A Halibut Day

Some people have asked if I was able to go fishing while I was in Alaska for our mission trip. Yes I did, it was a Halibut Trip. We arrived in Alaska on Friday, and Saturday morning at 4:30 I left, with Rodney Haun and Henry Jamieson, for a whole day of fishing.

We hired a guy name Frank to take us out on what I thought was going to be, and turned out to be, a lifelong memory.

We met Frank at his house and loaded into his truck and headed to the landing. They didn't have a paved ramp that you backed your boat down to the water. You took your trailer off the truck and a big tractor hooked up to it and launched your boat from the beach. It was quite impressive.

I was glad that I had a rain suit with a hood. The wind was blowing pretty good and it was a little cool. As the day went on the wind blew harder making conditions for fishing a little rough.

Henry started the day catching two stingrays and proceeded to start throwing up! He spent the rest of the trip lying down, getting up only to throw up and empty the throw-up bucket (which also was used during the day as a urinal and something to collect water to wash off the fish cleaning board ). There is a two fish limit per person. So we had all day to catch 6 huge Halibuts! Well, it didn't quite work out the way we had planned. Because of the bad weather we were not throwing the small ones back. We had a hard enough time catching our two and Henry's.

We caught the last one around 1:00 PM. Most people would have stayed out to about 5 or 6PM but we were getting beat up pretty bad by the weather so we packed up the rods and and tackle and Captain Frank started to crank the motor. You have guessed it already I am sure, the motor didn't crank! He tried and tried but nothing happened. I looked at Rodney after a big wave broke over the back of the boat, "I am going to be sick" and sure enough I lost my breakfast (we hadn't had lunch yet).

The memories are starting! The smell of gas and rocking of the boat made for an interesting afternoon. Captain Frank pulled the anchor up and we started drifting with the tide back toward
the landing. Captain Frank worked on the motor, called friends (who said they couldn't come because it was too rough), called his wife and got her to bring a 5 gal gas can full of gas to the landing, and called other boats, that the people at the landing said were out on this rough day. He used his cell phone to do the calling because his radio didn't work! The cell phone battery was going down pretty fast.

We drifted until about 5 PM when another charter boat came and towed us about a mile from the landing. We tried to tie up to their boat and unload us onto their boat but the rough seas broke the ropes! There was no way we could get Big 'sick' Henry into that boat anyway! They couldn't take us to the landing because there was no way to get the boat on the trailer without power, and with the wind and waves pounding us. We had to wait until the tide turned again so it could push us in toward the landing. The boat that towed us went to the landing and unloaded their passengers and brought us the 5 gal. can of gas his wife dropped off . We hooked the new gas to the trolling motor and when the tide changed we headed toward the shore. Riding the waves , we surfed up on the trailer and 4 young people jumped in the water and hooked us up to the trailer and the tractor pulled us out. We got out of the boat at 7 PM. Drifting for over 6 hours!

As we were heading home Captain Frank asked us if we would like to go to a Chinese Restaurant for supper! Henry had come back to life after he got off the boat, but we still didn't want to eat Chinese.

Some questions from me to Captain Frank:
1. Where are your friends? What kind of guy has no one who will come help him? Get some new friends!
2. Where is the Coast Guard? They were too far away to come help us! What good is a Coast Guard that can't come that far?
3. How can you think of Chinese food after all this?

Alaskan memories..A Halibut Day