The Aleutian Blues -Preparation for the Novel.

 Makushin Bay to the Bering – Into the Deep

From Makushin Bay, with the sun briefly warming our backs and Iceland momentarily at peace, we shoved off and headed into the Bering Sea. The reprieve was over. The sea was calling us out to battle again.

Halibut fishing meant longlines, not nets. It was a brutal, backbreaking process: miles of line rigged with baited hooks, laid deep into the ocean and retrieved hours later, hopefully heavy with fish. My designated job was to guide that longline as it spooled back in, keeping it from piling like a twisted pyramid in the drum. I used a steel pipe to move the line side to side, a motion that had to be constant, smooth, precise—even in the middle of a heaving, groaning sea.

The work was mechanical and meditative, but also terrifying. Sometimes I imagined that inch-thick nylon longline—wet, glistening, tensioned like a bowstring—snapping loose and slicing through the deck like a blade. If it caught me in the wrong moment, it would cleave me in two like butter. That thought stayed with me like a shadow.

It wasn’t just superstition. I’d heard the stories. Stories of fishermen losing fingers, arms, even lives to a line that jumped its track. One minute you’re steadying yourself with the steel pipe, guiding the rhythm. The next, you’re a cautionary tale, your name spoken in low tones in other wheelhouses up and down the Aleutian chain.

There were moments I stared at the line coiling in, taut and alive, and felt like I was playing a game of chicken with a sea serpent. A blink too slow, a step too soon, and I'd be another ghost swallowed by the sea. Every pass of that pipe became a meditation in presence. There was no room for ego, no room for drifting thoughts. Just the sea, the line, and me.

But I held the line. I made it through. Fear became focus. And with each day I stayed alive, I felt myself being shaped—slowly, brutally—into something more than a landlubber.

We pushed into the deep blue with Makushin shrinking behind us, Iceland creaking and groaning like a living beast. The crew was weathered but wired. We had enough stories and foul jokes to last another hundred miles.

There was no turning back now. The Bering was waiting, and so were the halibut. And so was whatever came next.