In honor of Women’s History Month, Wild Alaskan Company is proud to celebrate Tricia Caron, a retired tender who lived the tender life on the M/V Rolfy for nearly three decades.
Tricia now resides full-time in Homer, Alaska, but for many years, she worked as a first mate alongside her lifelong companion the late Captain Mike Orth on their 90-foot tender where they spent much of their time together at sea. There, she worked as a deckhand, managed the galley of the Rolfy, became a legend for her seafood feasts, and used her gifts as a nurturer to transform some of the internal dynamics of the industry. Aside from working on a tender, she’s also worked as a chef, has for many years owned her own vintage clothing enterprise, and now dedicates her time as a caregiver.
Tricia was part of the Alaskan fishing industry at a time when few other women were, and has seen it through everything from the Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989 to the major shifts happening in the field today as a younger wave of Alaskans look to safeguard harvests for generations to come. Her singular perspective as a woman in the field gives us a glimpse at how the fishing industry shaped her own life — its challenges and its beauty — and, in sharing her brilliant story, helps light the way forward as we consider how to be stewards of the sea, of a multi-generational industry, and of one another for years to come.
How long has Homer been your home?
Well, I came to Homer in ‘79, but I came to Alaska from Boston in ‘69. My then-husband and I lived in Anchorage. Then we moved to the Arctic, Kotzebue, and lived there for a year. We had a really great time.
But I first saw Homer in ‘69. My sister came from Boston with me, and we flew on the plane with my young baby. I was only 22 when I had my daughter, and that period of my life was like a blur; I was such a young thing.
Homer was pretty different than it is now. It was hardly populated. And I thought, “I'd love to live in this place,” but it took [my ex-husband and I] another nine years to get there. I divorced that guy after 20 years of marriage.
And then I was with my next guy Mike Orth for 30 years — and that was the guy that I was in the fishing industry with. He was friends with Walt Kallenberg, [WAC founder Arron Kallenberg’s father].
Was your introduction to fishing with Mike? Or had you worked in the industry before?
Well, my ex-husband was a crab fisherman here in Homer. This is when crab was plentiful in our day. So I was involved in it that way, but he was the fisherman. Before that, he was an accountant, originally from Boston. But he loved being on boats and he loved fishing. So he abandoned all the accounting stuff and became a fisherman.
It was a really good life. We lived an alternative lifestyle. We lived off of the bay and lived off of the land. I had big gardens, and we lived pretty remote, more remote than I am now.
So I was used to the fishing life, but I didn't participate in it until I was with Mike. Then I really got into it. When we first got together, he was in the Bering Sea, and we didn't see each other very much. And so he said, “How would you like to work together? How about if we get a boat and we start, you know, living a tender life?”
And I said, “Yeah, that sounds great to me.” I had just divorced the year before. I wanted to start a new life.
Mike had worked as a crabber before. He started when he was 24 years old, just out of University of Washington. And he came to Alaska, worked for a while in the canneries, and then ran a boat with six deckhands on it at the age of 24. Think of yourself at 24, caring for six souls, you know?
What were you doing before you started working in the fishing industry?
I had a vintage clothing business in the mid-’80s, and I've had four shops in Homer at different times since then. Vintage doesn't sound like it'd be a big thing in Homer, but it was! Women would dress in, you know, their extra tough boots with a little vintage jacket. It was really fun to dress women here, especially the young women, and I got really excited about it.
When I started working with Mike, I would have somebody watch my shop for me in the summer while I was on the boat. But then it became too hard to find the right person to run my shop in the summer, so then I just gave it up.
And then I was full time into fishing. We would actually be on the boat. We had a 90-foot tender called the Rolfy, and we would be gone for almost eight months out of the year.
