A halibut does not fight the way other fish fight. A tuna runs. A salmon jumps. A halibut simply declines. You set the hook three hundred feet down on what feels like a manhole cover, and for a good while the manhole cover wins, and the rod stays bent, and the line does not move in either direction, and you begin to have a private conversation with yourself about whether the bottom of Alaska is snagged on your reel or the other way around. Then it lifts, an inch at a time, and every inch is one you paid for.
Kodiak Island in early September is a place that hands out weather in small portions. You watch the forecast for three days, you get a window of maybe four hours between one system leaving and the next one arriving, and you take it. We ran out of a harbor full of commercial boats at an hour when the light was still deciding, past canneries and rafted seiners and a sea otter lying on its back with a crab on its chest looking entirely uninterested in our schedule. The hills came up green and treeless and enormous behind us, and then the fog closed the door and we ran on the plotter.
The mechanics of halibut fishing are not elegant and nobody pretends otherwise. You find a gravel edge or a hump on the sounder, you drop a pound of lead with a circle hook and a chunk of herring on it, and you bounce bottom in a drift while the boat swings and the current does whatever the current is doing. It is closer to farm work than to angling. The captain calls the drift, everybody drops, everybody reels up when the line goes sideways, everybody drops again. There is a great deal of standing around holding a heavy rod, waiting on a fish that is lying flat in the dark with both eyes on the same side of its head, thinking about it.
Our skipper had a small aluminum boat, a rebuilt kicker, and the entire Kodiak weather history filed somewhere behind his eyes. He would not fish a spot if the tide was wrong for it, no matter how much anybody wanted to, and he apologized for none of it. What he wanted was slack water on the back side of a hump he never named out loud, and around eleven in the morning he got it, and the drift went quiet for six minutes and then everything happened at once. Three rods down. A chicken halibut of maybe twenty pounds came up first, flapping like a wet doormat, and then the far rod bent into something that did not come up at all for nine full minutes.
That one went a hundred and ten pounds on the harbor scale, which around there is a nice fish and not a famous one, and it took two people, a harpoon, and some language to get it aboard. We kept two, released the big one after a photograph nobody in the boat has stopped showing people, and were tied up before the next front arrived with rain moving sideways across the channel.
The captain looked at the sky, looked at the fish box, and said we had gotten a little lucky with the window. In the Alaskan territory, that is the closest thing to a victory speech anyone is going to give you.
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