Leaving Protection by Will Hobbs Page A

bunk as I set out the food, along with orange juice and coffee. He got up very carefully, but even so he was staggered by another bolt to his lower back. After steadying himself, he gritted his teeth, cursed, and settled into the aft side of the table where he could look over the bow.
    Tor kept looking past me as he nibbled at a piece ofbacon. His eyes were on the horizon though there was nothing to be seen. His face was unreadable as ever, like time-weathered stone.
    The minutes went by like slowly dripping water. I couldn’t take the silence. “So where do you run to for the night,” I asked, “when you’re fishing the Fairweather Grounds?”
    â€œYou don’t,” he said impatiently. “You drift.”
    â€œJust drift?”
    â€œJust drift. Sometimes you end up miles from where you started.”
    â€œWhat if some big ship comes through when you’re sleeping?”
    â€œYou hope they see your light.”
    â€œSounds a little sketchy.”
    â€œIt is, but it’s worth it. It’s big-time fishing.”
    â€œWhat happens if the weather turns on you? Where’s your protection?”
    â€œIf the weather’s not too rough, you can ride it out on the lee side of Cape Fairweather. If it’s bad, you head into Lituya Bay.”
    â€œI think I’ve heard of Lituya Bay.”
    He looked like he was going to say something. “You may have,” was all he said. He got up, stiff as a robot. Having left most of what was on his plate, in seconds he was flat on his back again.
    Midmorning, and there still wasn’t a cloud in the sky—freakish weather for Southeast. The flatness of the sea amplified the vastness. Unlike the sea bird it was named after, the Storm Petrel couldn’t take to theair if things turned ugly. It was going to be exciting to fish the open ocean, like a big-time Alaska commercial fisherman. Maybe too exciting. I’d heard plenty of stories, and I’d seen videos of storms in the Gulf of Alaska. At forty-five feet, the Storm Petrel was a big boat compared to my family’s Chimes of Freedom , but it was still classified as a small craft when it came to weather advisories.
    Well, here I was, way, way outside and more scared than I’d expected to be. My biggest consolation, ironically, was my skipper. Tor had lived to be a graybeard, which meant my chances of getting home in one piece were good to excellent.
    Unless he didn’t want me to.
    Tor got up for lunch, and this time he stayed up. He suddenly remembered to double-check the course I had charted. I was relieved to find we were on target for the Fairweather Grounds, and not China.
    Torsen read a gloomy article about the future of wild salmon in his Alaska fishing journal, the Pilothouse Guide . I looked through his bookshelf for something on Lituya Bay, with a strong suspicion that it was known for something. I couldn’t seem to remember.
    At last I found some photographs of the bay along with a note about what it was famous for: an earthquake late in the evening of July 9, 1958. The quake’s epicenter was in the mountains at the head of the narrow bay.
    I could barely believe what I was reading. Themountain to the edge of the glacier at the head of the bay sloughed so much rock, so fast, that the splash reached 1,720 feet up the opposite ridge across the narrow arm of the back bay. In one fell swoop, the wave scoured every tree and every bit of soil off that slope, from sea level to seventeen hundred feet up. The photographs proved the unimaginable. Before, all trees. After, nothing but bedrock.
    â€œLook at this,” I said.
    â€œYeah,” Tor replied. “Lituya Bay. Did you read about the trollers?”
    â€œThere’s nothing here about trollers. Were there some in the bay when it happened?”
    â€œThree trollers had anchored for the night, two just inside the spit at the entrance of the bay and one a mile or so inside, on the