Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
notice them. I did see one sailboat, but it was in its proper place, on a trailer with a 'for
sale' sign in the window.
To celebrate this stubborn survival of the Alaskan commercial fisherman, in May the
community puts on a party, the Kodiak Crab Festival. The festival has been around since
1958, when they used to fish king crab out of the harbor and make them race each other so
the humans could bet on them. We were barely an hour off the plane when my friend
Sharyn Wilson and I walked down the hill from our hotel to the small boat harbor and bel-
lied up to the
SIFI
booth on the festival midway. For $15 each we were presented with two
halves of steaming king crab, melted butter, and Baby Wipes.
Dick and Kandi Powell have been running the
SIFI
booth for “a hell of a long time,” ac-
cording to Kandi, and since 1981, according to Dick. Dick fishes king crab commercially
“twenty-four hours past Adak” and donates the crab to raise funds for St. Mary's School.
Last year, he got the competition, in the form of fellow fishermen Terry Cosgrove, Russ
Moore, Steve Hall and Kim Hansen to donate crab, too, “and they don't even live here.”
This single booth has given the school a $60,000 playground, and now they're working on
expanding the gymnasium.
The crab is the best I've had since leaving Seldovia in 1969, fat in the shell and oh so
sweet. Sharyn inquires anxiously as to when the booth will open the following morning.
“Noon,” Dick says. “Well, eleven-thirty, maybe.” I can see Sharyn making a silent resolu-
tion to be there by ten.
We adjourn to Tony's, a local watering hole with a sign proclaiming it “the biggest nav-
igational hazzard [sic] on Kodiak.” There, it is alledged, actual Alaska fishermen stood up
and read poetry. That they wrote themselves. In public.
Understand, the fishermen I grew up with would rather have leapt naked into Kache-
mak Bay in January than read poetry out loud. Well, other than “The Shooting of Dan
McGrew,” and they would have had to have been staggering drunk even then. But this
night a local fisherman named Toby Sullivan welcomes us to the Fifth Annual Kodiak
Fisherman's Poetry Reading and promises us poetry for a couple of hours “and then the
alcohol takes over.”
Toby reads his “The Things You Need,” a prose poem listing all the things a Bering Sea
fisherman needs, including XtraTuff Boots, a case of neoprene gloves, a calling card for
