by Will Hobbs
“Two miles!” I cried. “Two crummy miles!”
Eyes constantly shifting from the seas to the navigation monitor, I steered and worked the throttle. It was moment to moment trying to adjust to the onslaught.
Time was my enemy, as much as the storm. In the next forty-five minutes, it was all I could do to gain a mile. Two-thirty, the target, had sickeningly come and gone. There was only fifteen minutes left of the slack tide.
I kept staring into the dark rain and flying spindrift as I battled closer. Land was close, but I couldn’t see it. What I did see, suddenly, was an almost continuous line of breaking waves. In the center, there was a hole, the narrowest of slots. The entrance to Lituya Bay? The channel through the bar? The gate?
The instruments said I was only half a mile off the bay. On the left-hand side, behind the waves, I thought I saw a line of spindly trees. I didn’t know for sure, but I had to believe they were growing along the spit Torsen had described, the narrow neck of land on the north side of the bottleneck entrance to the bay.
Yes, I could see it all now, the spit on the left, the breaking waves in front of the bottleneck, the land on the right. I was looking at the mouth of Lituya Bay.
I checked my watch. The slack between tides was over. The tide was ebbing; water was beginning to pour out of the bay. I’d come too late.
My forearms were cramping but I hung tight to the wheel as the storm threatened to drive the Petrel back to sea. Before the slot closed, I had to go for it. There was no giving up on Lituya Bay. Trying to make it to Cape Fairweather at the height of the storm would be suicidal.
I stayed on course, never taking my eyes off the slot in the line of ferocious breakers. With every minute, the entrance was shrinking.
Then, right before my eyes, the gate closed. The gap was gone. The huge white surf was breaking continuously across the bar. What now?
If I tried to punch through at the beginning of low tide, and hung up on the sand bar with the surf much more powerful than normal and the hold uncovered, the Petrel would be swamped in a hurry, then broken to bits.
Surf more powerful than normal…did that change things? Could the storm surge, all that wind-driven water piling onto the coast, provide me enough extra water to work with, to float me high enough and push me on through without being immobilized by the current rushing out of the bay? It was a desperate theory.
Out of nowhere, my last morning in Protection came back to me, so real I could hear the fire crackling in the stove. I saw the floathouse suddenly pitch up in the air, saw the sugar bowl sail across the table, saw my dad reach out to grab it and miss. There we were, running out onto the deck, laughing, in time to see the whale come out from underneath. “It’s a good sign for Robbie fishing the big water,” Maddie had said.
“We’ll soon find out, Maddie.” I laughed out loud as I aimed the bow of the Storm Petrel for the violent entrance of Lituya Bay, at the same angle that the storm was sending its huge swells against the bar. I made sure my survival suit was zippered up as far as it would go.
I thought of Tor at the last, when his weight was pulling me into the ocean, how he’d told me to let go. He was done, and he knew it. Whatever terrible thoughts he’d been thinking since he first met me, the last thing on his mind had been that he wanted me to live.
“I aim to,” I said aloud. “Your Petrel and your deckhand have made it this far.”
I eased back on the throttle. I felt a big lump roll under the boat, then another and another. Some of the swells were bigger than others.
“Gotta pick the right one,” I shouted above the whine of the wind.
Over my shoulder, I spotted the swell I wanted. It was rising, rising, rising, and I wasn’t going to let it slide underneath me. I gunned the Petrel full throttle, and the troller plunged ahead with the swell. I was committed. When this enormous wave broke onto the current shooting out of the bay, the collision was going to be colossal. If the Petrel foundered, I had to bail out fast. The ocean would make short work of her.
“Hang on,” I told myself. “It won’t be long.” I stood up, spread my feet wide, and clung to the spokes of the wheel with my hands clenched tight as talons. The boat came off the crest of the wave in free fall, mountains of water on both sides, and it hit bottom with a thud. The troller shuddered, and I was sure it was the end.
