Greenhorns look for answers while sockeye fishing on Alaska Peninsula.

Escape and justification in Bristol Bay

PILOT POINT: Greenhorns look for answers while sockeye fishing on Alaska Peninsula.

By KEVIN SIEFF
Daily News correspondent

July 29, 2007

PILOT POINT -- Three fishermen from different parts of the Lower 48 huddle on the beach in Pilot Point, a village near the mouth of Bristol Bay. It is 1 a.m. in early July, and the sunset's orange afterglow offers just enough light so the men can see each other's swelled hands.

They see the bright red cuts infected by salmon blood and guts.

They see purple fingernails, ready to fall off.

Every summer, 60 setnet fishermen descend on Pilot Point, a village of 70 people with no paved roads, to pull millions of pounds of sockeye into 25-foot metal skiffs. These men and women are a fraction of the nearly 7,000 people who harvest fish every year in Bristol Bay, according to an estimate by the Alaska Department of Labor.

Most of those laborers arrive in June -- for the biggest run of wild sockeye in the world -- and leave in late July. Some are in the United States on temporary work visas. Others inherited fishing permits from fathers and grandfathers.

The three men in Pilot Point have their own stories.

"I'd never been fishing before this," says one.

"I'd never seen the ocean," says another.

Now, as the night dims and the Aleutian mountain range disappears from view, the men are nearly indistinguishable. All are unshaven, unwashed and wearing waders and orange raincoats. To tell them apart, you have to get close. You have to note the marked differences -- in both content and inflection -- as they take turns telling their stories.

WALL STREET ON HOLD
Reuben Dvoretsky's friends think he's nuts. You don't graduate at the top of your class from the University of Michigan's business school, land a high-paying job on Wall Street and then fly from Buffalo, N.Y., to Alaska to try your hand at commercial fishing. That's how people get hurt, they tell him. That's how people get killed.

Dvoretsky booked the flight anyway.

Last fall, as he was preparing for job interviews, he watched every episode of The Discovery Channel's "Deadliest Catch." He was struck by the polarity between the business world he was preparing to enter and the world of Alaska fishermen.

"I thought, 'Man, before I devote my life to Excel spreadsheets, I need to get up there.' "

But by the time king crab season starts in October, Dvoretsky will have moved into his cubicle in Manhattan, where he will work for Huron Consulting Group. He has only two months, June and July, to play fisherman, and those months coincide with sockeye season in Bristol Bay.

He paid $13 to register at Alaskajobfinder.com, and through the Web site, Tom Bursch offered him a job that would be physically demanding but relatively safe.

He looked at his hands; they were soft and unblemished. He wanted calluses. Dvoretsky accepted the job.

After a month of fishing, he wonders if Pilot Point was the best place to spend his last summer break before going to work full time.

"No one has ever worked this hard on a vacation," he says. "I don't think I thought seriously about how hard this would be."

Though the work is hard, the risk is much less significant in Pilot Point than it is for the crab fishermen who inspired Dvoretsky's trip. That's OK with him. He doesn't need a severed finger to memorialize his fishing excursion; he's happy enough with a four-week beard.

"Look at me," he says, stroking his beard. "I look like a fisherman."

HUNTING FOR A CAREER
As a deckhand in Pilot Point, Bill Andrews, a 32-year-old from Michigan's Upper Peninsula, sleeps on a plywood bunk in an old metal cargo hold. The cabin is cold and damp, causing Andrews' shoulder to ache so badly that he winces throughout the night.

In the morning, he swallows five Tylenol caplets without water and gets ready to haul the catch over the skiff's bow. He wonders how many more pills he can take without seriously damaging his liver.

Andrews had waited for months to get to Pilot Point, and when he arrived it looked like paradise. When he walked into the placid bay, it was the first time his skin had ever touched saltwater.

He was hopeful. If he met the right people, he could land a gig as a bear-hunting guide. He could raise his 10- and 12-year-old boys in the wilderness so that, like their father, they could grow up "with a rod in one hand and a gun in the other."

But the weeks wore on Andrews. He hated spending so much time away from his sons. He wondered if his ex-girlfriend, who left him during his steady decline into alcoholism, had met someone else.

He grew frustrated with the city boys with college degrees who try commercial fishing on a whim after watching a television show. Many of them, he says, don't pull their weight. For Andrews, this is no whim.

He worries that he is getting too old to start a hunting career. If he can't make contacts this summer in Pilot Point, where several fishermen are also guides, then he expects to spend the rest of his life in Michigan, working as the supervisor of a call center, asking strangers if they are happy with their long-distance phone service.

STARTING A NEW LIFE
Robert Osak, a 24-year-old activist from Visalia, Calif., is an unlikely escapist. But when he saw the miles of tundra that separate the village from the nearest city, he smiled. He had been to rural towns in Bolivia and Thailand, but he had never felt so isolated, so far away from his home.
This was exactly what he was looking for.

Osak, who has a degree in urban studies, sits on the board of two nonprofits in California's Central Valley and is the co-founder of a community radio station in Visalia.

Until last year, he says, he also was addicted to methamphetamines.

"I wanted to travel," Osak says, "I wanted to learn a foreign language, but I had to deal with this disease."

When he started to recover, a friend told him about "Deadliest Catch."

At the time, Osak didn't own a television and he didn't care to watch the show. He wasn't interested in its plot, he was looking to jolt himself out of a two-year rut.

After landing a job with John Peterson in Pilot Point, he wrote his will, spent $500 on airfare and gear and arrived in Alaska with hardly enough money for food. When his shoe tore in half after a week of work, he tied it to his foot with rope and duct tape; buying a new pair was out of the question.

"It seems strange that I'd want to do this even though the finances don't make sense," he says, "but I needed this adventure."

After two years of trying to make sense of his life, Osak finds himself in a small aluminum boat, struggling to pull one of the season's last salmon out of a nylon net.

"Here I am," he says, "pulling at the fish's gills, yanking on the net and I'm only making it worse. And then, thanks to luck or God, the thing just falls out."

Osak pauses to recall his revelation.

"And that's how I'm going to remember this experience. A series of haphazard decisions led me here, to this tiny village, to this crazy job. And then, after two years -- as if I managed to pull on the net just right -- things feel sorted out for me. The salmon has magically slipped out of the net."