Fishing Up North: Stories of Luck and Loss in Alaskan Waters

Description

True and intimate short stories of a modern fisherman's life of luck and loss. Written in chronological order, fisherman Brad Matsen gives a realistic look of frightening weather, good fishing, terrible fishing, great days, and sweet living in Alaskan waters from the decks of crabbers, trawlers, longliners, trollers, and gillnetters. This book and others inspired film crews to trek to Alaska and cover the crabbing seasons for reality TV shows. Commercial fishing's home ports-Dutch Harbor, Kodiak, Naknek, Cordova, Petersburg, Sitka, and Seattle-are classic fishing towns, where docks, bars, and even quiet living merge in colorful portraits about life on the last frontier. Included in this second edition are new stories and updates from the super-heated days when fishing fleets turned king crab into fortunes, to the annual circus of Bristol Bay's monster salmon runs, to the bucolic life of the open ocean trawler.

Brad Matsen has written about the sea and its inhabitants for forty years in books, film scripts, essays and magazine articles. He is the author of the New York Times best sellers Titanic's Last Secrets: The Heroic Discovery of the Abyss and Jacques Cousteau: The Sea King among other books, and was a creative producer for the television series The Shape of Life. His articles have appeared in Mother Jones, Audubon, and Nature, among other publications. He divides his time between Seattle and New York City.

"Brad Matsen is a polished writer with a quirky sense of humor and an uncanny knack for the precise metaphor." ---Homer [Alaska] News.