I lent someone a my copy of "Working on the Edge" [by Spike Walker] years ago after reading it a few times and never got it back. Luckily, got another copy for Christmas this year and have read it again and quicker than the first few times! Probably the best book I have ever read on commercial fishing.
Anyone who has not read should track down a copy and read it...like I said, I have been able to read it at least three times now and thats not something I could say about any other book I have ever read. Its ahrd to put down even after multiple reads! I think its that good.
Anyways, here is a quote that I wrote down after reading it a month or so ago that I meant to post since I think it such a great passage. There are a lot of good parts, but maybe because its the dead of winter this quote is the one I latched onto:
"Arriving back in port, deckhands often lived out a wild 'go to ****' lifestyle. There was the three-day drunk, the three-thousand-dollar night on the town, the reunion with a waiting wife or anxious girlfriend, or the two-hundred-dollar roll in the hay with a pretty face and lusty young female body in a private room at Bee's.
It was there ashore, however, that the worst part of a fisherman's life became reality. It came in the form of bank forms and loan payments, of boat repairs and rising diesel prices, of insurance premiums and questionable marine-surveyor estimates. It manifested itself in the form of battling with one's wife for authority in the home, an authority relinquished during the long months away from home; and in making bail for hard-partying crewmen tossed into the clink over what the Kodiak police department viewed as 'excessive fun'.
In the end, when he'd had enough, he would return again to the sea. There, in that almost exclusively male world, a man could depend on the elemental nature of the life again, and his warriorlike role in it. Laboring against storm winds and ocean waves, he could, once more, become part of the hunt and roam freely across a moody wilderness of sea."
....good stuff
This post edited by twofinbluna 11:50 PM 02/14/2008
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