Wonders of the Deep

The recent landing of a colossal squid from the depths of the ocean started me thinking about Things My Father Caught At Sea. And that prompted another perusal of the old photo albums.

I don’t think my dad had ever fished before he came to Alaska to visit. (Maybe my mother, or Judy’s mother, can correct me on that if he had.) And I think his view was that it was likely to be boring, but ‘when in Rome…’ And so we outfitted him, and off we went, on our first little boat, into the cold and vast Alaskan waters.

In those days (that makes us all sound old, doesn’t it?) fishing around Wrangell was pretty good. We usually were going for halibut, although we’d also drop a crab pot somewhere, on a line and buoy, to check on when we went home again. My dad didn’t really want to be bothered with the whole ‘bait your own hook’ stuff, nor was he interested in the tackle, or in proper ‘technique’ or any of the other things that ‘real’ fishermen obsess over. (He really wasn’t keen on the ‘you catch ‘em, you clean ‘em’ notion either.) I think at first he just wanted to dangle the line so he could stand there and gaze out over the water in hopes that a whale would wander by and put on a show. (And they obliged us just often enough to reinforce that!) But then he started catching things.

Mind you, they weren’t often edible things. His ‘personal fishing technique’ allowed him to pull up the most amazing creatures. He’d bring things up with the hook stuck in the tail fin – things we’d never even seen before. Sometimes there would be brightly colored sea anemones that he’d pulled right off the sea floor. Often we ended up fighting manta rays of some sort, or Big Mouth Uglies, starfish, eels, the occasional crab, or simply Unidentifiable Organic Matter – animal or vegetable. And over and over, in my photo albums, there he is, grinning somewhat apologetically while holding up the latest ‘catch.’

I have to add that The Big One didn’t elude him entirely. His 200 pounder made him proud!

There are many wonders of the deep. And my father was one of them!

P.S. – also in those photo albums are some pictures of Render and Jill and Cousin Judy hanging spoons on their noses at the dinner table. Hmmmmm. (Speaking of odd specimens…)