Anchorage Daily News

TUNUNAK -- "Let's go all manual power," Felix said as his brother cut the twin 90-horsepower Yamaha outboards. Felix leaned over the rail and gaffed the buoy. His son yanked the buoy out of the water and started heaving the yellow line from the depths of the Bering Sea. The buoy line was tied to a narrow gray line that nearly disappeared in the clouded darkness of midnight. As it passed through our hands it was set with fresh bait, or live, flopping halibut were unhooked and placed in the hold.

For the next two hours we pulled and unclipped and rebaited and harvested fish, the three of us hauling the 1,800-foot line across the bow of the ship hand over hand while Felix's brother ran back and forth on the slimy deck of the narrow aluminum boat with fresh bait.

At one point, Felix hollered out something about the fun we were having. He said it several times during the 26 hours we were working together.

When I first arrived in Tununak last year, I had hoped to go halibut fishing. Perhaps no one wanted the liability of losing the new principal at sea before he even started his job. Whatever the case, I did not go fishing last year.

So when Felix invited me to join his crew for an overnight trip, I jumped at the chance. Still, while I have overnighted on a fishing trip, and I have done so without sleep, I was not quite prepared for this trip.

The trip was perfect for the first 30 minutes as we cruised out of the river that defines the spit of land that is Tununak and settled into the shallow, scalloped bay guarded by a pair of thousand-foot peaks.

However, 30 minutes later we were into the work portion, chipping away at frozen blocks of herring, our halibut bait, to separate individual fish and then hack them into slices small enough to fit on the hook. Two hundred hooks spread out over a line more than three-tenths of a mile long.

Nearly two hours later the four of us were reclining on coolers or balancing on extra buoys. Stanley thermos lid cups steamed with coffee. Felix made a comment about how the fun part is checking the long line and pulling in all those "halibuts," as we say here. Cutting bait and baiting hooks is something that Felix does not enjoy, hence my presence.

Four hours later we were hauling in the line using a hydraulic winch, snapping hooks off in rapid succession and pulling halibuts from the line in good numbers. The day was warm without being hot. There was sun for the first time in nearly three weeks, and the wind was actually pleasant.

Unfortunately, this is the Bering Sea coast. The constant among weather patterns is that they will change and that there will be wind. Even as we were lazily jigging for halibut while we waited for the long line to soak a second time, clouds were growing over Nunivak and Nelson islands. From our vantage point just off Cape Vancouver, the two cloud systems seemed destined to meet over our heads.

By 2 in the morning, while the four of us were trying to rein in the long line again, this time by hand, there was only a tiny sliver of sky along the northeast horizon where a faint glow remained. However, the temperature had dropped with the clouds and night and the wind had increased. Despite the fact that it was July 23, the temperature was not above 45 degrees. The wind chill put the temperature just a few degrees above freezing, in the dead of summer. Snow from the deep drifts of winter still lingered in the deep hollows of the island.

"Forget it," Felix said, when we had hand-pulled nearly a third of the line. "We will wait till we can see." With that, the four of us huddled down against the gunwales of the boat, all of us still wearing our raingear, some of us wrapped in blue tarps like cocoons on the plywood and aluminum floor, some of us sleeping and snoring, some of us shivering and restlessly waiting for the dawn.

Despite the fact that we call it the land of the midnight sun, Tununak is set at nearly the same latitude as Anchorage. Therefore, at night in July the sun is down for just more than six hours. Add to this a suffocating layer of clouds and you arrive at what we woke to in the morning. The sea itself swelled and chopped like liquid gun metal, with a deep and menacing potential.

We lit the old battered Coleman stove, started the water to boil for coffee and opened a can of Spam and the box of Pilot Crackers for breakfast. Slowly daylight came back into the world and the ocean lightened while the clouds darkened. We were hauling the long line up with the winch one final time when it started to rain. The horizon turned a deep slate gray, and the clouds looked less like an amalgamation and more like a solid wall. We finished hauling the line, careening in the rising swells. We stowed the gear and headed for home, only to drive right past the village about a mile offshore. The tide was out and the bay was nothing but a wide stretch of mud dotted with seagulls. Three hours we waited in the cold wind and rain and waves before making the run home.

Two hundred yards from shore we scraped bottom and waited another hour for the tide to come up enough to drift into the river mouth. Felix passed the time heaving bits of leftover bait at the hundred seagulls and watching the ensuing feathery scuffles.

He turned and looked at the dark sky behind us. Rain pelted our gear. "That'll be blue sky soon," he said, pointing to the darkest edge of cloud. Sure enough, as the boat scraped bottom and we prepared to offload our fish, the sun came out and the clouds receded like the tide. I stared up at the blue and thought how fishing is so much fun.

R. Brett Stirling lives and writes in Tununak on Nelson Island, about 110 miles west of Bethel. He is principal of Paul T. Albert Memorial School.

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