Three weeks before the fall halibut opener Billy and I picked up two experienced crew hands on the docks of Kodiak. Neither was pleased about serving on my small ugly boat, but they had arrived in Kodiak too late to have options. We spent a week outfitting the boat and getting her ready for what should be the most profitable fishing trip I'd had.

The best halibut fishing grounds in the world were 100 miles east of the southernmost point of Kodiak Island. On the morning of the opener those grounds would be crowded with fishing boats. Tempers would flare and every boat would carry weapons. Shots would likely be fired. It was not likely anyone would be shot, but if history were any judge, men would die. They would die at the hands of an angry sea.

The main problem with those two twenty-four hour openers is that the date was set a year in advance. Nothing could change that date. No allowance was ever made for the weather. So if it was nasty, as it generally was on a halibut opener, then the boats would all go out and men would die. There was too much money involved. Every boat had to go out. With this in mind I made the decision to leave Kodiak Village two weeks early and reposition the North Wind to a small cannery on the southernmost tip of Kodiak Island.

Heavy storms were battering the Gulf of Alaska so we took our time and made our way south. The first leg of the journey was so wild that it gave the new crew guys a chance to gain confidence in their skipper and that old boat. About half way down the east side of Kodiak Island there was a large bay that looked like it was closed at the end. But I'd been there before and knew that there was a narrow passage between this bay and the much larger Three Saint's Bay to the south. This passage was more like a creek between the back of two bays. I only knew about the passage because of Billy's life long experience around Kodiak Island. Even with Billy's intimate knowledge of the passage, the small North Wind could only navigate it at high tide and then only with Billy on the bow pointing out the hazards and directing me to steer around them. The new crew was impressed when we cleared the narrow passage and entered the massively large Three Saints Bay.

At the point where the passage meets Three Saints Bay sat the small native village of Old Harbor. I don't know the population of Old Harbor but I'd guess about fifty people lived there. There was a public dock, several homes and a small one room store. That's it. The docks were about a mile away from the store. There is a dirt road that a truck could navigate, but we didn't have a truck so the only way to reach the store was to walk a mile through the wooded country side. Remember this is remote Kodiak Island. The place with the largest brown bears in the world.

To get out of the boat for a while my crew and I made that walk. I carried my rifle and Billy carried a shotgun. Neither would be enough to stop an angry Kodiak, but we felt better having them. Fortunately the only thing we saw was a few of Kodiak's lesser known deer.

We planned to stay at Old Harbor for a day or two to allow the seas to calm. When we moved on we would go out the protected waters of Three Saints Bay. This would allow us to avoid about a hundred miles of angry sea. It's rare that you can find a short cut at sea, but this was one of them.

The store didn't have much and what they did have was expensive, but they did have a free lending library of both VHS tapes and books. We didn't have a tape player but I did look through the books. One of the books was "Alaska" by James Michener.

"I've read that," I said to the old native woman who owned the store. "Some of it was about Kodiak," I said, almost to myself as I remembered the book. "Wasn't there something about Three Saints Bay in it," I asked, thumbing through the book.

"Yes," the woman said. She gave me the name of an old settlement at the head of Three Saints Bay that was prominently featured in the book.

"Was it very accurate," I asked.

"Perfectly accurate," she assured me. "Jimmy was a stickler to detail."

"Jimmy," I said. "As in James Michener?"

"Yep."

"He was here," I asked. I loved all of Michener's works and admired his attention to detail, but I could not imagine a man traveling to the remote areas of Kodiak Island to write a scene in a book.

"He stayed here," she said. The woman showed me a small cot in a cubby hole. "He slept there," she said.

I didn't check out the book because I didn't want to make that long walk again to return it, but I would later read Alaska again. This time I paid close attention to the descriptions of places I'd actually been. Even remote places like Three Saints Bay.

After a day's rest in Old Harbor we put to sea again. It took a full day to go from one end of Three Saints Bay to the other, but when we reached the sea it had calmed considerably. In another day we reached the small cannery on the extreme southern end of Kodiak Island. Another boat was already tied up there. A skipper with the same idea as mine. If we got here early we'd be rested when we put out for the halibut grounds on the eve of the opener. There was only room for one boat at the small dock so I had to tie up alongside the other boat. This worked out well as his boat was seventy feet and had plenty of room for my crew. The skipper was gracious enough to allow us to spread out on his boat. In the ten days we waited for the opener to start that skipper and I, as well as our crews, all got pretty close.

The day after we arrived the weather went to crap. We were protected from the sea by a short artificial breaker wall of rock, but not at all protected from the winds. The winds and seas were so rough that we had to post a watch at all times to ensure our boats weren't' damaged against the dock or even blown to sea. With our two crews sharing this watch it wasn't a burden, but it was strange having to post a watch while tied to the dock.

The morning of the halibut opener was a shock to the system. I woke up at three in the morning and was startled by the calm. On deck there was no wind, but most shocking of all, over the top of the breaker I saw a perfectly flat sea. Oceans are flat calm on occasion, but not so in the Gulf of Alaska.

