On a recent weekday 44-year-old Merle Apassingok captained his father's sailboat, hunting bowhead whales in falling snow off St. Lawrence island. His nephew Agra labored to bail water the way Apassingok had as a boy.
"I was telling my crew, I said, 'Hey Agra, you're probably the only 9-year-old boy in the whole world sailing for whales in a walrus skin boat,' and then we started laughing," Apassingok said.
The joke was on them. Nearby, Apassingok's younger brother hunted in yet another handmade skin boat, with yet another 9-year-old crew member learning the same skills.
It's springtime in the coastal villages of the Alaska Arctic. As it has for generations, that means whaling season.
Crews have begun preparing for the hunt or have already hit the water along the North Slope and St. Lawrence Island, less than 40 miles from Siberia in the Bering Sea.
In Barrow, some of the 40 registered whaling captains have put their crews to work breaking trail, clearing a path to an open lead in the sea ice, said Eugene Brower, president of the city's whaling captain association. As of Sunday, two crews were out looking for whales, he said.
To the southwest, a Gambell crew caught what looked to be the first whale of the spring season on Easter Sunday.
"It popped up right in front of us ... My striker (Edwin Campbell) just had enough time to get his gear ready and strike it," said 29-year-old captain Lloyd Apatiki.
Temperatures that day lingered between 0 and 15 degrees, cold enough to frostbite your face, Apatiki said. His crew lost its darting gun when the whale dragged it beneath the young sea ice.
Boats captained by brothers John and Merle Apassingok arrived to help, each crew delivering another harpoon to the whale to kill it.
A 28-foot, 6-inch female, the whale was Apatiki's first, he said. The crew ate some of the blubber and skin raw that night like sushi during the roughly two hours it took to tow the bowhead to shore.
"When somebody catches a whale, the whole village gets happy and there's a lot of people who go down to the beach, no matter how late it is," Apatiki said.
Portions of the whale are divided among village boat captains, said Deborah Apatiki, the captain's mother. Everyone is welcome to whatever is left.
"We look forward to it. It brings the community together like nothing else," said Deborah Apatiki, who sometimes fries the meat and skin with bacon and onions.
"You cover it with flour and then whatever seasoning you want to use, and then you can chop it up and make meatloaf," she said.
Preparations for the spring bowhead season begin as early as a year in advance, said Merle Apassingok. Under the tutelage of his father, he oversaw the effort to re-canvas his boat with two-and-a-half walrus skins last July.
"Gambell is probably the only site in the world where we still sail for whales in a walrus-skin boat. There's other communities that have a skin boat, but they don't sail. They paddle out to the (whales) and then strike them," said Apassingok, who started whaling at 8 years old. He said Gambell without whaling would be like Thanksgiving without turkey.
He learned how to build skin boats in high school shop class, and with advice from elders he and his brothers built the vessel that John Apassingok now uses, he said.
A tip: Use only female walrus skins, he said. The male hides are too lumpy and bumpy around their heads and necks. "They like to fight, I guess."
This is the first of two whaling seasons in Alaska. In the fall, whales head toward their winter grounds in the south. In the spring, as ice breaks up, they return north.
"This coming week is a major, like, rush hour for the whales," Apassingok said.
Sunday was too stormy to hunt off St. Lawrence Island, he said, but whalers could be back in their boats later in the week at the first sign of good weather.
"We're like firemen, ready to don our gear and head out," Apassingok said.
Gambell, which is allowed to take up to eight whales a year, is just one of several whaling communities in western and northern Alaska. The largest is Barrow, where the ability of captains to begin the hunt is at the mercy of Arctic Ocean winds that shift sea ice and can slam shut the open leads where whales surface.
"Last year we had open water and then we had west winds and it closed up. And locked up for about four weeks. There wasn't much of a whaling season for a lot of the crews here in Barrow," said Brower, the captains association president.
As he gave quick a recap of the 2009 season over the phone from Barrow, other voices could be heard in the background. Brower had to go, he said. "My crew's calling me."
Read The Village, the ADN's blog about rural Alaska, at adn.com/thevillage. Twitter updates: twitter.com/adnvillage. Call Kyle Hopkins at 257-4334.
By KYLE HOPKINS
khopkins@adn.com