25 June 2006: 0433 AM
After awaiting pick-up for almost a day and a half (a tractor trailer with giant dual v-shapes fore and aft that picks gillnetters up by the hull from their comfortable racks inside dry dock at the PAF boat yard in Dillingham), I am happy to report that we are
FINALLY underway.
The boat lists and rocks a comfortable sway. We pull out of the sleepy boat harbor to join the legions of other vessels that left before us. In the background, Dillingham seems a shorebound metropolis of tiny lights looming in front of a cliff's edge on the horizon. The full view of the spiked mountain ranges off our starboard side becomes pronounced and staggering in the waning darkness as the sunlight bubbles up in pockets of purple-pink feathery patches just below the rocky blue-grey grandeur. The morning haze is upon them back on land, and as outsiders looking in, they appear occupied by a technicolor light show.
Watching the Ferking, the Brown Dog (piloted by the guy who once lived with a Palestinian suicide bomber) and all the other boats around the Solstice back in dry dock was a bit like graduation. The people, faces and personalities you've become familiar with over a two-week preparatory pre-season break away in their own directions- and in the empty spots your eyes catch in the harbor a feeling of hope, of want for their good fortune. And a tiny twinge of sadness occupies the space a boat on blocks used to be, as the air of school halls always feels empty without the familiar faces on your first day of class in September.
We've checked the seals, rudder posts and holds for leaks... despite the captain's great anxiety everything appears in order. I took helm after the harbor to the first mountain range while he superfluosly double-checked our appraisals. Despite our difference in age (I am 24, he's 19), my co-hand Max and I work well together. We know our places- he's the brawn and the joker, I'm the strategist and the onehanging out off the bow by two fingers trying to tie in the bowline to a tender fifteen feet away, with all the frigid expanse of certain hypothermia or worse depending on my accuracy within six inches.
I would have it no other way.
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