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127 Ngul-a Fatica! IN EARLY JULY OF 1967 I pulled into Snug Harbor for a two-day layover. It had been a pretty good period for so early in the season, and my spirits were up. I was fishing alone on Sounion and, after pitching my fish off onto the power scow Beaver, I dropped the hook just off the beach and about a mile above the cannery on Chisik Island. There were thirty or forty boats anchored along the beach, several from Columbia Wards, and while I was cleaning up and fixing something to eat, Jon pulled in and tied alongside. We both wanted the company. Jon was fishing the cannery’s little bowpicker Carol Lee that year, his first on the Inlet, and he seemed a little wired. From his point of view I was probably something of an old hand. I was in my fifth year on the Inlet and owned my own boat. But I think we were both a little high on the sense of freedom and independence you get from running a boat on your own. You’re self-contained in the little boat-world and feel the charge from being your own man. You can take off in any direction you want, when you want, and there’s nothing like the edge you get from knowing all the time that what you make, and whether you make it at all, depends on nobody but you. Jon and I had struck up a budding friendship, though it embarrassed me a bit when he called me on the radio and butchered the name of my boat. I pronounced it “soon-yun,” but he’d always say, with a little excitement in his voice, “Sow-own-ion. Sow-own-ion. Do you read, Bert? Carol Lee.” The next morning we did a little work on our boats. Jon had a problem with his hydraulic roller, but mainly he was worried about a gasoline leak that he wanted to track down. There was a sheen of gas in his bilge, and enough fumes to make you nervous. I was interested in that, too, since we were tied up together, and I helped him track it down. Like so many of the old boats, Carol Lee had an aged gas tank that was beginning to dissolve into rust. Gas oozed from innumerable pinhole leaks, making the boat a floating bomb. Jon didn’t smoke, but he cooked on a camp stove 128 Ngul-a Fatica! that burned white gas, and a spark from the stove or from the engine’s rusty old electrical system could easily set off the fumes that collected in the bilge. I showed him how to stop the leaks with a bar of Ivory soap, and that was enough to keep him going until he could get back to Kenai. We went ashore to the cannery in time to catch the ten o’clock mug-up, where we could have a couple of fresh cinnamon rolls and, more important, hear the talk among fishermen about how they’d done the day before and what they thought about the next opening. We wanted to know what time people were planning to pull out the next morning, whether they’d head straight out or work their way south against the flood. You wouldn’t want to be swept too far north for the opening set. And we were hungry for rumors about the price of reds and about what was going on in Bristol Bay. If they were slugging them over there, it’d play hell with our price here in the Inlet. After mug-up we hung out for a while on the boardwalk outside the store, where each of us picked up a few things we couldn’t do without, maybe a can or two of condensed milk and an extra jar of peanut butter. A loaf of bread from their freezer to replace the one you had, now a mass of powdery green mold. In the office adjoining the store, the ownersuperintendent Joe Fribrock was busy talking on the radio and checking over some charts, while his wife Dorothy helped fill orders at the counter. Outside the store we bumped into an Italian fisherman Jon knew, a short, animated guy named Frank, who had a cigar in his mouth and talked a lot with his hands. He lived in Los Angeles, near San Pedro, where he used to fish, but now he...

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