Born Here

My roots on this island go back thousands of years. I'm Alaskan Aleut Native. My great-grandmother was a five-year-old orphan on Kodiak in 1912 when the Katmai volcano erupted and blanketed the island in ash for three straight days. They loaded her and the other orphanss onto a sail ship meant for hauling ice to San Francisco. The men shoveled ash for three days to keep the ship afloat. She survived. Without her, none of this exists.

My grandfather started pioneering king crab fishing out of Seldovia in the 1950s using a 30-foot wooden boat and crab pots built from lumber and chicken wire. The cannery paid three cents a pound. He said that was big money.

My four brothers and I all share the same middle name in honor of my uncle Read, who was lost at sea in 1978 when my grandfather's 72-foot boat, the Epic, iced over and rolled in the Shelikoff Strait. Four men went down. One survived.

My dad fished the Bering Sea for over 30 years on the Saga, a 107-foot crabber he and my grandfather built together. The year I graduated high school, 2004, I went king crab fishing with him in the Bering Sea. It was the last year of the derby. It was also the first season of Deadliest Catch. We were part of it.

I do subsistence fishing and hunting every year to fill the freezer, the same way I've been doing it since I was big enough to hold a rod. I am a family man with two children. I have never lived anywhere else. I don't plan to.

I tell you all of this because it matters when you're deciding who to trust with your time and your money on the water. Anyone can buy a boat and call themselves a captain. What you can't buy is three generations of knowledge about how this island works, where the fish run, where the bears feed, and how to read Kodiak weather before it turns on you. When you get on the water with me, that's what you're getting.