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WHY I LOVE WHALES

When I was a mere pup--you know: clueless--
my father did his best to make me into a genuine dog
by giving me a job on a halibut boat.
I was a dog, all right!  I couldn't even splice a line.
Somewhere between Seattle and Prince Rupert I learned
how to gange hooks, too.  God, I was incompetent!

It lasted for years, all the way through graduate school
and well into retirement, now--thankfully--well
behind me.  I am now teachable now, although half
a century past my prime.  I cook and shovel snow.

Eventually, during those halibut fishing days in Alaska--
although not before I decided it was best not to work
on Dad's boats, I got the job of working at the roller,
almost all the time.  The "roller" was actually something
like a rolling pin on the rail, where the long line,
dangling short lines with barbed hooks intended to
catch halibut, came up.  Lots of things came up,
some of them halibut; some cod, octopi, sharks, or wolf fish.

The job at the roller was to keep the line coming--not
to stop--while gaffing what came up, keeping it or
flipping it back into the sea, unraveling the hooks,
and most importantly, heaving the halibut on board before
it knew what had happened and, at the same time, freeing
the hook and clearing the gangion.  I loved it!

But sometimes the halibut were huge!  We called them "whales".
"Whale!" we shouted, and stopped the gurdy.  Other
crew members came to help haul a three hundred pound
halibut up over the rail.  Maybe.  A halibut is all muscle.


Audun, a friend in Norway who lives north of the
Arctic Circle--up there where summer sun never goes down
and where winter never sees it--sent me an article
(a good while ago) about a cousin who caught a 400 pound
halibut in a fjord, and managed to haul it to shore.

Four hundred pounds!  I never saw a halibut over 300 pounds!

We know there have been huge halibut!  Almost 700 pounds!
So 400 pounds  isn't a halibut record:  it might be
a fjord record.  It might just be a reminder that we have
to be careful; that seventeen- or eighteen-year-olds need
to learn how to splice a line, and how to gange hooks,
and how to become men, and that they they cannot do it
if they do not both love and lament what it is
to catch a halibut that is as old as an old man;
an old man like me.  We live here together.
.

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