The Rolfy was built in 1941 as a supply boat for the Aleutians during the war. There were many supply boats that were transferred from the war effort to being tenders in Bristol Bay. They're all wood, incredibly built, mostly built in Seattle out of trees that had never been cut down before. The wood on these boats was so sturdy, the grain was so tight in them, that I couldn't fit a thumbtack anywhere on our walls. These are well made boats.
My husband and I acquired one of these boats in the ‘90s. And we did a total renovation right here in Homer. It was like a barge when we first brought it in, so it took us nine months and half a million dollars, but we converted it. We made fish holes in it, put bulwarks on it. Mike is the one I credit with that; he was amazing, he had a boat builder’s mind.
So what was the tender life like?
We would start at the end of February, load up in Homer and go across to Sitka across the gulf of Alaska and start with the herring. I don't know if you know anything about herring, but herring was very lucrative at one time in Alaska. Our main market was Japan because of the herring roe.
We would start from Sitka, and because the herring are traveling, we would follow them all over until we went up to Togiak which is on Bristol Bay. That's what gave us so many months at sea, and that’s what gave us our money for our operating expenses to run our boat for salmon. We'd have 2 to 3 deckhands on board, and so to pay for all of that, the herring helped us with our salmon season.
But after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the herring season changed. It changed our lives quite a bit. We used to make probably about $90,000 from just catching herring for the season, and then we could stock up on provisions and all of that for the rest of salmon season. But that ended — and also the Japanese economy tanked, so our only market was not buying herring anymore.
That was a real hardship for us and for a lot of other fishermen, Prince William Sound fishermen, Homer fishermen, Kodiak fishermen. We had oil on our beaches.
At that point, was that disaster something that the fishing industry had seemed coming?
We were afraid. We were cognizant of the fact that the terminus of the pipeline was subject to accidents. We asked that there be backup plans for any spills. We asked, and there weren't any. And so 33 million gallons of oil were left in the Sound and migrated to Homer, and found all over Prince William Sound — where, if you dig up rocks, you can still find it on the beach. The oil never went anywhere.
The disaster divided communities because there were people that made money on the oil spill that bought new boats to be hired by Exxon. It divided Homer, and the town has never recovered from it. You can feel the darkness in… not the people, but you feel a heaviness over the community. The aftermath of the oil spill was quite hard on everybody, and it was awful living through it. Birds dying, and whales, and… oh my god it just was the worst thing that's ever happened, besides the 1964 earthquake.
What was your experience like as a woman in the fishing industry?
It was pretty awful. There were hardly any women. I wouldn't get to see women for weeks on end. And this was in the late ’80s.
There were hardly any females out there. And if they were out there, they were pretty territorial. My Mike would say, “Trish, I think there's a woman on this boat!” And I'd get all excited and I'd get out on deck, and they would be dropping something off to us or something. And, you know, I'd go out to help tie things up.
And a woman would come out… and she'd be so leathery and kind of mean! I'd be so sad. It was like we had nothing in common, like she had kind of taken on a man's persona, you know? And, MIke would say, “Oh, that makes you really sad, huh, Trish?” And it did. It would remain that way for quite a few years. That was a really hard time for me, as far as, oh, just missing women. I'm a real woman's woman, not a man's woman.
That’s not what I was expecting you to say at all, when thinking about the challenges you might have faced having worked for so long in a male-dominated field.
It was that.
We hired women, and some of them worked out great. It has to be the right combination of women if you have them on your boat because you're working for months on end together. So I have good stories about that, and I have not so good stories. But it was the same with men.
Nowadays, there are so many women involved. It's so wonderful.
What were some of the other challenging aspects of working on a tender?
The long hours. I mean, we would sail for… well, the thing about a tender is that we were contracted, so we do whatever the cannery says. They'll say, “We want you to pick up the fish there, bring it to a floating processor.” We can be moving 24 hours, so there's no time off. That's what I'm trying to say. There's no time off.