"I'll be dammed," I said. The skipper of the other boat heard me and laughed. He invited me over for coffee and breakfast so I stepped over to his boat. He'd been up all night monitoring the weather and the radios. Over oatmeal and bacon he explained:

"The calm sea we see came out of the south, it just reached us. The heart of the storm is still battering Kodiak Island, most likely twenty miles north of us is still crap."

I understood the implications of this immediately. "The fleet's still in the Village?"

"That's right," he said with a big grin. "The grounds are ours."

Kodiak harbor is very difficult to get out of in bad weather. This was a very bad storm, so it's not likely any sane skipper would attempt to leave the harbor. Most of the commercial fishing boats based in Kodiak would gladly brave such a storm for a halibut opener, but they'd have to get to sea, which they couldn't do.

"Are you sure," I asked.

"I've been on the HF radio all night," he said. "They're hammered so bad no one has even left the dock."

"How long before the storm passes them," I asked.

"Fifteen hours," he said, having already done the math. "That means they won't have time to cruise down here and make a good soak before the openers over. Like I said, we have the grounds to ourselves."

I woke my crew and passed on this great news. Not only would the best halibut grounds in the world be open to us without competition for ground, but with the entire fishing fleet bottled up on the north side of the island, when they were able to put to sea they would have to settle for the lesser fishing grounds up north. Our two boats should do very well, but the rest of the fleet would have a mediocre catch if they were lucky. Supply-side economics would rule. With the catch so low we would receive a much higher per pound price for our fine catch. So when we put out into those calm seas all of us were counting our money.

We reached the grounds an hour after the season opened. I should have started earlier. The other boat was faster and had already run his first set. As soon as he saw our boat he called me with the great news. He'd run a small test set before running his long string. As we came into view they were pulling that test set. An hour is a very short time to soak his gear, but in that hour he had a large halibut on every hook. It was unbelievable news. We were going to be rich.

Less than an hour later we were still laying our first set when the seas began to pick up. One minute the seas were like a farm pond, the next they were back to the Gulf of Alaska. My crew was good so I had little to do other than drive the boat, which gave me more time to watch the weather. I didn't like what I saw. I mentioned this to my crew, which made them look to the south, but no one seemed alarmed. It's been my experience that my crew always worried about the weather before I thought it was a problem, so I tried to ignore my growing sense of unease. There wasn't really a valid reason to be concerned about the weather. It was rough, but not overly so. I'd fished in far worse. I figured I was just bothered by the fact that it had transitioned so fast from flat calm to crap. But since I'd never seen flat calm before I didn't have any idea how long it should take to go bad.

I tried to forget about the weather and focus on setting the gear. It kept getting worse, making it difficult for me to put aside my concerns. One of the new guys got my attention and asked what I thought of the weather. I told him I didn't like it at all. The other guy called us both soft--okay, he didn't say soft, but I'll go with that. Billy looked at me and I just shrugged. I really didn't know. Not knowing, I called the other boat. They had a barometer so I called and asked about its reading. The other skipper said he hadn't checked "the glass" so I asked him to. I don't recall what the reading was but I do remember his saying, "She's dropping like a rock." When I asked his opinion about the seas he said he'd fished in worse.

"Me too, but I don't like the feel of this."

Thirty minutes after that conversation I ordered my crew to pick up our gear. We were on the side we had last set on so they balked at doing so since it had only been in the water for ten minutes. The seas had gone from real bad to downright nasty, so I was insistent. I hadn't liked these seas since they first started. It was like I could feel the barometric pressure dropping. After fifteen minutes of pulling our line up the deck was covered with halibut. It was by far the richest catch I'd seen. We'd pulled about a quarter of the line from that first set when I ordered my crew to cut the gear loose.

The seas deteriorated so fast it didn't seem natural. By this point everyone on both boats realized we were all in trouble but no one wanted to admit it. From all that happened, I am sure I am the first one form either boat who decided this place was too dangerous. The catch was so rich that greed clouded everyone's judgment. Despite all my faults, greed has never been one of them. Money is useful, it is a way of keeping score, but it has never blinded me. As we were all tossed around in the violent sea the lure of fish holds full of cash blinded every other man out there. Every man except Billy, the alcoholic.

In telling my crew to cut the gear I told them to drop a miles long string of hundred dollar bills back into the sea. Hundred dollar bills that only needed to be pulled up, then de-head and gutted before putting in the bank. It would be a classic understatement to say they disagreed with my decision to cut-n-run. When I punctuated my decision by shutting down the gear hauler they all crowed into the pilot house to express their disagreement with my decision. By the time they cornered me in the wheel house I had the skipper of the other boat on the radio. He agreed that the seas were nasty, even dangerous, but said he was going to rough it out and keep fishing. The crew all heard this and said if they could stay so could we.

I said no. We were going in. That was my order as captain of this boat. The two new crew guys said that wasn't going to happen. They were young and big and willing to fight for the right to make money or die. My rifle was on the other side of the cabin so I was trying to figure out how to get to it when Billy pulled the hammer back on my pistol and said,

"You'll do like the boss says or I'll shoot you." They asked Billy why he agreed with me. Billy said, "I don't, but I trust him."