Twenty-one years
on the same water.

Coffee is on by four-thirty. The dock is a short walk down a packed gravel path through alder, the kind of walk where you do most of your waking by the time you reach the boat. The strait is usually still at that hour. In late June it isn't really dark — the sky has been a long, slow blue since one in the morning — and the water gives back the light without breaking it.

You leave the slip a little before five. The run to the halibut grounds is twenty-five, thirty minutes depending on the day. There are mornings the boat seems to lift over the water rather than push through it. You watch the depth finder over the captain's shoulder. Bait stacks at sixty fathoms. The boat slows. Lines down.

Halibut fishing is patient work. You feel the lead find the bottom and you wait, and then you feel something that is not the lead. There is a long moment where nothing is certain, and then there is. It takes a while to bring one up. The crew handles the gaff. The fish comes over the rail. There's a measure of quiet on the deck — the kind of pause that happens around something that has weight.

Mid-morning you shift to salmon water. Different rhythm, different rod. Bait spinning slow at the back of the boat. The bite, when it comes, is unmistakable. You work the fish toward the net. The guide reads the tide and the gulls. By noon you've usually had a few in the box and a few back over the side.

You eat lunch on the water — sandwiches the lodge sent out, coffee still warm — and you fish through the afternoon as the light begins its long fall toward evening. Back at the dock by five or six. The catch goes to the processor. You go to the porch. Dinner is at seven. Most nights, someone is still out at the rail at ten, watching the strait go gold under the late-summer sun.