Halibut on the Moon - Hardcover

DAVID VANN’s internationally-bestselling books have been published in 23 languages, won 14 prizes, and appeared on 83 Best Books of the Year lists in a dozen countries. A former Guggenheim fellow, he is currently a Professor at the University of Warwick in England and Honorary Professor at the University of Franche-Comté in France.

They pull onto Highway 101 going north, driving along the water. The waves white and breaking but so tame. No fetch here to build, and the water shallow everywhere along the edges. He and Doug commercial fished for a year on a boat Jim had built, sixty-three-foot aluminum. His dream of escaping dentistry.

“Nothing compared to what we saw, huh?” he says. “The waves.”

“Yeah. We saw some waves alright.”

“I thought we were going down that time in the straits.”

“Yeah. I thought so too. That looked pretty bad.”

They were long-lining for halibut in the straits between the Aleutians, at the edge of the Bering Sea, and the line caught on the bottom. The problem was that the seas were thirty feet and breaking, and this line was pinning them down in sick ways. Whenever a wave rose beneath, they were pulled down into it, pressurizing.

“You know, it’s a bit like that,” Jim says. “The depression, the low points. It’s like how our boat was held back and as everything around rises it only pressurizes. It’s something like that. Not a perfect description, but something you’ve felt anyway. Do you remember that?”

“I remember. A feeling inside isn’t like that, though.”

“Oh, it’s much worse. Much stronger. A thirty-foot wave is nothing. A few tens of thousands of pounds of aluminum held down through a wave is something light by comparison.”