You know, I can remember a young guy that we hired. He said to me one time, “You people never give any breaks.” He just wouldn't get out of his bunk. And I said, “Well, the fish are here at a certain time. They're not taking breaks.” That’s why we're working constantly, we are always moving. It's a hard, rewarding life. We're always adjusting our hours, we’re always on watch.
When the young deckhand was criticizing us, I said, “Oh, really? Why don’t you come up and tell Mike that?” And he just kinda hemmed and hawed — he didn’t want to confront Mike, of course. Mike was a consummate fisherman, and so I always felt really safe with him, and he was very judicial. He was the perfect captain of a boat.
But one day Mike caught him, and the deckhand said, “Uh, it's not your fault, Mike. It's not your fault.” You see, he could talk to me as a woman that way, but he couldn't tell that to Mike!
The long hours were just part of the job. We would get up at two in the morning and pull anchor and have to travel around to some place maybe 24 hours away. But you know what? Every day was different. Every day I worked, I woke up on the sea. You're in the hand of nature. And I really miss it. When Mike died four years ago, there went my job, and there went the love of my life. It's sad even to tell you about it right now because I loved it so much. It was such a calling.
It’s incredible to hear how working in the Alaskan fishing industry has shaped your life.
Yeah, I eat salmon probably three times a week! I'm just crazy about it, even after all those years.
But I also worked in restaurants as a chef. In 2002, I applied to go to culinary school in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Mike was going to go to boat building school. We just wanted to make a change in our life. We wanted to shake it up. So I applied, and I was told that the program would accept me even though I was much older. And then I told the director about my experiences cooking with Alaskan salmon, and she asked me to come and teach a class! “Would you teach a class?” I said I’d definitely do that.
So we were ready to do all this, to make a change. And that's when they discovered Mike had cancer, shortly after that. So we cancelled everything. It was like a show stopper.
He had surgery, different things to arrest his cancer. And they arrested it for 15 years. We lived a wonderful life for 15 years. He never complained about anything, we just lived our life. He was involved in trials and different things, and we always were able to make those and include that within our fishing schedule.
How did you first get into cooking?
I cooked for many, many people on the Rolfy. We would have all kinds of people on the boat, so I would be cooking for up to 14 or 15 people sometimes. That's where I got my cooking experience.
You know, my first season with Mike, I noticed when we got to Bristol Bay that there was a real strife between the fisherman and tenders hired by the fish companies. You could cut it, it was so thick. I asked Mike, “Why do the fishermen dislike the tender people? We supply them with food. We supply them with water and fuel, and we pick up their fish. Why is there this animosity?”
And he said it wasn't always that way, but it became that way because the fish companies started becoming bigger and bigger and screwing the fishermen. And because the tender people were middlemen, the fishermen started pointing their animosity toward them as well. The animosity was from the tender men too, back and forth from the fishermen.
So I said, “Let's make that different. We’re going to change that.” I started cooking for the fisherman. I would cook these huge meals because I had a beautiful galley. I had everything I needed, all the food I could want, all the fresh fish I could use. And because Mike had been a fisherman, he knew how fishermen wanted to be treated.
I swear, I started seeing other boats doing it, within a year of us doing it. They were making food for the fishermen, being helpful, changing the dynamics. Today, the tender boats go out of their way to be of help and of service to the fishermen.
Do you think this shift happened because you, as a woman in the industry, had more opportunities to spend your energy as a nurturer instead of doing physically demanding work on the boat?
Actually, I was a deckhand also. It took everyone on board to do the work we did to offload the fish. I did work very physically. And on top of that I did this other stuff — because women can do it all, you know that!
But I worked on deck a lot, carried a lot of things. I'd be really tired, and I would just think, “Oh, I don't want to do that. But okay. I can't stand that bathroom being that dirty right now!” So when everybody's asleep, I’d go down and clean it (even though we're supposed to clean up after ourselves). Or I would clean our repair room, a whole floor.
Tell us a little about the boat itself.
