soapbox

Oh yeah, and here are some links if you’re bored.

http://pepperlive.com/
http://highergroundmusic.com/calendar/?show=282

Pepper. Burlington. July 20. $12 advance, $14 day of.

So, there probably aren’t a lot of Pepper fans out there reading this, but I figured it’s a shot. For those unfamiliar, Pepper is a Raggae/Dub/Punk-ish band from Hawaii, that sounds very much like Sublime (commonly mistaken even). Check my (Ronald Reagans) iTunes for further further confirmation about how much they rock. I’ll definitely be attentding. Others interested?

I haven’t given Tim his pirate story yet, so here goes…

On the 5th of July, at 4:15 am, after getting three hours of sleep, Kirsten and I, my father, and my sister all headed out on a charter to try and catch some fishies. It was so close to the time that everyone got home that my sister was still drunk.

For some reason, my dad thought it would be fun to fish for salmon (which was the reason we had to get up so early, the tide was at 6:00) so we wasted hours and hours trying to catch fish that didn’t even exist. (It currently takes like 36 hours of pole-time to catch a king salmon in Southeast Alaska… I just don’t have the patience for that.)

At about 11:30 we decided to switch to fishing for halibut and then the action started. Unfortunately, while we were pulling up lots of fish, they weren’t halibut. We had a handful of cod and a dozen or so small dogfish sharks. It was exciting, but it would have been better to get something other than “bycatch.”

Finally, I got a good bite and pulled in the 60 fathoms of monofilament to find a nice little 20 pounder. That started the whole thing with us pulling in a halibut every 20 minutes or so. Most were small, but my dad got a 50 pounder.

After a while my sister got kind of tired and went to take a nap in the cabin. This is where the pirate story starts.

A good charter captain would have offered to drop the line my sister was using and help us if needed to bring any fish in. After all, that’s why we were paying him a lot of money. So I suppose the first warning was the fact that he just dropped the line overboard without talking to anyone.

And, of course, that was the next line to get a fish. The bite was hard.

After he fought the fish for a while, I had to take a turn while he got a gun. (You basically have to shoot big halibut or they can break your leg or knock a hole in the boat thrashing around.) The fish was big but I got it up another 20 feet or so. When he was back with the gun he asked how much line I’d brought in and let that much back out.

More reeling, three shots from a .22 to the head, and a big pull from the gaff hook and we had an 80 pound halibut onboard. The captain said, “I think I’ll keep this one.”

What?

A few points.
1) The captain of a charter boat can’t legally be sport fishing while he’s working.
2) A halibut is about half meat (55% after cleaning and trimming) and is currently selling for around $10/lb. ie. it was a $400 fish.
3) The clients (us) hadn’t reached their limit yet.
4) We were paying him a huge amount of money anyway.

Of course, when you’re on a boat a long ways from home with a very odd guy who has access to a gun, it isn’t the best time to be provoking an arguement. We decided it was just time to go home.

The good news is that when the time came to actually give all of the fish to the cold storage people, the captain gave us the big fish. I think it was mainly because he was worried about being caught rather than because he wanted to do the right thing. If he hadn’t done it though, he wouldn’t have worked again. There are only a few people who handle bookings and a bad report like this would be enough to put him out of business.

Anyway, Vern Anderson, be glad that you did give up that fish. Regardless, we will never be hiring you again.