I've given you the feel of what fishing in Alaska was like for me, so I'll not recount every story, though every trip into the Gulf of Alaska was an interesting adventure. What I will do is share the highlights of the most interesting events. To simplify things I'm not going to tell these stories in order. I doubt I could get that straight. During the two years I fished I also made numerous trips to the lower forty-eight states to do computer work, but I'll not interrupt these fish stories for that either. The stories are all true, but they didn't all happen back to back.

Kodiak Grizzly Bear.

Kodiak Island is a place of legend. It is known for its commercial fishing, but also for it's bear. The Kodiak Grizzly bear is a sight to behold. The first one I saw was in the terminal of the Anchorage International Airport. This one was stuffed and encased in thick glass. Despite the obvious fact that he was long dead, that bear is still the bringer of nightmares to many. The second Kodiak Grizzly Bear I saw was a bit more animated.

It was during the four hours of dusk that Alaskans call dark in the summer that we dropped anchor in a protected cove on the east side of Kodiak Island for some much needed sleep. I woke to the sound of a monster from my dreams. It is impossible to describe the sound other than to say it was truly terrifying. For protection I had a large caliber hand gun and a large bore hunting rifle. To deal with the noise I heard I grabbed both. We sat easy at anchor in a small but deep cove, thirty feet from shore. On that shore was a large Kodiak Grizzly who was clearly bothered by our presences. When he saw me on deck he became even more agitated. He screamed and roared and pounded his massive claw into the water.

My first thought was my bucket list. One of the things on that list was to hunt a Kodiak Grizzly. While I watched the angry bear pound the sea with his paw I mentally removed that one from my list. There was no way in hell I was going to walk on the same ground as that beast and hunt him. In fact, he scared me as it was. Billy woke too, so I had him pull anchor. We all needed more sleep, so we relocated to the opposite side of the larger bay. There we went back to sleep, but I couldn't get that bear out of my mind. I never considered hunting a Kodiak Grizzly again.

The next Kodiak Grizzly I saw was while riding as a passenger in a Cessna for a short flight between Old Harbor and Kodiak Village. Flying low through a narrow gap between two mountains (the kind of flying that kept me from flying a bush plane myself) we spotted a Kodiak Grizzly. He was high enough on the mountain side to be level with the plane, but 200 yards away. I doubt this was the same bear I'd seen on the North Wind but he had the same demeanor. We couldn't hear him over the drone of the Cessna's engine, but from 200 yards we could see his mouth open in a roar while his giant paw swatted the air towards the passing plane. I have no doubt he would have knocked us out of the sky had he been able to reach our wing. Yet another reminder to leave these beasts alone.

Dolphins.

The first time I ran the North Wind out Resurrection Bay from Seward we were joined by a group of dolphins that played off our bow. Like every fisherman and sailor, I loved watching dolphins play off my bow. They look so much alike and were so fast it took me several trips of observing to figure out what they were doing. The group of them would swim off both sides of the bow, then a single one would move to the very tip of the boat's bow. That dolphin would slow until the bow of the boat touched it, then the dolphin would rocket off to be replaced by the next contestant. They would do this over and over for ten to twenty minutes then disappear. Fisherman claimed they stayed longer on a faster boat as it was more of a challenge.

On one trip a new crew member he wanted to witness this so I allowed him to lay on the deck to look down at them. This idiot watched them for about a minute before he pointed his flash light into the water and turned it on. Blasted with the sudden light the dolphins disappeared. On the trip back a week later the dolphins didn't return to the boat. The next trip out there were no dolphins to greet the North Wind. There was another fishing boat a mile behind me so I called the skipper and asked if he'd seen dolphins. He said they were playing off his bow at that moment. Several more trips with no dolphin sightings and it was easy for Billy to convince me to move the boat to Kodiak. The fishing there should be better, but also there would be different pods of dolphins.

But there were no dolphins in Kodiak. None at all. One day on the dock talking to another skipper I mentioned this. He looked at me odd and said, "We see dolphins all the time. Every time we go in or out of the harbor and most times when we go in or out of most of the calm bays around the island." This caused me to watch closer and to ask more questions of other fisherman. What I learned was that there were in fact many dolphin pods active all over Kodiak Island and every boat skipper I asked saw them multiple times on every trip. Yet no one on the North Wind ever saw another dolphin.

Somehow the dolphin pod two hundred miles to the north had black-balled the North Wind because of an idiot with a flash light. And somehow that pod in Resurrection Bay had communicated this with the many pods of dolphins around Kodiak Island. I have no idea how this happened, but I am sure it did. They knew the North Wind from its unique sound signature and were able to communicate that sound to other pods. Wish I'd have asked a marine biologist about this, but never did. The only other time I would see a dolphin was from the deck of the Alaska State Ferry.