Around here, we spend a lot of time talking about the art of cooking fish, so today I thought it might be nice to break from the norm and share a story about catching fish. A tale that stars father and son, a lesson on the magic of survival and what happens when the guts and grit of the human spirit triumph, against all odds, in the face of the elements.
This little saga resides in the souls of the men who lived it and between the cracks of the wooden timber planks that comprise the Polly K, the Kallenberg family’s first commercial salmon boat on which the whole thing took place. The story was recounted to me by my father-in-law Walter Kallenberg, who at the time of the incident was just 17, and who eventually grew up to become, in addition to a mechanical engineer, a Bristol Bay commercial sockeye fisherman — just like his father, Robert C. Kallenberg.
As many of you know, Grandpa Kallenberg not only fished for sockeye each summer in the silver waters of Bristol Bay, but also wrote a master’s thesis entitled "A Study of the Red Salmon of Bristol Bay with Particular Reference to Teaching its Conservation." It’s no exaggeration to say that a deep and unflinching reverence for the salmon is and has always been etched into the Kallenberg family’s DNA.
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“We’re not having sandwiches.”
On one particular July afternoon in the summer of 1966, right around the middle of the sockeye salmon season, Robert and Walt find themselves crafting salmon salad sandwiches aboard the Polly K, where they’ve “made a set” (positioned their gillnet in the water to catch fish) on the west side of the Kvichak River — a sizable river, approximately 50 miles long, located in southwestern Alaska — that flows southwest from Lake Iliamna to Kvichak Bay, an arm of Bristol Bay, on the Alaska Peninsula. The tide is moving out, the gear is in the water and lunch is on the metaphorical horizon, until Robert stops, puts his slice of bread down, looks out at the actual horizon and sees what could only be a very serious storm. “We’re not having sandwiches,” he tells Walt, his voice as certain as the wetness of water. “We’re picking up.”
Picking up means they start pulling the net back onto the boat with whatever fish has managed to get caught in it. Because at this very moment the rhythm of the tide combined with the temperament of the weather is a harbinger. They start to make a run for the east side of the river, the length of which is about ten miles wide, the force of the wind battling it out with that of the tide, and the waves showing up like hulking, moving mountains of water, their size and intensity building up with each minute.
“It feels exhilarating when you’re face to face with that much power.”
“To this day, I have never seen anything like it in the bay. It looked like they went on forever,” Walt tells me. “These waves are coming, moving quickly, and hitting the boat, leaving it suspended in mid-air. I can see other boats running in the same direction as ours, and I can actually see their propellers when a wave goes up. We are going way up and we’re slamming back into the water about ten, fifteen feet. It feels exhilarating when you’re face to face with that much power,” my father-in-law tells me, a moment that he is actually able to document because the young Walt has with him a Polaroid camera!
And in the course of all this mayhem, Walt and Robert are hit with the unignorable — their boat is starting to feel heavy. The feeling that they are not only at the mercy of wind and tide, but also, in fact, sinking. Even though they have some fish on the boat and see water coming over the bow, they both well know that neither of those variables could create enough weight to sink the boat. Something else is going on.
Robert tells his son, “Hey, open up the hatch — see if you can see any water in the bilge.” Walt does so, and confirms that there is indeed a lot of water in the bilge. “Throw on the Jabsco pump,” Robert yells, which is a pump with an actuator on it that you shove a lever on, which tightens the belt, and you can start pumping water. Walt reaches down and turns that pump on, but the water is up far enough on the belt that it won’t grab. “That was, without a doubt, an attention-getter,” Walt recalls.
“Son, I don’t think we’re going to make it.”
The other pump on the boat is a navy hand pump. Walt goes to where that pump is and gets down around the fish and the water, which by that time is up to his knees. “We’re in trouble,” Robert says, doing his best to steer the vessel. And when you’re in trouble on the boat, you throw a rain jacket up on an oar. So, Walt takes off his jacket and straps it onto the giant oar they had on board and raises it as their signal of distress. Robert looks at Walt and says, “Son, I don’t think we’re going to make it.”
Well, no one — not even his own father — is going to tell this kid from Bristol Bay that his life is about to get cut short in “the drink,” as fishermen are sometimes known to call the sea. And with the tenacity of a pitbull, Walt, who has never before swore at his father, replies: “THE HELL YOU SAY!” He pumps that pump with the force of a beast, unstoppability fueling his motions, the prospect of the rest of his life pulling and pushing his lithe, teenaged arms. “I was not going to die. That just wasn’t in the program. And from then on, it was the storm trying to fill the boat up, and me trying to put the storm back in the river.”
“Were you scared?” I ask him, as he recounts his tale, the moment clearly embossed into his memory.
“Was I scared??” Walt answers me. “No! I was BUSY.”
Robert steers on, moving the boat further east toward other boats, including a tender (a service vessel that provides supplies and provisions to fishing boats and receives fish from the vessels). They tie up to the tender and another fishing boat, which throws in a bilge pump suction hose and starts pumping sea water out of the Polly K. “I had been pumping that boat by hand for the past two and a half hours, and evidently I was hand-pumping more water than the bilge pump, which, in hindsight, has never really made any sense to me,” Walt says. They end up getting the help of a second fishing boat, which adds its bilge pump to the cause, and those two boats escort the Polly K back to the dock to safety.
“38 holes in the bottom of the boat… I counted them.”
They ultimately got the boat onto the dock, elevated on blocks three or four feet high. “Under the boat you could see the water running out of 38 screw holes that had been ripped open when we lost a timber, which protected the cooling piping, off the bottom of the boat because the boat was flexing from being slammed by waves. It had broken off and taken the lag screws and left us with holes in the bottom of the boat. 38 of them. I counted them,” Walt says, pride and nostalgia alive in him.
The holes were eventually plugged and Robert ended up replacing the gasoline engine — which was subject to water damage — with a diesel system, which could withstand more, and though the event was harrowing in every way, it was not enough to dissuade young Walter from following in his father’s footsteps and going on to fish the bay for decades to come. And what started as a moment of great peril and uncertainty became a moment woven into the tapestry of countless moments between father and son, and later with his own son, Arron, my husband (and WAC founder + CEO) — a family legacy inspired by not only the bounty of the sea, but also by its lessons.
“My frame of mind was basically me against my environment. We made it to the other side, but how that happened, to this day, I don’t really know how. It’s just one of those mysteries that I think about and I just have to smile,” Walt says, with (you guessed it) a smile.
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I love this story so much because it reminds me that the wild-caught Alaskan seafood that ends up on my plate is often laden with the very human stories of the fishermen and women who spend their time harvesting it. Individuals who lend their lives to the cause of feeding us well. To which I say, thank you! We are in awe of you. We learn from you. We are grateful for you. We honor you.
Live Wild!
Monica
Pictured above: [In clockwise order starting from top left] A Polaroid snap taken by 17-year-old Walt from the deck of the Polly K during the storm; a photo of father and son on the Polly K, on which they would fish summer after summer for many years together; a shot of the Polly K on land — named after Walt’s mother Polly — the first Kallenberg family commercial fishing boat; a photo showing the swells of the storm in real time.
