Extreme Fishing (8 page)

It’s dark now and a bit like being tossed about by a cat that’s popped your eyes out and eventually will eat you whole, just not yet – there’s more pawing, chasing and
batting mid-air to be done – and all I want to do is die. Bob guides us through a rising swell to more marker buoys. He is a worried man tonight, not because of the weather but because he
needs to balance the books. The last two locations haven’t been yielding.

I have been on board for twelve hours now, working, falling and puking. I’m dog-tired. With the light gone I have no sight of the horizon and no perspective of which way is up. But
although I am weakened, the anger inside me is growing and seething. As we pull up by another marker buoy, I help the lads land another pot. A wave hits me clean in the face. I can’t breathe
as I inhale the icy seawater. It’s up my nose, in my lungs and stinging my eyes. As I try to recover another wave comes. POW! I am punched backwards and in that moment I think I’m going
over into the swirling black nightmare. As everything breaks down into slow motion I yell inside: ‘I don’t want anyone else to be Taylor’s dad. I’m his dad! I want to be
there for him, no one else.’

Seamus picks me up. What I need now is a good slap but no one gives it to me so I am going to pass one on to someone else. I summon all my strength, stumble across the deck and swing for Jason:
‘Bastard!’ He’s stood by all this time watching me puke and fall and he’s the one who got us into this bleeding mess in the first place. I boom: ‘Turn the fucking boat
around!’ The Arctic winds scream around our heads as another wave smashes port side. We fall. In the film version this is the point where I get Jason by the collar, pin him down on the
butcher’s block, chop his head off and gut him and throw him down the chute. As if reading my mind, Jason scrambles away.

The soundman has fetched Bob from the wheelhouse –
fuck, who’s driving?
I stay on the floor. I don’t want to fall anymore. Bob shouts down at me over the winds, which
sound like a million banshees.

‘We can’t turn, Robson! The boat’ll flip and then it’s night-night.’

He offers me a hand up. I accept but am immediately bent double for another projectile puking fit.

Another wave smashes the side. At this point I decide to give in and accept that this is how it’s going to end. I’ve never been a religious man but in this moment I am having more
words with the Almighty than ever before. I think, nowadays, in the age of science and reason, many see religion as anachronistic and irrelevant to them, but all I can say to those without faith,
including myself, is perhaps we’ve never been in a position where we’ve really needed it? Out on the high seas or on the battleground or at a refugee camp, cold reason and science are
just not enough. For the first time I pray that I will be reunited with my family. I pray with all my heart and soul and I vow never to complain about being an actor again, as I don’t know
the meaning of hardship. All the while I’m having my spiritual epiphany, the crew of the
Ocean Pearl
graft away, landing pot after pot without a break, undeterred by the vicious
storm.

Seamus takes me and the TV crew below deck. He confirms it’s a force-10 storm, which is two off a hurricane (12) on the Beaufort wind force scale. The waves are over twenty feet high and
the wind is reaching speeds of 65 m.p.h. He offers us some fried black cod, but we all shake our heads in unison and snaffle another couple of seasickness pills, which are bloody useless. He shows
us to our digs. There are four bunks to a closet. I share with Mike and two fishermen and, like a nightmarish version of
The Waltons
, we say goodnight. The other three guys snore as if they
all have serious medical issues. I diagnose sleep apnea and a very bad case of bulimia for myself, as I need to get up every ten minutes to puke.

Finally the wind drops a few knots and Bob is able, very slowly, to make a turn for home. Bob and the crew are happy to stay out fishing, but my pleading every five minutes with Jason has
obviously paid off. It went something like this: I’m lying in the closet on the bottom bunk, I shut my eyes, oh God going to be sick, I run to the toilet, dry retch, dry retch, flush, wash my
mouth out and knock on Jason’s closet door: ‘Please, Jason, I can’t take anymore! For the love of God!’ I go back to bed and repeat the process. It was worth the begging,
though, because
we are heading home
. I get a burst of energy and rush up to the wheelhouse to see if it’s really true. Bob, being the hero he truly is, has taken pity on me after
thirty-six hours of hell and guides us back to safer waters. The crew are apparently pissed off – they’re losing money and it’s our fault. I apologise.

Bob offers me a glass of red wine and a fillet of black cod, which the crew eat for breakfast, lunch and tea.