The boat was actually four stories high: It had an engine room, a repair room level. And then it had the galley, and then the wheelhouse. So there's so much to clean all the time. Talk about physical work! It's not classic boat work that you might think of, but it's essential for keeping it clean and looking good.
Wooden boats are constant upkeep. You're always walking around with a little paint in your hands. The ocean just works against you. And as soon as you're done with one end of the boat, the other end is rusting, so you're constantly going in circles thinking, I can't do this one more time. We were always cleaning. It was a hard life. And, you know, sometimes in the middle of it, in the middle of the smell of fish, I would think to myself, “If my friends, my women friends, could see me now!”
I was in charge of beautifying the boat, keeping her beautiful, buying all the food, keeping the galley, and I kept her pretty immaculate inside. I loved a shiny, shiny galley. Mike took care of all the engine work and all the planning of where we're going.
But I also learned to be a navigator. Mike was a great teacher. He was always taking classes to upkeep his license, so he would come home from those and he'd be teaching me. That was pretty awesome.
How has your work shifted since Mike’s passing? It sounds like your work was inextricably tied to him.
After he died, I kept the boat working. I hired this amazing young captain, and he ran the boat for me for two years. I supervised everything, paid all the bills, bought everything, managed it, and he did the hiring. So we kept that going for two years, and then it became really hard for me because it was just worrisome. You know, you're responsible for all these lives.
Before that, I had worked only with Mike. So I didn't want to be with anyone else. I mean, you get to see how important it is for you to have extreme trust in the one who's making the decisions. And I just never felt that I could trust anybody else that much. Plus, I had just come off from being with Mike in his transition, with hospice. We have hospice here, but it isn't like the ones outside of Homer. We don't have a big enough population, so it's a voluntary situation where everybody in the town works toward it.
I had been through almost a year and a half with Mike, and then going right into — like, four days later — I hired the skipper who just kind of walked into my life. It still seems like a miracle to me that that happened. He's become like a son to me now. He's a consummate fisherman, much like Mike, and ran the boat great.
But then I had the chance to sell the boat, while she was still sailable. I sold her two years ago, and she's still running. She's still in Bristol Bay. It was bittersweet for me to sell her. I would have never thought I would not be at sea until the end of my life.
And here I am a landlubber now. It feels so really weird. I can't cook in a restaurant because I can't stand for long periods of time like I used to, and I can’t be at sea.
But I'm still vibrant. I think being out at sea made me that way. My friends all tell me, “I can't believe you're 73!” I don't think of 73 as very old. Actually, now I take care of a 93-year-old woman who has dementia and I found that I have a new life of making someone happy, as happy as I can when I'm with them. It's a really beautiful thing.
So that's what I'm down to. I used to think that's what I'm reduced to, but now I don't think of it that way at all. I think that's what the beauty of all these years has given me, the opportunity to slow down and be with somebody in a very certain way.
It’s especially beautiful because my husband had the whole community come in for one reason or another to read to him, some to play music for him… hospice has a lot more heart here.
What do you see as the future of the Alaskan fishing industry?
I have a goddaughter in Homer that runs an all woman crew in Bristol Bay. She has been fishing most of her life, and there are all kinds of women like that in this town. And, I don't know if you've ever heard of the Salmon Sisters. They're just really amazing.
The next generation of fishermen will be, I think, filled with women. These are women that I've known since they were children. We have so many kids that were born and brought up in Homer who went away, but they are coming back in droves — Arron is one of them. I mean, it is amazing that we're seeing that happening. They’re involved in sustainable fishing; the Salmon Sisters go up and speak at meetings up in Anchorage about the fisheries. They have so much more to say about it than our generation.
The younger generations are the ones who are getting involved in the fisheries because they want them to last as long as they can. They are the future, as long as we can keep our fisheries healthy.
Pictured: a life-saver from the Rolfy that served as Tricia and Mike's "wedding ring" during a ceremony at the legendary Salty Dawg in Homer, Alaska.
