Deep Sea Fishing (to Katy Perry tunes)
The good thing about fishing in Alaska in July is that when you wake up at 3:30 AM to go fishing it feels like daytime so you just learn to roll with it. Joe and I were due to meet the captain for our deep sea charter at the dock at 6:00 in Homer so we had quite a hike to get there. But who the hell needs sleep when you are about to slay some halibut and lingcod!
The trip from Sterling to Homer was lengthy but is a beautiful drive along the coastline for a majority of the trip. Some of the scenery along the way makes it hard to drive without wanting to pull over constantly and take it all in. I think I felt that way for alot of the time we were in Alaska. It’s just incredible to look at the surroundings you find yourself in. The boat dock area at Homer is itself really pretty amazing. It’s like an island fishing village that has an unbelievable amount of boat docks and charters that operate out of there with a little town of shops, restaurants, and other places right there on the island. It reaches out into Kachemak Bay next to an amazing range of snow capped mountains that are part of Kachemak Bay State Park. It kind of pumps you up because there are fishermen everywhere ready to board their charters and have some of the greatest days of their lives.
I’m not the most superstitious dude out there but I am adamantly against bringing bananas on a frigging boat. I’ve been burned by the banana a few too many times and when I saw the crew loading our boat, the Casino, with a bunch of bananas and other miscellaneous items I was on red alert. As the deck hand went to grab the container with the bananas, I said to him “Hey man, what’s up with the bananas?”. Gabe, the captain of the Casino was standing nearby immediately chimed in with “Don’t you worry about that Banana Boy!”. This was going to be a different kind of charter for sure.
As we soon found out, Gabe is a captain that loves his music at high volume. This was a long range charter so we had about six hours total of travel time to get to and from where we were fishing that day. What happened next was pretty damn hilarious because when we took off from the dock, Gabe starts playing music I’d describe as teenage girl dance music. More specifically, he played a range of pop tunes from Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Ariana Grande, you name it. I am convinced that Gabe does this to troll the old dudes that go fishing with him and see how long it takes for someone to say something. After an hour and a half of this, finally we all start ribbing Gabe about the music. I asked at one point, “Gabe did your teenage daughter make our playlist?” The captain said that we were going to listen to a bunch of different stuff on his boat and he’s was going to play all kinds of shit except country because Gabe “fucking hates country”.
Once we gave Gabe some crap about the music, he transitioned to some more acceptable Rage Against the Machine, Snoop, Journey, Jim Croce, and many many more on the way out to Kodiak Island where we’d be fishing. First stop of the day was to catch halibut using big soft plastic jigs. The crew got us setup and ready to go and we started catching halibut within a few seconds. Game on for most everybody. Honestly I couldn’t figure it out at the first stop. I am used to fishing for grouper and red snapper on circle hooks so I was screwing it all up. When you jig for flounder, the technique for hooking the fish is different and you are using the leverage of the rod and putting your thumb on the spool in order to set the hook. With grouper/snapper, I’d just start reeling and the circle hook does the work but after losing a few halibut, I knew I was doing something wrong.
While we were moving to the 2nd stop I had a chance to think about the flaws of my technique and as soon as we started fishing, I was able to hook a big lingcod and just like that it all came together for me. Joe and I were able to get our lingcod and halibut at the 2nd stop and most everybody else on the boat was laying into them as well.
Our 3rd stop of the day was a rockfish spot (also called black sea bass), which was right up my alley because we used spinning reels and my bassin’ techniques were dead on for hooking and landing these fish. We caught 60 of these within about 30 minutes and it was non-stop action.
While we fished for the sea bass, the weather turned pretty sour and since we had limited out, it was time to head home. The boat ride was pretty damn brutal the whole way back but we did have captain Gabe’s music to keep our minds off the weather. For the whole ride back we listened to…you guessed it…fucking country music. Grade A trolling captain!
Only two of us threw up on the way back to Homer after going through the Flemish Cap-like waves but we were all glad to get back to land and get our massive amount of fish processed. It was a hell of a day fishing and one that we won’t soon forget. In some weird way, when I hear Katy Perry from now on it will bring back fond memories of our day of Alaska deep sea fishing.
