A mere two months after the experience at the glacier I found myself on a plane back to Alaska. Had I not learned my lesson yet?

I had gotten a job salmon fishing out of Dillingham, Alaska with Bronson, a friend from school and his family. I had no idea what I was getting into, all I knew was that we would be fishing out on Bristol Bay and that it paid well, sounded exciting so I was down.

I arrived expecting to step off the plane and onto the boat and go, but that wasn’t the case. We had to first clean the boat and fix and prepare the nets. This involved a lot of sitting in a garage basically sewing the nets. When we finally headed out to sea, I was so excited. The first couple days there was a lot of learning how to do everything.  After the learning phase it was a breeze, long hours and hard work, but it wasn’t bad. In our down time we played lots of Pokemon and Magic, I read up on the bridge when I could.

We did crazy things such as lobbing seal bombs at our sister boat which was the son of our captain. Looking back it wasn’t the smartest thing to be doing, one seal bomb bounced off the deck and past my face before exploring a mere couple of feet from my head, but at the time we thought it was fun.

We would regularly catch a couple of flounders in the net, we always kept a five-gallon bucket filled with water close by and we would throw them in the bucket as we found them. After we have emptied the nets and cleaned off the deck, we would play our favorite game, flounder skeet shooting.  The tosser would grab a flounder by the tail and throw it straight up meanwhile the shooter would grab another flounder and try to hit the first flounder in mid air with his flounder. We rarely made contact, but it was a fun way to pass some of the time. If we had a flounder left over we would see how many times we could skip it across the top of the water.

During the last week I was there we had one of our biggest hauls, we had salmon everywhere! The hold was filled and overflowing and the deck was cover with so many fish that we could hide underneath them. We were headed to unload at the tender when we received a call on the radio from the captain’s father-in-law. He was stuck on a sand bar as the tide was going out. We turned around and headed towards his location.

When we arrived I grabbed a rope and threw it over to the stranded boat. We tied it off on our side and as soon as they tied it off we pulled away to tighten the rope. Bronson and I stood on the deck by the real watching. As we moved further away the rope started to get caught on the horns. I stepped forward to throw the rope over the horns then I stepped back. I was standing just below the reel, my feet covered with fish. All of a sudden I could hear something by my feet. I looked down to find that I had stepped into a coil of the rope, before I could react the rope grabbed my leg and began to drag me across the deck.

It happened in an instant, but it felt like it took forever. It was in slow motion for me, I remember vividly uttering and thinking several curse words as I was being swung toward the edge of the boat. Nearing the edge I thought I was going to hit my head, reacting quicker than I can ever remember I pushed off the deck with my arms as hard as I could and brought my upper body up towards my legs almost as if I was doing a sit-up, I barely missed the edge. The next thought that raced through my head was “oh shit, the rope is going to snap my leg when it gets tighter.” In a flash I saw everything I expected to do in my senior year of high school taken from me. No football, no basketball, basically nothing to get excited about. The momentum as like a pendulum as I reached verticality just hanging by my leg, I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth expecting a wave of excruciating pain to hit me any moment as the rope snapped my leg.

What I felt instead was the rope loosen its grip and I looked to see myself falling towards the ocean below. With the momentum I had going, I was able to finish the flip I was in and enter the water feet first. The water was chilly, but not as cold as I expected, as soon as I surfaced I swam as fast as I could towards the boat. I didn’t feel my leg until after I got out of the water; it was then I realized that I couldn’t put any pressure on it.  I was given ibuprofen and sent to bed. When I woke up my leg had turned purple from my knee to my toes and was as hard a rock. I gimped around the boat for the next couple days wondering how long it would take to heal.

Those last few days on the boat I was as useless as a third tit, but it gave me a chance to sit back and enjoy some experiences I may not have gotten to fully enjoy. It’s the most surreal event I’ve ever experienced watching the light finally get extinguished in the west, only for the east to start showing light again a short time later.

My leg stayed purple for a couple of months, but no real injuries came from the incident, but the memories from my second trip to Alaska will linger forever. I hope I get to visit Alaska again and hope its sooner than later.