Fishing Up North

This new edition contains new stories and updates from the super-heated days when fishing fleets turned king crab into fortunes, to the annual circus of Bristol Bay's monster salmon runs, to the bucolic life of the open-ocean trawler, the true stories in Fishing Up North: Stories of Luck and Loss in Alaskan Waters"captures the flavor of the modern fisherman's life and fortunes in the waters off Alaska. You'll find firsthand accounts of frightening weather, good fishing, terrible fishing, great days, and sweet living from the decks of crabbers, trawlers, longliners, trollers, and gillnetters. This book and others inspired film crews to trek to Alaska and cover the crabbing seasons for reality TV shows. Commercial fishing's home ports --- Dutch Harbor, Kodiak, Naknek, Cordova, Petersburg, Sitka, and Seattle --- are classic fishing towns, where docks, bars, and even quiet living merge in colorful portraits about life on the last frontier.

Brad Matsen has written about the sea and its inhabitants for forty years in books, film scripts, essays, and magazine articles. Author of the bestselling Titanic's Last Secrets and Jacques Cousteau: The Sea King as well as eight other books including Planet Ocean: A Story of Life, the Sea and Dancing to the Fossil Record and The Incredible Deep-Sea Adventure series for children. He was a creative producer for the television series The Shape of Life, and is a speaker on global environmental issues. He has written hundreds of magazine articles for Mother Jones, Audubon Natural History, and many other publications. He divides his time between Seattle and New York City.