The sharpest thing on the planet, without question, is a brand new Victoronox fishing knife.  There is no question about it.  The thing will cut you to the bone from across the room.  The first thing that happens when I purchase a brand new Victoronox fishing knife is that it leaps from its incompetent little plastic sheath and attacks my fingertips.  It takes a moment to notice you've been cut by one of these things, like when you glance down and notice the steady stream of blood gathering around your feet and you think, 'Where is that coming from?', and then you check your hand and it's completely smeared in deep red ooze and then the fierce sting registers in your brain.  A Vicky is so quick it takes your nerve endings a minute to catch up.  So you wrap some electrical tape around this wound that you can't even see and now the problem is not so much the cut itself, but the fact that you're reduced to four operable digits on the one hand for  the foreseeable future because Vicky cuts are loath to heal.  This is how my codfish trip begins.
                                                                            ready!

Actually it begins two weeks prior with twelve-hours-a-day of gear work to get all the huge traps ready to fish.  This is the unglamorous side of commercial fishing that goes unrecognized by those not familiar with the industry.  The hours spent working on pumps, motors, valves, hoses, line, mesh, traps, gear, electronics, cleaning, grinding, painting - the bulk of the work for which no one earns a dime.  It's a huge gamble, to hope that the relatively brief period of actual fishing will make up for all of that time spent, the incredibly gross hours of opportunity cost.  The guys on deck have a hard job, true, but the skipper is the one who has all the pressure to produce, to make the sacrifice pay off for the crew, to put us on some damn fish.  Otherwise he won't have a crew for very long.  Not to mention the hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gear and machinery being put at risk out there on the open ocean.  It's easy to understand why so many of them are rather high-strung individuals.  A certain degree of catastrophe has to be expected with so many variables conspiring out there, so many chances for something to go wrong.  The odds of a flawlessly productive trip are nil.  If you want to avoid trouble you better just tie your boat to the dock and slap up the 'For Sale' sign.
                                                       let's see what we got!

We're 'plus four' on this trip, meaning we've got the skipper, Craig, plus me, Nate, the rookie from Colorado, Justin, the big guy from Dutch Harbor, and Loren, my old buddy from the Totem crew over in Bristol Bay.  Justin and Loren have worked the Providence before and Nate has experience in some other fisheries, so we have the makings of a really good crew.  So the deck is loaded with traps and line, we've got our grub, we've got our bait, and we're out.  Eighteen hours to the fishing grounds.  This, and the eighteen hour steam home with a boat load, is the joy of a fishing trip.  The two weeks in between is a numbing blur of cold, wet, mumbling, grumbling, sleep-deprived, mild chaos.  Everyone talks about quitting - except Justin, who scarcely says a word even when you ask him a direct question - and everyone continues to do their job with vigor.  The weather is poor half the day, and really poor the other half.  When we were on the beach we couldn't wait to leave.  Now we can't wait to head home.  This is the eternal cycle of a trip fisherman's life - in too deep.
                                                       a couple of twenty pounders

Anyway, we all work through our cuts and bumps and bruises and fatigue and foul weather, and eventually circumstances dictate that we head for the beach.  I sleep like a big, fat, happy baby.  We deliver our fish.  We are unimpressed.  I was going to leave Kodiak this week, but I have yet to recoup what I've invested up here.  Call the airline, change the flight.  Bait, fuel, grub - we're out.  One more time around, echoing the wicked hope of every trip fisherman - 'this could be the one.'
                                                                    nap time