SEWARD -- The biggest winner in the Armed Services Combat Fishing Tournament staged out of this Alaska port on Thursday was Master Sgt. Brent Johnson from Elmendorf Air Base, but there were no losers.
Twenty-one-year-old Pvt. Charles Necessary from Tennessee, now stationed at Fort Richardson, caught only a single grey cod, yet remained as happy as could be on a day that started gray with spits of rain before the sun broke through a patchy sky.
"I caught my fish," Necessary said. "I was coming out here to catch a fish. I caught a fish. It made my day. Mission accomplished."
Along with Johnson and Necessary, about 400 other active-duty Alaska military showed up to enjoy a free day of fishing, thanks to the donations of dozens of Alaska businesses. Tournament organizers Bob Candopolous and Keith Manternach, who have organized the event for the past three years, said the tribute to America's servicemen and women has grown into the biggest of its kind in the country.
Seward charter businesses have embraced the tournament, which along with free fishing offers a bounty of prizes in big-fish and drawing competitions. Nearly 30 charters volunteered their boats this year, despite dire predictions about what the summer could bring for Alaska tourism businesses.
M/V Florette C skipper Dianne Dubuc put to sea undeterred by a malfunctioning head aboard her 53-foot troller. Dubuc rendered the boat functional by temporarily stuffing a port-a-pottie in the shower aboard the vessel that serves as her home while in port.
She spent the morning chatting up the servicemen onboard, supervising deckhand Mike Grassmid, and ducking below decks regularly to try to fix the head. She eventually got the head running, but didn't do so well with the fish.
Necessary brushed off profuse apologies she later offered for a slow day's fishing. He couldn't have had a more enjoyable day, he said.
Dubuc had hoped to put Necessary and a half-dozen others onto some king salmon. Six of those fabled Alaska fish had been brought aboard the Florette C on Wednesday, she said.
When she went looking for more off Callisto Head the next day, though, the salmon were gone, replaced instead by schools of cod, which taste good, but don't put up much of a battle when hooked.
No one on board seemed to care. Everybody drank the beer and ate the munchies provided by BP Alaska, savored the chicken offered by Anchorage's famous Lucky Wishbone restaurant, watched the mountain goats scrambling across the faces of the cliffs on mountains rising straight from the sea to heights of thousands of feet along Resurrection Bay, and generally enjoyed themselves.
"I love Alaska," said Airman Fred Hein from Michigan, now serving at Elmendorf. "I gotta get my wife out here. She loves being on boats."
Derby winner Johnson, ironically, doesn't exactly love being on boats. He confessed Friday that he almost skipped the derby because of a concern about once again getting seasick.
Instead, though, he dosed up with Dramamine, slipped on the pressurized wrist bands said to help ward off motion sickness, and joined other serviceman celebrating the summer start of the Alaska fishing season.
For Johnson, it was a big improvement on last year. He spent the summer of 2008 in Iraq. It was hot, he said, and he spent a lot of time on a treadmill trying to build up his running mileage for the Mayors Midnight Sun Marathon in Anchorage on June 20. The only really good part, he said, was the colonel under whom he served in Iraq was a serious, big-time runner.
"It was like having my own personal coach,'' Johnson said.
Thursday he had his own personal guide, sort of. Saltwater Safari Company put Johnson and a boatload of others over some good fish, and Johnson -- along with Todd Palin, husband of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, got lucky.
Palin was along as a visiting celebrity. When a rod bent with a strike, he picked it up and hooked a fish big enough to open a whole can of political worms for Candopolous and Manternach. Had Palin's catch involved anyone else, the rod might simply have been handed to another, the fish fought and landed, and the 146.6-pound-halibut credited to a serviceman on the boat. This sort of rod-passing goes on with some regularity in the Alaska charter business.
Technically, however, Alaska law says that the angler who hooks the fish is the angler who has legally caught the fish -- no matter who lands it. With Palin hooked into a halibut that was obviously big, there was reportedly a fair bit of discussion aboard the boat about what to do, especially given the ability of the Palin clan to attract controversy.
