Prince William Sound & Barry Arm

Prince William Sound & Barry Arm

Nick and Lola have been working on commercial fishing boats the last two summers, or would have but Nick broke his foot and he's been on the sidelines this season. Lola worked though, and this was a very good year for the fishermen, so she made pile of money, enough to buy a used car anyway. Nick, the poor schmuck, is stuck at home taking care of his ailing father. That's what you get ya big dummy, trying to save that stupid jet-ski from that vicious, foot-eating dock.

The boats they work on operate in Prince William Sound which is this weird area southeast of Anchorage. Notably, Anchorage isn't on Prince William Sound, it's on Cook Inlet. To get from one to other you have to sail south to the Gulf of Alaska, which basically puts you out in the open ocean, as if you weren't already. Cook Inlet and Prince William Sound are both large bodies of water, Prince William Sound is roughly 75 miles across and maybe 50 miles north to south. What makes it weird is all these islands and the jagged coastline. It's not like Puget Sound or San Francisco Bay, the boundaries are not so well defined. It's more like Norway. You see that nice outline of Norway on your world map, but when you start examining it closely you see that it is just a jumble of giant rocks. The coast doesn't look like it has any proper land at all. Much the same can be said of Prince William Sound.

All around the sound are all these little inlets, and coming down from out of the mountains are all these little streams that empty into the inlet. When spawning season comes along, the adult salmon head back to the stream where they originated. Each one of these streams has their own tribe of fish. Evidently the fish self identify, I don't know that anyone else, man or fish, can tell. When all the salmon are heading home, they break the first rule of security: they have become predictable. Their nemesis, the commercial fisherman, knows this, and sets up his nets just offshore from where the stream empties into the inlet. All the fish swimming home run into his net and are caught. Well, not all of them. Some get by and that's enough to keep the salmon population going. At least I hope it is.

Then there's the issue of the number of streams and the number of boats. Too many boats might catch more salmon than the market wants, the price would collapse, and some fishermen would go broke. That would thin their ranks. So it's a very capricious way to make a living. The fish may or may not be plentiful, the market demand may be high or low, and there might be more than enough fishermen, or there might not be enough. If things go your way you could living high on the hog, if they don't you may find yourself on the beach, casting a line into the surf.

And that's just the business side of it. The reality of it is zillion dollar boats, crews hard at it all day long, out on the boat for weeks at a time, well, as long as the season lasts, or until the refrigeration system breaks and you have to come into Cordova which is only town to speak of.There is Valdez, but that's an oil town, Cordova is a fishing town. They have their own jetport so they can fly Ukrainians in to work in the fish processing plant. Liza has been working in Cordova as a general factotum, doing, among other things, delivering parts to repair the broken refrigeration systems on the commercial fishing boats.Anyway, fishing season is over and they are all here in Portland.

Nick informs me that Prince William Sound is under a kind of tsunami watch (pdf). They (the guys who watch these things) have latched onto Barry Arm as a potential disaster in the making. I am not quite sure what Barry Arm is, whether it is an arm of a glacier or a piece of land, but there is a glacier involved. The prediction is that sometime in the next 20 years, Barry Arm is going to collapse into Prince William Sound and that is going to trigger a tsunami 1600 feet high which will be like the biggest wave ever! It would cool to surf it, hey? 1600 feet. I can't even imagine. Of course it will dissipate very quickly, it's not like a major underwater fault shift. Still, it will probably be felt all over Prince William Sound, and since all the fishermen up there know about it, it is liable to influence the choice of fishing grounds.