In the air

I got released from my last boat earlier this week and have been waiting around dutch harbor. I'm about to board a plane to go to anchorage for my next assignment. Just wanted to give you guys a heads up. Mainly my folks.

-Patrick

No mail

Don't send mail to any adress but the one i'm about to list.

Patrick Morales
733 N Street
Anchorage, Ak 99501

The News From Lake Woebegon

Well another week has passed and it was an exciting one for this bird watcher. I got to cross off a few new species off my "life list". Yep. One of which was a Laysan Albatross. I was pretty stoked.

There were also seals and a few humpback whales. I saw all of this within a three hour time period. Our fishing had gotten so slow that it had become more advantageous for us to sit in one spot for 12 hours to wait for it to get dark and then start fishing rather than burning up fuel to go between the day and the night spot.

I just realized that I haven't really mentioned anything about the crew on The Viking. I've decided to do a list for easy reference.

Pat- Pat if born on the east coast would most likely be described as a redneck but since he is from washington I'm at a loss for fitting him to a relevant stereotype. None the less his interests are hunting, fishing, and logging. Yes-Logging. He's what I found out the state of washington refers to as a Lumber Barron. Which is anybody who possesses a certain acreage of hardwood. He's pretty nice for the most part, kind of an asshole but in that endearing sort of way. It's hard to tell whether he actually likes me or just puts up with me since I have to be there. Eitherway the man knows how to cook and as a result I eat well on this boat. Really well. In fact i've eaten better on this boat than I have over the past 4 years of college. Here's a quote from Pat.

"Shit steve it might get really expensive to do your killin' if you have to start going out of state"
- Pat in reference to fellow crew member not owning land in washington.


Bill- Bill is one of two captains that alternate time on the boat. They usually trade months. Bill is a man of few words and with that said i'll say no more. He'd like it that way

"..."
- Bill on... anything

Sam- Sam and I got on a similar sleep schedule. Is was on purpose because he's the one who operates the boat at night when most are asleep. Sam's really nice and was gracious to explain the ships electronics and gear. He told me some really crazy stories about fishing in Alaska. One of the most interesting ones was back in the days of Joint Venture when people from outside the united states were allowed to fish they would sometimes caravan to the fishing grounds. By caravan i mean they would drive three boats that were all tied together and the boat in the middle would be piloting the other two. Crazy. Speaking of crazy. Sam might have a little crazy streak. He's the nicest guy you'll ever meet but I get the feeling that if you pushed him or crossed him really bad he might kill you. Most of the time we just talked about sports which was nice because I've missed that connection to the real world.

"Go Seahawks"
-Sam... on the seahawks


Dean- Now we're to my favorite member of the crew. Dean has probably assumed the role of father figure on the boat and I feel it's something he's relished as well. He has three daughters and most observers are female so I think he's enjoyed having me around to sort of pal around with. Dean is the ships engineer and he's into motorcycles and his wife sent him his dvds which contained a few motorcycle documentaries. My parents might be familiar with "On Any Sunday" and "On Any Sunday 2" both of which Steve Mcqueen makes an appearance. We also watched Faster a documentary on Moto GP. Dean also showed me how to weld which I have to say I don't necessarily see his daughters being interested in but who knows?

Dean sort of looks like what I'd imagine wyatt earp looking like. He's got dark hair laced with lines of grey and he has a big thick moustache. If you put the guy in cowboy duds and gave him a set of revolvers he'd look pretty damn authentic.

There she blows

Ever since my last offload I've gotten on this really bizarre sleep schedule where I'm usually not able to go to bed till like 4 or 5 in the morning. When you're at sea on a fishing boat though you come to realize that time frames like the normal 9-5 are insignificant and more accurately nonexistant. To aid with my bizarre habits of sleeping and to make a general attempt at keeping my body from atrophy I've been going out on the deck and doing a little workout that consists of various sets of pushups and pullups crunches and lifting some heavy pieces of metal that they have in the deck locker. Well late one evening around 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning I'm doing some pushups and I stop for a second to look at the ocean. It's pitch black and i'm mainly staring at the spray from the waves that are coliding with the boat. The deck is always pretty loud due to huge diesel engine that lies below so there's a constant hum. But that night, two nights ago, I heard a high pitch vibration. I didn't know what it was but I knew it sounded like it came from an animal and almost sounded like a dolphin. I stopped and stared off into space like people do when they're really trying to listen for something and as it happened the void that I was staring into was filled by a large black dorsal fin that rose above horizon of the boat and then disapeared. I ran to the edge of the boat to stare into the water after shouting various expletives in astonishment. There were two overhead lights that shone on the deck and spilled out onto the sea as well giving the water just outside the boat a really light blue color. I stared intently when all of the sudden two large black and white figures errupted from the water's surface. A male and female killer whale within 6 feet of me swimming beside the boat. I ran inside to grab my camera and started to take video. For the next 10 minutes I sat by the edge of the boat staring over the rail and in that 10 minutes they submerged and emerged probably 6 or 7 times. It was one of the coolest things that I've ever seen in my life and that expirience alone has made this trip amazing.

As for the video? Well i watched it and it's pretty dark and if you weren't there at the actual occurence then you probably wouldn't be able to see the whales in the video. And if you could see them you'd probably be to distracted by the guy in the background who was shouting explitives in astonishment and how totaly cool it was.

I'm still alive

I'm sorry that I haven't updated this in a long time but it's really difficult to get to a computer long enough to type anything. My past few times in port have resulted in me having to go straight to offload which means that I go straight to staring at dead fish for 6 hours. The sweet thing is that the new plant that we're offloading to doesn't require me to actually stand so I get to read for those 6 hours!

Things are going well though. I've got nothing all too exciting to report. One of the crewmen is going to show me how to weld on the next trip out to sea which I'm looking forward to. I've been reading a lot but I don't have a lot of music so any mix cds that people might feel inclined to send would be great.

I hope those that I haven't talked to are doing well and if so feel inclined should shoot me an email or post a response. Thanks. Sorry this is so choppy. I'm in a hurry.

-Patrick

ps. and i'll continue living

Well I'm switching boats now

So we left yesterday to go on another trip and we stopped about 10 or so miles outside of dutch harbor to do a quick tow so that the boat could get coverage for that day. Things were going fine until the boat sort of tremored. I was putting my rain gear on when i looked up at the deck boss who said "Oh shit... I think we're snagged"

It was true. Apparently we had become hooked on a sunken ship from WWII. We knew this because the coordinates of the wreckage have been known by everybody... but our boat. So the crew spent the next 10 hours trying to retrieve the net. It ended up being an 80,000 mistake. They lost the net which is connected to the codend (apparently there's a difference). They got to keep the codend (80,000) the transducer (35,000) and 3 of 4 eggs (10k each).

Gordon the engineer enlisted me to video tape the entire thing with his sony handy cam. I don't know how he's going to feel about the results because half way through I realized that this was recording audio as well. So there's about 40 minutes of me making remarks about the excursion like "progress history!" and "son of a bitch that sucks". Any way we ended up heading back into town and I was released the next day because it would be a week or so before they'd start fishing again. Bummer.

My photo bucket

Here is the link to my photobucket album.

I couldn't upload all my pictures because it was really foggy and the internet is really slow anyhow and is way worse with zero visibility. I know that sounded ridiculous but it's true. This is as much of the 1.45 gigs of pictures I could get before I had to get on the boat last week.

http://s316.photobucket.com/albums/mm343/thecubanrocker/