“Is that our buoy?”
Terror. What is it doing there? It’s supposed to be around the rocky corner in a little nook protected from the wind. There’s a shelf, but I had made sure I set the shrimp pots while drifting in the correct direction and there should have been plenty of extra line to more than account for the next high tide.
My mind was at full throttle contemplating consequences, but mostly looking for answers.
There was the problem of the nest…but I had unwound the line that was looped in on itself the way sloppy line coils do. I’d been smart and addressed that before tossing the first pot overboard so the pot wasn’t dangling 100 feet beneath the surface while I reorganized. I had even thought of how proud my wife would have been that I wouldn’t have had to apologize for getting furious at inanimate objects. I had thought ahead. I had taken a deep breath and worked the problem without the episode turning PG-13 or R for language. I wish she had been there to witness such a feat of mental strength and poise.
So what had I missed? Why had the pot floated around the point and now stood shocked, guilty like a teenager caught vaping?
I had set here a dozen or so times with no real epic success, but enough to provide the meat for a few dinners. It’s also close enough to town, and a protected enough a run, that there are few days I can’t get out there with my skiff and pull the pots by hand. Yes, I am aware that there are pot pullers that could sit right on top of either downrigger mount I have, and use the exact same plug and the exact same electricity source. I could send pots deeper and with more pots per string. I just haven’t gotten around to it.
Anyway, I was excited about the bait even though two friends think I’m wrong. One has commandeered an old blender from the kitchen to use exclusively for blending herring and fishing that in half-filled bait cups. Another swears by the pellets with some of the shrimp pellet juice that is impossible to clean should it spill. I happened to have some salmon carcasses and figured that since I prefer steak to beyond meat there were probably shrimp who were also conscious of ingesting too much processed food. I’d target them.
I slowed the skiff and approached. The buoy bobbed precariously on a slope that had the consistency of a staircase that descended 600 feet beneath the surface. I have friends who try to hit little ledges in this sort of terrain. Not me. Not with that severe a consequence. I’d rather miss a spot and end up shallower or deeper than I want, but still fishing. Not floating.
You know, maybe I was fortunate. If the buoy had floated the pots with the latest high tide, but had been too bashful to make a real run for it and I could recover them, what a relief, right? What a profound bit of luck that I wouldn’t have to replace these two productive veteran pots. One was the standard stainless, nesting pot that is ubiquitous and probably a little over a hundred bucks. The second pot was hard mesh with the bait compartment in the center. It’s at the end of its career but still fishes well.
“Not ours,” I say, trying to temper my jubilation and pretend I wasn’t really worried.
“Huh?”
“That’s not our buoy. We’re good.”
I throttled up, rounded the corner and saw two red buoys more or less where I left them.
• Jeff Lund is a freelance writer based in Ketchikan. His book, “A Miserable Paradise: Life in Southeast Alaska,” is available in local bookstores and at Alpha XR. “I Went to the Woods” appears twice per month in the Sports & Outdoors section of the Juneau Empire.
