The Char­i­ty is fired up and ready to cut the lines, so I’ll type mad­ly to give a brief update. This is one of the many moments I think how lucky I am to fish with my broth­er, who sees me twitch­ing for a last inter­net mes­sage and jerks his thumb at the cab­in door.  “Just go.” I scur­ried up to the gro­cery store next to the har­bor, the clos­est place with wire­less. Good thing, too — just real­ized we did­n’t buy any cof­fee for this trip!

We’re iced up, fueled up, full of gro­ceries and opti­mism.  Got a good fore­cast, and ran 500 pounds of frozen-sol­id hump­ies through a chop saw this morn­ing, get­ting our bait ready. (You’re going to have to see a pic­ture of that process — humpy saw­dust every­where — but anoth­er time.)  We’ve got a per­son­al quo­ta of 10,000 pounds of hal­ibut to catch, and antic­i­pate being back in Sit­ka in a week.

Anoth­er excit­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty came up about three weeks back. A new friend is launch­ing a web­site for all things Alaskan com­mer­cial fish­ing-relat­ed, and invit­ed me to share some log­book-style posts over there. Alas­ka Way­points goes live tomor­row morn­ing, 5.11.11, at 10 AM PST.  You can find my col­umn, “South­east, Vari­able,” at www.alaskawaypoints.com, with a sto­ry from our trip north last week. Please do vis­it and share with any­one con­nect­ed to the fish­ing busi­ness; it’s going to be a fan­tas­tic resource for our folks.

On that note, I’m ready to grab some cof­fee and run back to the har­bor. Fun­ny how the prepa­ra­tion of get­ting ready to go fishin’ can be so much more exhaust­ing and fran­tic than the actu­al WORK of fishin’, itself.  Mar­tin and I are in agree­ment: It’s time to leave town so that we can get some rest.

Be well, all — please check back in for some new sto­ries in about a week.