The Foy of Hooking

My bluse (blog muse) is sending me mixed messages this weekend. It tells me to try and write something serious and reflective, to bring some balance to my vulgar tales of staggering around Alaska, drunk with foy (fishing joy); but it also tells me that I have a responsibility to finish up those tales of foy, especially the promised halibut hangover story.

What is a halibut hangover? For me, it came in two distinct forms:

-- Serious muscular ache in the right arm, shoulder and back, even during the first mile of a 20-mile day, compounded by a deep sense of defeat and emotional exhaustion.

-- A sensation of dead weight that hangs over the side of the kayak for about two hours, thrashing or running occasionally, but mostly just hanging there like a cinderblock.

Leaving a beautiful camp in Aluklik Bay on my second traveling day in Prince William Sound, I decided to drop a jig right at the head of the bay, just to catch a few rockfish and start the day right. I hooked up almost immediately (no surprise), but when I tried to slowly bring the fish up, it slowly turned and went a little deeper, steady taking line (surprise!)

About an hour later I had managed to get back enough line to verify that yes, that heavy weight was caused by a large flat thing that was white on one side and dark on the other. And it was a bit bigger than I had bargained for when I read that the "chicken halibut" in PWS usually ran around 20-30 pounds. My guess was 50-75 pounds, and after 90 minutes of tug-of-war, it was reduced to a dead but quite unmanageable weight. Anyone who has dealt with a halibut knows that you need only reach out and touch the fish to bring it thrashing back to life. So, lacking a sidearm, I resorted to suffocation:




Suffocation clearly wasn't working well, so I went to General Plan B, which in kayak fishing is to get somehow to terra firma and finish the fish fight on your feet. Too often, this is easier said than done. And when you've got slippery seaweedy rocks, and a little bit of chop, and -- most inauspiciously of all -- a large garden of kelp between you and terra firma, then the results are fairly predictable:




Two days later in Jackpot Bay I had another tough failure, which came about as a result of sticking a small ling cod onto a large jig and lowering it about 100 feet. When the line started steadily and heavily going out, I whooped and screamed for foy; but somehow or another during an awkward moment the 40-pound braided line snapped faster than you could say Halibut Hangover #2. It wasn't until my third go that I finally got to put some chicken in my pot:




Foy-loving friends might ask why I only hooked three halibut on a 12-day paddling trip, and there are a few good answers to that. First, I learned pretty quickly that my muscles and joints could only withstand one halibut battle per day and still crank the paddle with adequate force to get me around from pillar to post. Also, it was generally true that any halibut jig was also fair game to rockfish and ling cod between 1 and 6 pounds (I am upset that I never got a big ling, though) and these fish would often take the jig before it even got to the bottom, pre-empting the halibut entirely. And then, finally, just when I thought I had the halibut thing figured out, I started getting into schools of coho salmon that would take flies, which of course takes priority over any kind of spinning-gear projects. That's not to say that I didn't make the most of my halibut interval:




And with that film, I am pretty much out of ways to re-live the foyous moments of my second Alaskan fishing sonata. Sigh. Blank look of existential despair. Incipient infant daydreams of a Christmas carol to Baja . . . possibly an early spring song of sea trout in Patagonia . . . and then perhaps a third sonata to come.