Captain Tom & the Kasilof ~ Salmon Life

Enterprise Freedom

Salmon have a remarkable capacity for spreading life. From their spawning grounds, millions of fry emerge and a new generation starts the cycle anew. Miraculously, it doesn’t stop there. The chain of life continues across land, as bears feast on migrating salmon and it’s a sloppy feast that carries nitrogen by the ton across the terrain where our forests grow, propagating an ecosystem too broad to quantify in a simple essay.

And the chain crosses into human endeavor as the pursuit of their vital protein gives economic life to fishermen, to the flood of deckhands and cannery workers who descend on coastal Alaska every year, to the local businesses for whom the fishing season is a boon: groceries and hardware, marine supply, as well as motels, bars and eateries. I came upon this salmon-propagated chain of human endeavor one evening on the Kasilof River.

Captain Tom, the "best damn skiff driver on the Kasilof."

The western bluff overlooking the Kasilof offers an elevated vantage point on the waterway as it snakes through the salt marsh toward its north-facing mouth. I stood among the aspen and spruce, called by the rumbling hum of diesel engines, the barking PA at a commercial dock, the chorus of seagulls. It was late in the day on July 31st, and the fleet of drift boats was coming in from the Cook Inlet after what might be their last commercial opener of the season. Some were already on their moorings, but the river traffic was just starting to build. Outboard skiffs traveled among the fifty foot crafts, but only the skiffs moved both upstream and down.

One stood out for the bright blue jacket of its captain, a stark contrast to his flame red beard. A river taxi. I went down to the boat landing to see if I could flag a ride. He introduced himself as Captain Tom Blaschka, “best damn skiff driver on the Kasilof,” and he welcomed me aboard for a spin on the river and his perspective on how the Sockeye has transformed this winding waterway into a lane of industry, tradition, and culture.

“I gotta run upriver and pick up my friend. He’s a good dude. Russian. A little strange. Then I’ll run you down to the mouth. The dipnetters are out in full force.” We shoved off from the boat launch and into the current, Tom’s outboard growling steadily just to hold the boat still. “Full moon tonight, so she’s ripping pretty good,” he says of the tide, just coming off high slack when the river begins to drain 26 feet on its way to low. In a channel as narrow as the Kasilof, scarcely hundred yards across where we were, it’s easy to mistake the tidal flow for the fast running current of an inland river.

“Hang on,” he said and opened her up. We were upstream of the active commercial docks and there was little traffic as we rounded the first hairpin turn. Tom was a ready tour guide and the high pitch of his voice seemed designed for cutting through the throaty howl of his motor. He nods toward a barrel of a boat, the Terminator, “Captain Dan’s been fishing here since the Sixties. With his Dad.” Further round the bend we passed a dock void of human activity, the old Snug Harbor facility, he said. A derelict structure that seemed ready to fall into the river, its piers and cribbing standing off kilter like loose matchsticks on the southern bank.

"I just wanna leave, man. Go do something."

Tom tells me how he came north in ’94 after making a boozy snap decision at the American Legion Bar in Coeur D’Alene, Idaho. It started with the sort of barstool bellyaching that rarely leads anywhere but a steep hangover.

“I just wanna leave, man. Go do something.” he told his friend, who replied with the encouragement only a drinking buddy could offer, “Well, let’s drink a few more beers and think about it.” And a few beers later, it ended with a coin toss. Heads was Alaska, and tails was Arizona. The coin was flipped and it wound up heads. “Shoulda gone to Arizona,” he laughs, but then dispels with the idea. “My brother lives in Arizona and he can’t stand it.”

When he and his friend made it to the state line he figured they had one of two choices. “Whatya do in Alaska? You gold mine or you fish. And it was salmon season, so I said let’s get on it.” And the rest was (twenty years of Tom Blascka’s personal) history.

A pair of Flyaway cranes were strutting along the fringe of marsh, looking for dinner. On the topside of the drifters we passed, captains and deckhands were hosing the decks, rummaging in jockey boxes and stowing their gear. From time to time, Tom would exchange a wave. Future passengers, I asked? “Yep,’ Tom said, “and all they’re looking forward to is a cold beer and a steak.”

He eased off the motor as we approached a boat with two men watching us from the rear deck. Before we pulled alongside Tom told me that the other day this fellow had complained of dreams plagued by lightning. “He went on about it for ten minutes.” I asked if that was a bad thing and he shrugged and shook his head, “I’m not Russian.”

“Mikhail’s a good man,” Tom added. “The other day he gave me a big, fat Silver salmon.”

If dreams of lightning foretell your river taxi depositing you on the wrong dock after the Captain pins his skiff between a loading dock and the barreling current of the Kasilof River, nearly flipping it and killing the hapless writer on board who failed to don a life vest, then Mikhail’s dreams may well have been prophetic… but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Tom's brow furrowed and he kept his eyes on the larger craft, measuring their paths and charting ours.

Once everyone situated, Tom brought the skiff around and now with the tide doing its part, we zipped downstream at twice the speed that we’d travelled up. While that may sound like a thrill, as we cut the distance to the mouth, we began to encounter the second half of the fleet, coming into the river like charging buffalo. No longer scanning the landscape for a landmark to describe or a quip to drop, Tom’s brow furrowed and he kept his eyes on the larger craft, measuring their paths and charting ours.

Some of the drift boats bore the classic look of a midsize working craft with an elevated cabin the width of the boat, situated two thirds of the way from stern to bow. Others, however, looked like gleaming aquatic tanks, stout and angry with their captain’s perch leaning far forward on the bow. If their sport was ramming, it was on these boats you would lay your bet. Some had their bows sheered off to comply within the State’s length requirements, but the modification gave these boats an even more daunting Mad-Max-by-Sea look.