It was all white water and confusion. For the time being, we were intact. It seemed possible that the hull had withstood the impact. The propeller was still responding and so was the rudder. We must have bounced loose off the bottom. I had a death grip on the wheel—the turbulence was all but overwhelming—and was cranking it hard left to keep the boat from being spun into the whirlpools.
Next thing I knew, the Storm Petrel was being sucked into the backwash. Over my shoulder, the next wave was building higher and higher and was about to break. I pointed the nose of the Petrel directly into the current and slammed the throttle forward. The boat began to gain against the current. Relative to the trees on the spit, directly opposite, she was making headway.
How much headway, that was the question. The tremendous wave looming above the Petrel was about to break on her back. “Go, go!” I screamed. The wave broke behind us instead of on top of us. Its surge gave an assist, adding enough water and momentum to allow her to slip inside the bay, taking me along for the ride.
Suddenly I saw trollers, dozens of trollers anchored inside Lituya Bay.
They must have been watching. They all started blowing their foghorns.
As I motored into the bay, my eyes filled with tears, and I gave a few blasts in return.
20
ONCE INSIDE THE BAY, I steered for the nearest troller. I brought the Storm Petrel as close as possible to the Slow and Easy, whose skipper appeared on the deck. We were only a stone’s throw apart but had to holler back and forth over the wind. At last he understood me. I moved a little farther off and dropped anchor while he lowered his skiff to come and get me. I was soon inside his wheelhouse, on the radio, reporting Tor’s disappearance.
Tor wasn’t the only one missing. In the last hour, two trollers had sunk trying to make it to Cape Fairweather. Both had been able to broadcast Mayday calls before they went down. Two Coast Guard helicopter teams with swimmers were attempting their rescue with the storm still raging.
“You’re lucky to be alive,” the skipper of the Slow and Easy told me. “Lucky you gambled on Lituya and lucky you made it across the bar.”
Doug Fender, one of the many solo skippers this king season, was happy to have company. He’d been sixteen days alone and looked pretty haggard, still covered with salmon scales. In his mirror, I looked worse. Fender made a slumgullion stew—some canned stuff with onions, carrots, and potatoes thrown in—and we listened to the radio as we ate. The trollers in the bay were all comparing notes about the storm. Everyone was anxious to hear the fate of the missing fishermen.
It wasn’t long before we heard that the skipper of the Trumpeter, along with his deckhand, had been rescued by the Coast Guard swimmers. They’d been found in their life raft, both wearing survival suits. Torsen and the skipper of the Distant Thunder were still missing.
I asked Fender where Tor’s body might wash up. He described a tide rip a few miles north that collected most of the flotsam and jetsam along that stretch of coast. The weather forecast described the storm as fast moving. There was a good chance it would be over by sunrise.
The trollers in Lituya Bay were making plans to cross the bar in the morning, before high tide ended and the entrance closed. I was asleep aboard the Storm Petrel by a quarter to eight, counting on a borrowed alarm clock to wake me.
At six the next morning I woke to the fresh memory of the storm, scenes on a scale too huge and terrible to be believed, yet it had all happened: the violence of the water, Tor in the ocean without a survival suit, me trying to gaff him like a salmon. These were images that were never going to go away.
I climbed the ladder into the emptiness o
f the wheelhouse. With his equipment and possessions all around me—much of it still on the floor—Torsen’s absence loomed large. I shuddered remembering him going down at the last, his acceptance of it.
I went out onto the deck to see if the weather was going to pin me down for another day.
The storm was gone. I could see the forest surrounding the bay, the island at its center, the glaciers at its head, and all the way up the great white wall. Jagged peaks were shining in the morning light.
Fender came onto his deck and told me the news. His voice carried easily across the still water. The two missing skippers were still unaccounted for. I dreaded the inevitable: I would have to contact Tor’s daughter as soon as possible.