‘I couldn’t, Bob, I’m sick to my toenails.’

He insists I drink with him. As I sip the claret I feel as if I’ve taken a quantum leap back to the seventeenth century.

‘Thank you for the experience. I will never forget it, Bob.’

His face cracks into smile. We finish our drinks and shake hands.

After dropping us off, the crew head back out to endure another five punishing weeks at sea. I honestly don’t know how they do it, especially in light of what I found out
several days later. Just weeks before we arrived, Bob had lost an entire boat, out of his fleet of a dozen trawlers, in a force-9 gale. Sadly, eight of the crew members were also lost at sea.
It’s a sobering thought and one that should make us all value our fishermen all the more. So when you’re next eating black cod, give a nod to Bob and his crew – and whatever
happens don’t you dare waste a morsel!

As soon as we reach the shore I ring Vanya. She has been trying to get me for days. She was worried and knew something was wrong. Taylor knew, too.

‘I can’t wait to be home with you,’ I say.

Nothing on the face of God’s earth is as important as my family. I’ve been humbled by the experience on the trawler and have discovered a new-found respect for Mother Nature, not
only in her beauty but in all her might.

November 2008, Series 2

Everything is alabaster, including the sky, frozen by the White Witch’s own hoary hand. It’s bitter, harsh, perishing, arctic, glacial, numbing, polar,
penetrating, raw, COLD! But unlike in the
Narnia
books, I haven’t just fallen through the wardrobe to get here; instead I have endured another commercial plane journey, over 2,000
miles this time. It’s more mundane than magical – well, the flying bit is definitely magic, but the loos and the tea not so much. I mean, that’s the paradox of the human spirit,
isn’t it? We can make a tube of metal fly through the sky with all our clobber on board but we can’t improve the food or the plumbing! Well done, the Wright Brothers; buck up, Gate
Gourmet.

A clinically obese passenger across the aisle from me asks, ‘You been to Alaska before?’ I shake my head.

‘It’s staggering,’ he says. ‘Over a hundred thousand glaciers and most places you can only get to by plane. I hope you got your warm clothes and boots or you’ll be
getting chilblains.’

He then goes on to tell me about the terrible problems he has with his feet. I look concerned but inside I’m thinking,
Yeah, you can’t keep them out of the bloody pie shop,
mate
. (Will I go to hell now?)

I walk like a zombie to a waiting transit van to begin a six-hour butt-clenchingly awful journey due south from the city of Anchorage to a place called Homer. We are driving in a blizzard in the
dark, which makes
Ice Road Truckers
seem positively tame.

My
Extreme
team comprises Jonathan, the AP whose job it is to make sure all the filming runs smoothly, director Jamie Goold, Mike Carling on camera, soundman Patrick Boland and location
fixer Hector MacKenzie. They have all been in Alaska for two weeks doing a recce, but it would seem in that time Jonathan still hasn’t gained confidence behind the wheel. The conditions are
treacherous and the van is slipping all over the place. We are all on edge. Jonathan is a luvvie like me and really shouldn’t be the designated driver. I vote for Hector, who emigrated to
Alaska with his wife twenty years ago. He’s an old-school rough, tough, no-nonsense Scot, and, I’m betting, a superior ice-driver.

Jonathan is craning over the wheel. He can’t see the road, the windscreen is frosting over and . . . what’s that? He hits the brakes and we go into a spectacular skid, turning round
and round until we end up parked on the wrong side of the road. We have all had enough. I strongly suggest Hector drives. Jonathan is only too happy to hand over the task but starts having a tizzy
because he feels the journey is just too dangerous; he doesn’t want to be on board anymore. I know the feeling. He starts hyperventilating. In a bid to calm him down, Jamie suggests we change
the tyres to studded ones to make it a bit safer. Unhelpfully I tell him to ‘man up’, hypocrite that I am: ‘As my Uncle Matheson says, no place is worth going if it’s easy
to get to.’

Finally, after a change of driver, tyres and underpants, we arrive at our first Alaskan angling destination – Homer on the Kenai Peninsula. The Kenai, which is as big as the UK, Italy,
France and Spain put together but only has a population the size of Newcastle, is a Mecca for salmon fishermen from all over the world. The fish are healthy and plentiful in this unspoiled paradise
and only the very lucky, like me, have the chance to cast a line here.

