The Star - News, views and advertising of the Grand Coulee Dam Area

I have taken a lot of fishing tips over the years. Only one was successful.

This was in Kodiak, Alaska.

I was there to help the owner of the daily paper prepare her newspaper property for sale. It needed a lot of tweaking.

I had been up there on several occasions, and on one of these trips the owner of the paper scheduled me to go out on a charter boat for halibut.

The day of the trip, she showed up at the dock to introduce me to the skipper of the boat. They were obviously friends, and the skipper said he would look after me.

The boat was 50 feet long and had two very large outboard motors on the rear.

The skipper told me that we were going over 50 miles out to an area he was familiar with and had been successful for halibut in the past.

He said it would take over an hour to get to the location.

The charter boat held a handful of people who had paid an unknown fee to come aboard and fish. I was lucky, the owner of the paper was picking up my tab.

We literally just skimmed the water we were going so fast.

While enroute he explained that catching halibut was not like fishing for salmon.

The skipper said the halibut didn’t fight like a salmon, and that it was more like pulling a barn door up from the bottom of the ocean.

I had been in a few barns in my day, and it was difficult for me to picture pulling up a barn door.

A crew member prepped all the poles, mine included, and when we were located at the spot, all our lines were in the water.

I got the first “barn door” and had trouble getting it to the surface.

I got the next couple, and my arms felt like they were going to fall off.

During the day, I pulled up 13 halibut, and along the way I pleaded with the halibut gods to give me a break. They didn’t hear my plea.

The largest was a 168-pound halibut that nearly did me in.

As it turned out, I provided most of the boat with limits, including the skipper.

He said he would take a couple of the 35-pound fish.  

The limit at the time was two fish.

I later learned how cagey the skipper was since 35 pounders were considered the best size for halibut.

Being a greenhorn, I chose the two latest fish.

I still can’t believe my luck fishing that day.

At the end of the afternoon, with healthy limits, we headed back to Kodiak.

On our return, we were chased by a rolling fog bank that kept trying to swallow up our boat.

When we returned to the dock, the newspaper owner had arranged for someone to take charge of my two halibut and to prepare them for shipment home.

She and her husband added some moose, bear and elk meat to my fish and got it to the airport in time for my departure.

The fish and wild game was packed in a very heavy cardboard shipping container and arrived in good shape.

It was amazing to me the number of similar shipping containers that arrived at the airport.

You can do most anything if you know how to do it and have the money.

On other trips and on weekends, the newspaper owner made sure that I got to do other things. One time she arranged for me to fly to Anchorage and then drive to Denali National Park, and another time to take a long hike to the interior of the island.

But the barn doors were fascinating. That was some barn with 13 doors.