Part IV

Tide to Table

“A normal day starts around 4:00 a.m. I have three alarm clocks, and I turn each of them off and I stuff them deep in my sleeping bag,” says salmon boat captain Megan Corazza with a chuckle, “and then I finally wake up.”¹ Her great-grandparents moved to Alaska in the 1930s, her grandfather fished for the Snug Harbor cannery, and she was raised aboard family boats in the Prince William Sound fishery. “I’ve been on salmon boats since I was one year old,” Corazza relates, “So for me that was life, there was no other, we didn’t get summers, we were on the boat all the time and that was completely normal to me.” At the age of twenty she became one of the youngest skippers in the state. “I was at college, and I was so busy with what I was studying, and I just looked at this piece of paper, and I had hardly any money in my bank account, and I signed it,” she laughs again, warmly. “And all of the sudden I owned a boat, and a big debt.”

Though the art of fishing came naturally to her, being a skipper presented new challenges. “My mom took me out on my dad’s boat before we got my boat in the harbor, and she said, ‘I’m gonna teach you how to drive a boat.’ I was driving through the harbor, and she pointed at this dock and said, ‘Okay, I want you to very slowly nose up to that.’ So I came at it pretty slow, and I put it in reverse, and I had no idea there was such a big delay on the shifter … and it actually shifted in reverse about the time that I rammed into the dock.” She chortles at the memory, “I just watched the whole dock undulate like a wave all the way to the shore. So I knew nothing about these big boats.”

Today, Corazza is a successful and experienced captain who divides her time between a house in Homer and hardworking months aboard the FV Centurion, her boat. “The whole crew lives together all summer long, and some summers we don’t come back to town at all.” After her three alarm clocks roust her from bed, she and three crew members get straight to work. “I spend the morning looking for fish, I’m listening to my radio group talking about what they’re seeing for fish,” she describes. Meanwhile, “the crew is getting the deck ready … and then my skiff man goes out and checks the oil and everything in the skiff, and gets the skiff started.” When salmon have been found and the boat is in position, captain and crew get down to the business of fishing. “I turn around and give a thumbs-up, my one crew ‘pulls the pin’—meaning they release the skiff—and the skiff spins off the back of the boat, connected to the net, and starts pulling the net off my boat, and I drive in the opposite direction.”

The Centurion is a purse seiner, dragging an enormous net with a drawstring. “[We] do a quick round haul, which means you can see where the fish are and you just do a circle around them, and then close your net up.” Working in tandem, “the skiff and the boat come together and the purse line, which runs through rings on the bottom of the net, you pull the purse line up. Then you’re stacking the net on the boat and you’re pulling the purse line up until all the purse rings come up beside the boat and you can put them on this big metal hook. And now you’ve got all the fish trapped, they can’t go out and dive under the net, because the net now is like a purse, the whole bottom gathered and right beside the boat.” With the fish safely netted, the crew turns to getting them on board and into a hold filled with refrigerated seawater. “So then I haul gear and the crew stacks the net back on the boat, until we get to the very end. At the end, all the fish are just right beside the boat in this big bag, and we roll the bag on board.”

In one day of hard work, skippers can bring as much as 40,000 pounds of fish into port, mostly pink and coho salmon. But fishing is fraught with risk, and dangers lurk everywhere. “On deck you’re dealing with so much weight, and so much strain. You’ve got a skiff pulling on the side of the boat,” she describes, “and if the skiff man hits the end of the rope too hard, it can snap the line and come back and have a snap-back and take your crew out at the knees.” Hauling up the net, when it is weighed down by tons of fish, is particularly hazardous. “You’ve got a huge amount of strain on the purse line, and it can snap and hit people in the chest. I’ve known a couple guys who had it snap into their abdomens, and kind of wreck their guts.” Crew members have fallen into the fish hold, and skippers have stumbled on heaving decks and broken legs or hips. “You’ve got a deck winch, which is a big capstan that’s used to pull up the purse line,” she continues, in quiet tones. “We call it ‘the mutilator’ because it wrecks people. If you get a piece of clothing caught, and there’s four wraps of lines going around the deck winch, it’ll suck you in and it will break your arm and rip your arms off, and pop your eyeballs out of your head.” She speaks from experience. “I’m not making these things up, this has happened to many friends of mine.” Even once the fish are loaded on board, threats lurk. “In our engine rooms we have Freon, because we’re refrigerating our salt water, so you’ve got a whole system with a deadly chemical going through it, where if you get a pinhole in your copper tube you’re gonna die.” As skipper, these dangers are uppermost on her mind. “When I run my boat, getting the most fish is not my priority. Having a healthy, safe, and happy crew at the end of every day is my priority.”

This captain’s own well-being is sustained in part by her catch. “Salmon is my most favorite thing to eat,” Corazza exults. “I feel super healthy when I eat it, and I think it has amazing health benefits, especially for our brains. So my pantry is always full of salmon, and my freezer is full of salmon.” Comfortingly, her pantry has been well-stocked for decades. Over forty years of fishing Prince William Sound, she is reassured by the fishery’s stability. “I do think in my short—my career feels long, but it’s such a pin drop in the world—I don’t see a reason to question this environment’s ability to keep supporting salmon runs.” Those runs are annually bolstered by juvenile salmon fry released from hatcheries. “In Prince William Sound I think that the success is in part due to the hatchery system,” she explains. “What I have noticed as a fisherman is that having a hatchery in place takes a lot of pressure off the wild stocks … If a hatchery stock comes in, and the wild stock that year is weak, the fishermen can fish on the hatchery stock, and they never have to get anywhere near the wild stocks.”

Corazza distinguishes such hatcheries from closed-cycle aquaculture and admits, “I get kind of grossed out by thinking of genetically modified salmon that are maturing in a matter of months, and being fed weird dyes to get the natural color in their flesh … it doesn’t seem like good food.” But she is quick to point out what should be an obvious truth: “there’s nobody that’s more concerned about the conservation of salmon than salmon fishermen, who need the salmon to be there every year.” Whereas aquaculture can produce large amounts of salmon on a low budget, she believes in supporting the trade of fishing. “We want to be out fishing our coasts rather than raising our fish in pens.” When she says “we,” she means her family, and her local community. “The majority of fishing that I’ve ever known in my life happens on small, family-owned boats … our salmon fisheries, and most of the halibut fishermen I know, are all small boats that have been in families for years and years.” Painting a poignant portrait of a profession passed from generation to generation, Corazza says of the Alaskan salmon boats, “we raise our kids on them, and we fish by our parents.”