Manternach did not want to talk about any of this on Friday, but he said the decision was made that in the best interests of everyone involved, the wise thing to do was to follow the exact letter of the law, let Palin land the fish, and hope it got overshadowed by something bigger.
As luck would have it for organizers, it did. Johnson's 183-pound catch (essentially all halibut over 100 pounds are spawning females) topped Palin's biggest-ever catch by a good 37 pounds. Johnson's fish was weighed in front of a big crowd while Palin's was whisked away toward a small group of dignitaries.
Sarah Palin was nowhere to be seen, though she reportedly showed up in the evening for a banquet with the servicemen.
Organizers were relieved Todd Palin turned out to have the punier of fish. Johnson, meanwhile, was ecstatic about his catch.
"It's by far the biggest fish I ever caught,'' said the native of Onalaska, Wis., who first came to Alaska in 1995 and keeps plotting ways to come back. An 18-year Air Force veteran, the 38-year-old Johnson fears he will be rotated south if he again re-enlists. But he's already calculating Alaska retirement possibilities.
"I love this state,'' he said.
The sentiment is not uncommon among those who like to hunt, fish, snowmobile, ski and play hockey -- all of which Johnson likes to do.
What he really doesn't like to do is get seasick.
"I was really apprehensive about going out Thursday,'' he said. Fortunately, though, his prophylactic treatments worked, and while others on his boat were getting sick, "I was fine,'' Johnson said.
"That makes it a lot more fun.''
So does catching a fish that brings home bragging rights and a $20,000 credit on a new vehicle from the Lithia dealership in Anchorage.
Johnson said he thought when he hooked the halibut that he was into a good one, but he wasn't positive. It was only the second fish of the day on the boat, and the first to emerge from the depths had been a bait-size "chicken" halibut tossed back as too small to keep.
This fish "ran a little bit after he hit, and I thought that was a good sign,'' Johnson said, but then the halibut started coming up without much of a struggle. The weight on the end of the rod indicated something fairly substantial, but there wasn't enough of a fight to make Johnson think of anything bigger than 25 or 30 pounds.
About halfway to the surface that changed.
"That's when he started running and taking more line than I could get back,'' Johnson said.
From that point on, things just got crazier. Johnson said he was little surprised to find himself sore on Friday from the effort of hoisting the halibut to the rolling surface of the Gulf of Alaska off Montague Island. He does remember clearly that when he got the fish to the surface, the boat crew went a little berserk.
"They were shouting, 'Oh, my God! Oh, my God!' '' Johnson said.
The angler, who had yet to get a look at the fish, wasn't sure what was going on, but the crew tossed aside the gaff normally used to bring halibut aboard and went looking for a harpoon, the tool used by whalers.
While the crew was readying the harpoon, Johnson said, "the fish kind of almost surfaced, and then it took a run on me.''
He worked it back to the boat, got a look at it, saw that it was big, and then the crew went in for the kill.
"They harpooned him, and it was just like that scene in (the movie) 'Jaws,' '' Johnson said.
The big fish took off, line coiled on deck started screaming overboard, and then a buoy went flying off the deck into the ocean behind the fast disappearing line.
By then, Johnson added, "I was starting to get a little excited.''
A few minutes more, though, and the fish was safely in the boat.
"This was the first fish we actually put in the boat,'' Johnson added. "The crew kept telling me I had the winner."
He wasn't so sure, but by then didn't really care if he won any prizes or not. He figured he already had one big prize.
"My mom and my sister, who live in Wisconsin, are always looking to me coming home because I bring halibut,'' Johnson said.
He's got lots of halibut to bring this time. Meanwhile, he doesn't know what he's going to do with the credit at Lithia, though he has thought about cashing it out to get the money for a new snowmachine.
One of the things he did before going to Iraq last year was sell his Arctic Cat. Now he misses it.
Find Craig Medred online at adn.com/contact/cmedred or call 257-4588.
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By CRAIG MEDRED
cmedred@adn.com