I crossed the bar in the Storm Petrel at the next high tide, while the going was good, along with the small fleet of trollers that had sheltered in Lituya Bay. Once on the ocean, the trollers headed south. King season was over, and they were eager to sell. Almost all of them were heading to the closest fish plant, at Pelican.
I wanted to sell as much as any of them. Wanted more, even, to get home. Once out of the bay, though, I turned north. It wasn’t only Torsen’s body I was looking for, it was the milk crate and the plaques.
I heard a helicopter but I couldn’t see it. No doubt they’d been searching all night.
By the time I reached the tide rip, there were trollers on the horizon that were heading my way. These were the boats that had sheltered at Cape Fairweather. They would be abreast of my position in half an hour. I had thirty minutes to look, and then I would join them for the run down to Pelican.
It was tricky guiding the Storm Petrel alongside the rip. It was swirling with opposing currents, awash with kelp and other debris that could foul the propeller. I was afraid I might actually find Torsen’s body, all swathed in kelp. Finding the crate seemed impossible. All that rope I had used to secure the big glass float inside the crate was the same shade of brown as the bull kelp. I kept telling myself to look for the roundness of the ball camouflaged by the rope. That was the only thing that would give it away.
I had passed back and forth along the rip half a dozen times, as slowly as possible, and was close to giving up when a pair of sea otters caught my eye. They were playing in the rafts of kelp unmoored by the storm. I thought I saw a third otter, then realized it wasn’t moving in any direction, just washing back and forth with the swells.
The third otter was the prize I was looking for. I soon had it on board, none the worse for wear: the big green fishing float for my sister, the Russian plaques for history.
Two weeks later, I met up with Torsen’s daughter. Grace came to Port Protection and stayed with my family. She’d come to arrange for the sale of the Storm Petrel, which my father and I had brought home from Pelican at her request.
I didn’t know what to expect. How had she taken the news of her father’s death? What would she think of me? She had said almost nothing when I called her with the grim news.
When Moose Borden brought her in the air taxi and she first stepped onto the deck of our floathouse, tears came to her eyes and to mine. “And so we meet, Robbie Daniels,” she said. “I’ve brought the journal, Rezanov’s journal. It was in my father’s safe-deposit box. Thank you so much for telling me about it.”
The first low tide that came along, Grace and I went for a slow walk around the cove. “Ever since he lost my mother,” she began, “my father has been a difficult man.”
I was surprised by how quickly she had cut to the chase, and I didn’t know quite how to respond.
“I’ll bet he was hard to work for,” she said with a smile.
“We had our ups and downs.”
“Tell me about the storm,” she said, “and how he died.”
I told her about Tor going out to secure the starboard trolling pole, getting swept over, how I threw him the crate with the glass ball and the plaques. I spared no detail, not even the gaff hook. It was what happened at the last, Tor saving my life by warning me to let go, that gave her the comfort she was looking for. Grace appreciated everything I told her about her father—especially that he’d talked of her and her mother.
“What should I do with the plaques and the journal?” she asked.
“There’s a museum in Sitka that has the first plaque ever found. I think your plaques and the journal belong in that museum, since Sitka was the capital of Russian Alaska.”
“Then that’s where they’ll go. Meanwhile, I have some settling up to do with you.”
Back at the floathouse, Grace wrote me a check for my fifteen percent of the take from the two fish sales, the small one to the Angie and the big one to Pelican Seafoods. It came to $2,256, far more than I’d ever hoped to make in one king season.
From Protection we all went to Sitka in the Storm Petrel, its blown-out windows and the radio antenna freshly replaced. Once we tied up, we headed straight for the Bishop’s House Museum. My family and I were proud to be there with Grace, to be a part of it, when she presented the plaques and the journal on behalf of her father. It turned out that Tor Torsen was going to be famous instead of infamous, in spite of himself.
On the way back to Protection, I was at the wheel and the other four were at the table as we skirted the tide rips off of Cape Ommaney. Grace got up and looked out the wheelhouse window at the drama of the surf pounding the tip of the cape. “It doesn’t matter if my father’s body is never found,” she said softly. “In a way, it would be fitting if the sea, which he loved so much, took him to be with my mother.”
