False Pass

When my dad told me about his decision to go fishing in False Pass, the farthest salmon fishing grounds from home, I thought that he was joking. Eventually I got the jist that he was dead serious. That took about five minutes to sink in, but then I asked my dad a question that had started nagging me: "How are we going to fish in False Pass with our little 32-foot boat?"

"We are going to build us a brand new boat", Dad said to a surprised version of me.

"When is the work going to start?" I asked my dad after I got over my shock.

"Next week".

"OK!" I said, even more confused than ever and that ended our conversation.

As dad promised, the work on our new boat began a week after we had our little "talk". Lots of work went into our new boat with a lot of people helping us.

    Having finished our boat, the Magnum, with little time to spare, we threw ourselves into preparing for the salmon season in the farthest, southwestern reaches of Alaska, on our brand new fishing boat. We had to buy enough food, get enough clothes, and all of the other things that we would need so that it would last for at least a month.  Finally we had everything that we need and it was time to go, but at the last minute a problem developed.

On the day that we were supposed to go off for fishing, we found that our RSW, the fish cooling system we had installed into the fish hold, was not calibrated the way it was supposed to be. This problem was not very big, but it was going to take us a long time get it fixed. When we were done fixing the problem it was already 2 in the morning but that didn't discourage us. We just untied the Magnum from the dock and set out to False Pass. 

Our voyage to King Cove, the place where the Peter Pan Seafood headquarters of False Pass, (the cannery that bought our fish during the whole summer) was located, took us 72 hours of driving. After everything was arranged at King Cove, we set off to the fishing grounds, which took us another half-day of driving. After we started fishing everything went as smooth as clockwork. We fished when it was open and stayed in "harbors" when it was closed.

Our "harbors" were bays that we dropped anchor in, in order to get shelter from the wind. On the Kodiak side of the Aleutian chain, we spent our Sundays, holydays, and the days when the fishing was closed in a bay called Dora Harbor. There is nothing special about it; it is just a bay with some rocks and a couple of hills. On the other side of the Aleution Chain we stayed in two different "harbors": Port Moller and Port Heiden. Port Moller actually looked like a harbor.  It had a Peter Pan Seafoods station in it and it had an actual dock. It also had a post office, a store, and a laundrymat. Port Heiden, on the other hand, was just a plain bay that we anchored in, but if we could get to shore and walk about two miles, we would be able to get to a store!!!

So we basically fished, went to stores when we could, got some rest when we could, and we did this until it was time to home. We left for fishing on June 6^th and we came back home on July 25^th, just three days before my birthday (that made me really happy). Our journey to False Pass was made on our boat, but our return journey required our boat and a couple of airplanes. The first thing we had to do was get our boat to a harbor that had some decent docks. Why? Well, because our 48 foot long boat needed a place that had a decent harbor, with docks that could hold our boat in case of really strong winds. Out of all of the real harbors, (King Cove and Port Moller) King Cove had the best, strongest docks.  We got to King Cove harbor and tied up to a dock well enough so the boat would stay in place for as long as we needed it to. The second thing we needed to do was get some transportation to Cold Bay, an airport where PenAir landed. Fortunately Peter Pan Seafoods came through for us. When it was time to go they sent a car for us. The car drove us five miles to an airstrip, where two, five seater, single engine planes were waiting for us. The planes took us to Cold Bay. A PenAir plane took us to Anchorage (fortunately mom had bought the airplane tickets before it was time for us to go). From Anchorage we drove all the way home. When got home I felt like I had just come home from a very great and long journey.