?”

  No answer.

  “Lose a big fish?”

  His head pops up, and his son looks away. Ah.

  “Happens all the time,” I reassure him. His misery seems relentless as the rain, a preexisting condition, maybe, the bad day on the boat the latest indignity heaped upon him.

  “It kind of bummed me out, but I’m getting over it,” he says unconvincingly between bites of dinner.

  The lodge employs a full-time chef during the fishing season. Meals are extravagant and industrial: porterhouse steaks, prime rib, grilled chicken, fresh fish, all thrown on the grill two dozen at a time, enough to feed famished clients and guides. Even the small salad in a parfait glass stuffed with fresh Dungeness crabmeat is somehow masculine. There’s nothing delicate in sight, except the lovely Michelle, who holds her own among the clients. At one point, someone tells a joke and she punches him in the arm, just one of the guys.

  The guys at my table finished fishing yesterday. They spent today walking around Sitka in the rain before their flight later tonight.

  “We walked our butts off,” Tracy says. “The first thing I bought was a pair of sole inserts for my shoes. Then I bought something for my wife.”

  “What did you think of Sitka?” I ask.

  “Beautiful,” Bill Sr. says, but there’s something in his voice.

  “But . . .?”

  “I’m really not as much into fishing as Tracy,” he says. “I’m more interested in going to Nome to do some prospecting. I prospect for gold a little bit, here and there, and Nome’s calling me. There’s so much gold still there. You go there and the trip pays for itself.”

  “That’s the attitude that brings people to Vegas, isn’t it?”

  My cynicism visibly wounds him, so I backpedal and tell him about Peter Bernard and how he first came to Alaska chasing gold. “Amazing, isn’t it, that a hundred years later you’re still drawn to the same place for the same reason?” I say. It seems to cheer him up. I don’t tell him that he failed miserably at prospecting, like most of the stampeders, because who am I to judge? Someone has to win the lottery, and you can’t win if you don’t play.

  “That gold beach in Nome, it’s calling me pretty hard,” he admits. “It’s still pumping gold out into those sluice boxes. They say if you put the work in, you can still average an ounce a day. I’d be happy with a half an ounce—that’s still $800. It’s kind of expensive to get there, but it’s a great opportunity. You can still do pretty good.” Having seen the reality shows about prospecting—Bering Sea Gold, Gold Rush Alaska, Yukon Gold, a new one almost every season—Bill’s a magnet drawn to precious metal.

  It’s hard to tell what Tracy thinks of his idea. Still high on fishing, he’s wearing an impenetrable smile, and it’s clear this isn’t the first time he’s heard about Bill’s longing for Nome. “Sitka’s beautiful, and we’ll be back here to fish again,” he says, confidently.

  Worrying his mustache, his brother seems less sure.

  17

  Too Far

  When we came to within 500 yards, the whole village population turned out to greet me. There were about 150 men, women and children and twice as many dogs surrounding our sled, everybody yelling: “Yo! He come back!”

  It’s not raining my last night in town, but it might at any moment. Low clouds mingle with fog, soft and pliable, and if I could take them into my hands, I swear I could tear them into smaller pieces like cotton candy.

  I stop by a dinner party to say good-bye to a few friends from my old newspaper days. A decade after I last worked for them, another reporter in a long line of transient employees, I still walk into their home without knocking, greeted like family. Their house—white paint weather-chipped and wind-faded—perches on a small island connected to downtown Sitka by a stone causeway, like a keeper’s residence. Outside the door, seven or eight pair of XTRATUFs hide under a bench like shy puppies. You could go a week in S
itka and not see an umbrella, but nearly everyone wears a good pair of boots; locals favor XTRATUFs with such fervor that they’re often called Sitka Sneakers. Designed for fish holds and open boats, the shin-high neoprene bilge boots the color of boiled beef make for acceptable footwear anywhere: schools, coffee shops, restaurants, court—on defendants, lawyers, and poking out from beneath the hem of the judge’s robe—and even weddings. Sitka celebrates them with the annual Running of the Boots, a regional homage to Pamplona’s bull chase in which participants don costumes and their favorite pair to parade through town.

  Inside the house, the smell of food fills the warm air, mixing with the sounds of voices, kids laughing, and a television. Three generations related by blood and newspaper ink run around, and Lucy, an elderly black Lab friendly with my dog when I lived here, barks through her blindness as she wanders among the friendly chaos. There are hugs. There are drinks. There’s dessert.

  The kitchen window opens onto Sitka Sound, an expansive view of mountain and sea, including the long-dormant volcano on Kruzof Island. Wide and stout, a dead ringer for Mt. Fuji, a Spanish explorer named it Montaña de San Jacinto in 1775, and Captain James Cook named it Mt. Edgecumbe three years later. Cook’s name stuck, easier to pronounce, I suppose. The Tlingit have always called it “L’ux,” but like Denali, renamed for a fat American president who never stepped foot in Alaska, it’s just another Native place name whited-out by people from Outside.9

  Mt. Edgecumbe last erupted April 1, 1974—or at least that’s what Sitka residents thought when they woke to funnels of dark smoke lofting from the cone. That morning, a local joker named Porky Bickar hired a helicopter, dropped a stack of oil-soaked tires into the basin, and set them on fire, a joke he’d planned for years waiting for an April Fool’s Day with clear skies. “Just don’t make an ass of yourself,” his wife told him when he got out of bed that day. Porky’s patience and resolve met with great reward. The legend of his prank spread. In 1980 he received a card in the mail from a stranger in Colorado with a newspaper photo of Mt. St. Helens erupting and a short note: “This time you’ve gone too far.”