Long before there ever was a Forrest Gump my Navy buddy said ...
When I go home to Alaska, I'm getting myself a boat and going fishing for salmon. Call me if you need work.
It was a good bet. His dad and mom had practically been original homesteaders when they went up there after WW2. They fished for salmon the old fashion way pulling in the nets by hand without the help of a hydraulic power block run off the boat's diesel engine. Hell, back in the day they were probably rowing the boats.
My buddy and his brothers grew up working for his dad on the fishing boats. They lived off what the land and sea provided. The oldest brothers slept in a lean-to next to the house.
In the winter ... in Alaska????????????
We had sleeping bags and blankets. It doesn't get that cold down by the water.
That translates to
Most of the time in the winter it stays in the teens and twenties at night ... and for a few nights when the cold blows in from the north ... only five or ten below.
If they were lucky, they'd shoot a moose. They probably didn't think of it back then, but moose meat pepperoni works pretty good on pizza ... with an couple of a Olympias.
My buddy said: I hate oysters. My mom would harvest oysters from the Homer Spit at low tide and can them for the winter. One winter pretty much all we ate was canned oysters.
Now they advertise:
These oysters grow in clean, cold glacier pure waters and taste like the waters they grow in. The finest oysters in the world.
I doubt my buddy's mind's been changed by the sales talk. I'll have to ask him some time. I wonder if he's on Facebook.
One of the manly fishermen who'd been around for awhile asked me:
This is work is pretty hard? Do you think you'll be able to keep up.
(Let me retort)
Do the fish shoot back?
He was puzzled. Perhaps I should have added the part about recently being in firefights with the North Vietnamese for weeks on end with little or no sleep. I never even got around to telling my buddy about that. Instead I went back to the truck and got some more eggs to put in the boat.