As we neared the destination for Mikhail and his mate, Tom asked us all to stay seated and keep low. The modest size of our craft and its diminutive motor became increasingly apparent. Tom eased off the motor and I could sense that the power of his 60-horse Yamaha was serving only to compromise the will of the current. We were in a spot where the channel constricted and the tidal bore was making two-foot rollers in the middle of the channel.

I knew we weren't moving like he wished we were, but I wasn't fully aware of the danger.

“Hold on, Gents. That’s where the fun begins.” Fun? What fun? I hadn’t signed up for Tom’s brand of fun. “It’s tearing it up. I worked at that dock for five years and this is the lumpiest spot in the river.” We were still racing toward the dock and when a hulking aluminum craft appeared on the far side of the narrow slough, Tom’s only option was to bring the boat alongside a floating platform, perpendicular to the current. Had I associated our positioning with the commandment of my stepfather the first time we canoed on the riffling current of the Shenandoah River: “Never turn her broadside to the current!” I might have become woozy with panic. But everything happened quickly.

Tom pulled up to the dock and I helped hold the skiff in place as Mikhail and his mate climbed out. We both hurried to hand them their parcels as the current bore into the port side of the skiff, causing the starboard rail to plunge repeatedly toward the roil of water circulating against the dock. Tom shouted something and I looked up to see the dock workers staring down at us and one of them shouted back and pointed angrily toward the middle of the river. Tom lunged for the outboard and gunned it, but the engine bogged, fighting to overcome the sidelong force of the raging tide.

Tom had only to make a quick downriver turn, to get around the towering piers of the dock and we’d be free. I knew we weren’t moving like he wished we were, but I wasn’t fully aware of the danger. As we edged toward the corner and away from the sucking swirls alongside the dock, the engine grabbed and the bow came around and pointed toward the inlet. Too ignorant to be scared, I knew enough to feel a wash of relief as Tom’s skiff found a pocket and we eased back into open water.

Once we were clear of it, Tom was shaking it off, “you see how it can get. It only takes a second before things get hookie-spookem.” He looked at me and my absence of a life vest, “You don’t have a float coat, I do. I’m good. I’ll float around but you’ll go under the dock and get wrapped up in a chain,” he chuckled as the decompression set in. “I’m alive, we survived, it’s all good. Just one extra beer for me tonight.”

If I hadn’t spent my own share of time working on commercial skiffs and tenders alike my knees may have gone weak. Alas, it was already becoming a barstool tale, a familiar moment when Alaska reaches toward you and unfurls her fingers and shows you there in the palm of her hand, how small you really are. How many men have clamored into the fo’c’s’le after a far closer call than that and brushed it off with a nervous laugh and a cup of coffee.

You could imagine the fishermen racing against the tide before it left them high and dry, stuck out of port, with the same things on their mind.

When we neared the mouth of the river, the Cook Inlet opened up and the horizon was dotted with the last of the fleet chugging back to the river before the sand bar rises from the ebbing tide, blocking the entry of the river.

“Here’s a piece of history right there,” Tom said, resuming his role as tour guide. “There’s a barge up here they used up to the 60s and 70s. They just used their pike poles and threw the fish in.” He pointed to a ghost of a structure that appeared to have grown from the mudflats, all that remained of the wharf of the Arctic Fishing Company, the earliest cannery on the Cook Inlet.

You could imagine the fishermen in the late 19th Century, lining up for a turn to fling their catch into the barge, racing against the tide before it left them high and dry, stuck out of port, with the same things on their mind as the drift captains bearing down on the mouth of the river.

We swept across the mouth of the river where a beak of beachfront was covered with trucks and tents, blue and red boxes I knew to be coolers, expectant gulls and kids ankle deep in mud. A four-wheeler buzzed the water’s edge where the fishermen clustered with their twelve foot nets, bracing for the jolt of a catch. A whooo rose from the collective and a young woman backed out of the water with a bucking silver prize. More whooos.

“People spend their whole summer around it,” Tom said, eying the dip netters and their camp. “Alaskans get buttoned up all winter long, so it’s nice to come down and actually enjoy the summer in your state a little bit. Usually you’re too busy busting your balls making money. You’re up on the (North) Slope, or whatever, some folks have a coffee cup job, so this is their escape from reality.”

On the way back upriver the going was steady and controlled. Tom was more at ease without the torrent trying to push his aluminum can where he didn’t want it to go. He recounted his time working on the Ocean Beauty dock, working 40 hours straight, hauling in nearly a million pounds of fish. Glory days. “We did good,” he said.

We snaked around the drift boats steady on their moors, far less foreboding when approached from the stern. When we reached the boat landing, the receding waters had exposed a broad expanse of muddy bank. Tom held the skiff steady as I stepped out into the muck. We shook hands, exchanged numbers and off he went, back up the river and around the bend.

I climbed the bluff and took in the scene one last time. The sun was lower and so was the tide, but still there was the rumbling tones of industry, the gulls and the occasional call of a dock master. And this river. This river, dense with human endeavor, industry and recreation, and a way of life that casts its thread across species and centuries. This river, where even the recent works of man––dock cribbing and boat hulls peeking from the marsh grass––all succumb to the relentless tides, becoming ghosts that join the relics of our forefathers. This river, where the salmon return each year, the reason for it all, and what a lonesome place it might otherwise be.

Salmon Life

Captain Tom & the Kasilof

Tradition and Family

Picking the Salmon Life

Captain Tom & the Kasilof

Tradition and Family

Picking the Salmon Life

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