With Joe Upton and The Alaska Cruise Handbook

Listen:

June, 1965: I am just 19 and so excited to have gotten a job on an Alaska bound fishboat. We're about 20 hours north of Seattle.

"Hey kid, wake up, it's Seymour, ya gotta see this." The 70 year-old Norwegian mate, Mickey Hansen, was shaking me awake.

Seymour Narrows! I'd heard about it back on the docks in Seattle. There were supposed to be whirlpools that could suck boats right down. I pulled on my clothes and went up into the pilothouse. We were just entering this narrow twisting canyon. I could see the current swirls in the water ahead and a whirlpool at least a hundred yards across blocked the channel. Just then a log twice as thick as a phone pole poked up from the dark water and as quickly disappeared. Our skipper turned the wheel violently and spat a dark stream of tobacco juice into a can.

"That's the kind of crap you don't want to hit, kid.." The skipper said, and ten minutes later waved me in behind the wheel. "Here, take it for three hours..." he jerked his chin over toward another nasty looking patch of floating logs and debris, "and don't hit anything..." With that he disappeared into his cabin and closed the door.

"Me? Steer this big boat alone?" I thought, terrified.

Then Old Mick put his big hand on my shoulder, the other on the big steering wheel. "Here, kid, here's how we do it..."

Mickey and Me, Southeast Alaska, 1965

My first Alaska job was aboard the Sidney, a fish packer, sort of a mother ship to the smaller fishing boats that spend their seasons far from their home cannery. In addition to buying fish we had groceries, fuel, and water for our boats. With a cagy skipper, grumpy cook, but an immensely kind first mate, it was a season that changed my life forever.

Joe's Best selling cruise guide with big illustrated map

So began my education as an Alaskan fisherman. But more than the nautical rules of the road, how to catch fish, how to read the weather from signs in the sky and water, that kindly old man filled me with the lore and the legends of The North.

We'd pass some bay and Mick would have a story: “We went in there in the old Mary A, winter of ‘31. Thick o’ snow, we’d toot that horn and listen for the echo off the rocks, through the snow.” Tie up at a cannery and Mick would tell about working on a tug to help the square riggers get out back in the '30s, deep loaded with canned salmom.

At Seymour, he told me the story of "Old Rip," the ship killer rock that used to be right in the middle of the channel. Every year it'd get a ship or two. First they anchored a barge with a thousand tons of anchors, Old Mick explained, but the current was too much, the barge would move and the drill bits would break. Then a work crew died in a whirlpool, and they decided to drill from the shore, a half mile of shafts and tunnels to fill that rock with almost three million pounds of dynamite, and adios "Old Rip.!" That kindly gentleman filled me with a lifelong passion for The North, which still drives me today.

For me that long ago summer of 1965 was ALASKA in capital letters. There were totems at the dock, eagles in the trees. All I wanted to do afterwards was to go up there to fish commercially in my own boat.

Eventually I did, building a tiny waterfront cabin near a small roadless, fishing settlement.

Our store floated on logs, and was also a bar. The bartender was the fish buyer. You could sell your fish for bar credit and get right to work: whiskey and water, whiskey and coke, or whiskey and Tang. And they saved the ice for the fish.

In the spring we fished the windy outside coast. In the summer, we worked nearby Sumner Strait. In the fall we traveled north to the natural wind tunnel called Lynn Canal, for the 10-dollar-a-fish chum salmon. And in the long, kerosene lantern-lit winters, there was time for visiting.

The stories came out. The experiences of my friends and neighbors, an oral history of the coast. I was an amateur photographer, and a writer. “Write a book,” my friends said, “Tell our story.” One book became another.

When I first started fishing, cruise ships were few and small. Then more ships began traveling the coast, and I designed a series of illustrated maps to better share with these new visitors the drama and beauty of The North.

For me the books and maps are a way to share with you a sense of the mystery and the power of this place that is such a big part of my life.

So come, take this journey through this land that remains much as it was when the first explorers came through.

Thanks, Mick. I'm still telling the stories.

Joe's epic tale of working as a crewman during a King Crab Season.

A young adult novel of a dramatic trip up the Inside Passage

My first book - a journal of a long and hard Alaska fishing season - is still in print - over 35 years later!