Anchorage Daily News

KODIAK -- I grew up around boats, but it was my older brother who learned how to drive a skiff and repair an outboard motor. On family fishing trips when we were kids, my sister and I were content to trail ribbons tied to CareBears or My Little Ponies in the wake.

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This summer I got my first boat, a 17-foot Boston Whaler with a two-stroke, 60-horse Yamaha. Before her retirement 10 years ago, she was one of the main fishing skiffs at our setnet site on the west side of Kodiak Island, hauling hundreds of thousands of salmon. This was the first skiff my husband. Peter. worked from as a crewman when he was 13. He remembers salmon floating around his boots when they picked the nets in rough seas. When waves broke over the bow, they sometimes washed fish out the transom.

Now we fish from large aluminum skiffs, but a couple of years ago we pulled the old Whaler out of the beach grass for repairs. The crewman who did much of the fiberglass work used to make surfboards in California; he was as thorough as if she were a longboard instead of a 50-year-old boat. She's watertight and solid, but she could use a paint job. The deck is the faded aqua of tropical oceans I daydream about on rainy summer days. The yellow fiberglass patches on her hull make me think of roller skating scars.

I was nervous when I first took the skiff to Larsen Bay. "You're sure it won't sink?" I asked my husband.

"You could chain-saw this in half with people sitting in both ends, and they would both keep floating," he said. "This skiff could fill with water and it would still float."

I wish I didn't know that his information came from old Boston Whaler commercials. But I figured this trip had to be smoother than my past attempts in other boats.

The first time I was alone in one of our aluminum skiffs was during a gale. We drove two skiffs side by side, but my husband anticipated and adjusted for the waves while I clung to the steering wheel and managed to plow into each one. It was like aiming for potholes. Water knocked my hood back and streamed under my raingear and into my boots.

That same summer, I made my first solo crossing of Uyak Bay in a camouflaged duck-hunting raft. Our chocolate Lab rode in the bow. To steer with the tiller handle required perching on a tubular side a few feet from the water. By the middle of the bay, the waves had grown impossibly big. Suddenly the seaworthy raft felt more like an inflatable wading pool. I couldn't predict the next roll of water, and the swells were disorienting. The dog paced with his tail between his legs. "No way out but through," I recited in between praying and hollering at the dog to sit down.

Now as I head to the village of Larsen Bay, I drive slowly until the butterflies sink. I pass the channel markers and hear my brother's voice from a sailing trip in college, "Red, right, returning." I pass the Russian Orthodox Church and round Frenchie's Point, where crows are rising off the bluff like bits of ash from a campfire. The breeze and open air bring the same thrill as does coasting a bicycle down a long hill or kicking toward blue sky on a swing set. Driving the skiff gives back the feeling of freedom I've missed without a road to our door.

Soon we will put the skiffs away for winter. Outside the cabin windows, the changing season shows in stronger wind and waves. My skiff nods from the mooring line, white as a snowbank during breakup. With her engine fogged and flushed, the Whaler will sit dry in the warehouse until spring. Next summer I'll take my son beachcombing or berry picking in this skiff. On the way to his grandparents' cabin, we'll look for otters and seals at the haulout rock. I'll take my brother fishing when he comes out for a visit.

Painted on the bow is a fist pointing forward, the artwork of a crewman in the '80s. It points in various directions depending on the wind. This way to Katmai. This way to the head of Uyak Bay and Kodiak bears dark as molasses. This way to Cape Town, Sydney, San Francisco, Shanghai. I would never venture as far as Shelikof Strait, but I like thinking about the ocean we share, traveling on an element that moves with the sky and moon and the earth below it. No lanes, just always changing open space.

Kodiak-based Sara Loewen, formerly a teacher and now a student in the Master of Fine Arts program at UAA, fishes in Uyak Bay with her husband, Peter, and 1-year-old son.

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