There was a silence, and then Maddie said, “Your father fished on the prettiest boat there ever was.”
Grace turned around and smiled. “I know, Maddie, and I’ve been thinking. I sure hate to sell the Petrel to strangers.”
It took a few seconds for this to sink in. “We could never afford her,” my father said. “She’s not in the same class with our Chimes of Freedom.”
Grace’s eyes, a deep sea green like her father’s, were all lit up. “What if we were simply to exchange boats straight across? I’m certain my father would have liked that.”
My mother gasped. “We couldn’t—”
“No, really,” Grace said. “I’d like to be able to picture you all together on the Petrel, just like now.”
I was still trying to get ahold of what she was saying. This was huge.
But was it true, like she’d said, that Tor would have wanted me to end up with his boat? I searched for a memory. Suddenly I could see him hanging on the hayrack and watching me pull king salmon. I could almost hear his gruff voice saying, “Not bad for a morning’s work.”
So many things came flooding back: the dawn colors our first day out, all four lines rattling, the two of us pulling salmon side by side, the roll of the open ocean, the stone-washed beauty of the capes. Our feelings for the trolling life were one and the same, and Tor had known that. The rest of it, the dark parts of our journey, I wanted to put behind me, let it all drop to the bottom of the Pacific. Maybe Grace was right, that this was what her father would have wanted.
My mother got up and stood next to Grace. They were both looking over the bow into the distance. “We could fish the outside waters off Addington and Chirikof, right from home,” my mother said. “It would be a big addition to our economy to be able to fish king season, and it would mean college money for Robbie and Maddie.”
“Let’s ask the man at the wheel,” my father said. “What do you say, Robbie? You’re the one with the experience on the outside waters.”
“As long as we keep land in sight,” I said. “Count me in.”
I was already thinking that I wouldn’t have to wait until next year’s king season to show my family the wonders of Cape Addington. In a couple of weeks, the cohos would be running strong out there.
These outside waters were in my blood now. It would be a while before I felt okay about taking the Petrel out as far as Tor and I had gone, but I knew there would come a day when I’d point her bow back t
oward the Fairweather Grounds. Maybe it’s true that the trolling way of life is in its twilight years. But the twilight lasts a long, long time up here in Alaska, and I mean to enjoy every minute of it.
Author’s Note
I’ve often mined my personal experience for fiction, but never so quickly as with Leaving Protection. I had been visiting southeast Alaska for years, but this story was a direct result of two visits in 2002, the first in May and the second in July.
In May my wife, Jean, and I visited historic sites in Sitka, the old Russian capital. I have a longtime interest in the history of Russian Alaska. From Sitka we traveled via Ketchikan to Prince of Wales Island and the town of Craig. Sitka and Craig are the foremost commercial fishing harbors among the outer islands of Southeast.
I was in Craig at the invitation of a teacher, Julie Yates. It was in Craig’s harbor I first set foot on a salmon troller, her father’s boat and her namesake, the Julie Kristine. I had long been captivated by these picturesque boats, and I told her that one of my great ambitions in life was to catch a king salmon. Julie suggested I should return one day and work with her and her dad on the Julie Kristine. I told her I would love to take her up on that. She added that I should write a novel about commercial fishing. I said that sounded like a great idea, but I would like to go fishing whether or not it led to a story.
Little did I know how soon I would be working aboard that boat. In June, a forest fire closed the wilderness close to my home in Colorado, where I’d been planning a backpacking trip. Late in the month, I called Julie up and asked if, by any chance, I might join her and her father that very summer. She talked with her father, George, and called right back. “Hop on a plane,” she told me. “King season starts the first of July.”
By pure luck, I got in on the best king salmon season in many years. Julie and her father returned from their first outing with eight hundred kings, plus half as many cohos. I joined them for their second and third trips, seven days of fishing combined.