Seward in October is a town putting the lawn furniture away. The cruise ships are gone, half the harbor restaurants have flipped their signs for the year, and the charter fleet is down to the few skippers stubborn enough to keep running until the weather tells them not to. I found one of them, a man named Gus who has fished Resurrection Bay for thirty years and keeps a thermos the size of a fire extinguisher, and he said he had room on what might be the last trip of the season, depending. Depending on what, I asked. He looked at the sky the way other people look at a phone.
We left the harbor at first light with the mountains wearing fresh snow halfway down and the water in the bay flat and black. Gus ran out past Caines Head and into the Gulf proper, forty minutes of swell that sorted the passengers into the ones who had eaten breakfast and the ones who had eaten it twice. He anchored on a gravel bank in two hundred feet of water, handed out rods with reels like coffee cans, and clipped on two-pound weights and whole herring the size of a forearm.
Halibut fishing is mostly waiting, and in October it is cold waiting. You bounce the lead, you feel the current lean on the line, and you learn which rattles are the bottom and which are not. Around ten the woman next to me set the hook on something that did not move so much as disagree. Gus came down the rail, said let her run, and for twenty minutes she cranked while the fish took it back. When it came up it was the size of a door, brown on top and white underneath and broad as a kitchen table. Gus tied it off alongside and said that one is going to feed a family through March.
Mine were smaller, two chickens of twenty pounds each, which in Alaska counts as modest and anywhere else counts as a story. The wind came up around one, the way Gus had said it might, and he pulled the anchor without discussing it. We ran home with the spray coming over the bow and the snow line on the mountains looking lower than it had that morning.
At the dock he hung the big fish on the rack for the photo, and a man walking past asked when the next trip went out. Gus looked at the sky again and said May.
Cold water days are hoodie days. See our custom boat hoodies and sweatshirts, drawn from a photo of your own boat.