It’s really beginning to sink in that I am going to places most professional and amateur anglers can only dream about, and no one more so than my Uncle Matheson. For decades he has dreamt
of dipping his fly rod in the Kenai River and exploring the unspoiled Alaskan wilderness. And what’s more he’s a trained taxidermist so he would doubly love it here, because at every
turn, from the airport to the hotel, from the shopping mall to people’s homes, there’s always a stuffed creature, or usually several, on display. It’s a fishing and taxidermy
utopia.
I’ll bring Matheson here one day
, I think,
but right now what I need is a stiff drink
.

Home from Homer

My first impression of Homer is, well, that I can’t see a bloody thing, save a small wooden cabin otherwise known as the The Salty Dawg Saloon Bar. I enter; the
smell of stale hops hits me. This is a place where men are men and moose are frightened. Dollar bills are pinned to the walls and hanging from the ceiling, with all manner of messages written in
marker pen: ‘Shelly loves Buck.’ ‘Noah will pistol-whip Buck if he touches Shelly.’ An old salty dawg sings Country and Western songs in the corner, strumming his guitar and
puffing on a harmonica – except that they’re more ‘Cold and Northern’ songs about being chilled to the bone and coming back from fishing and getting the dry-land blues. I
feel slightly melancholy.

Keith Kalke introduces himself. He’s an all-American hunter with a camo baseball cap, an impressive moustache and eyes that could pierce steel. Unlike the former governor of Alaska, Sarah
Palin, Keith started hunting and fishing with his father aged just five. (In 2011, it was discovered that Sarah wasn’t quite the out-doorsy girl she’d claimed to be.) Keith orders a
beer and I order a white wine. No one including Keith bats an eyelid at this, which is disappointing as part of me (the mad part) wants a bit of a ruckus. There is none. Apparently, there are one
or two Alaskan fishermen who enjoy a glass of Pinot Grigio as much as I do. Well, it goes very well with king salmon and there’s certainly no shortage of
Oncorhynchus tshawytscha
(from
the Ancient Greek meaning ‘hook nose’) up here. We’ll be searching for the king in the morning, and Keith is very confident we’ll catch.

I raise a toast: ‘To good king salmon fishing!’

‘Slammin’ salmon!’ says Keith, and we will be.

At this time of year, millions of Pacific salmon of all species, including the king (or chinook), pink, chum, sockeye (or red) and coho (also known as silvers), are making their epic journey
back to their freshwater homes after years of feeding in the ocean. And what’s more amazing is that they are returning to breed and then die. This life cycle is known as semelparity –
from the Latin
semel
, ‘once’, and
pario
, ‘to beget’ – although no one knows why Pacific salmon (
Oncorhynchus
) expire after breeding while Atlantic
salmon (
Salmo
) survive. It’s one of life’s eternal mysteries, but without their sacrifice the ecosystem in Alaska would struggle to thrive. These fish not only support human life
in this winter wonderland but also the lives of birds, otters, bears – and the forests themselves. The salmon bring with them vital nutrients from the ocean, such as nitrogen, sulphur and
phosphorus, which, via the wild animals that love to feast on them, fertilise the trees and plant life. Almost every organism around the river basin of Alaska has salmon in its DNA.

After a breakfast of tinned hot dogs, waffles and cream at our Travelodge-type hotel, I meet up with Keith and his son, Ross. We are going out on his boat, the
Ocean Hunter
, in pursuit of
piscatorial royalty, and I’m excited. We drop anchor near Yukon Island in Kachemak Bay, part of the vast estuary where the Yukon River meets the mighty Pacific. Keith begins to explain the
method of fishing we’ll be using.

‘We’re running a twenty-five-pound test line with a flasher. This is gonna be like a school bait fish. All it’s going to do is attract and get their attention and they’ll
come up and look at this and they’ll see the bait dragging behind it,’ he says in his rugged way.

‘You give them a little tease and then they bite,’ I say, nodding.

We’re also putting on a downrigger, a weight to keep the bait at a depth of fifty feet.

Almost immediately Keith shouts, ‘Fish on!’

‘You are kidding me!’

The line is away. I take the rod. The odds are stacked in my favour because unlike the fly reels I use, which are basic storage facilities for the fly line with little or no tension at all,
these reels provide up to fifteen to twenty pounds of tension along with a line that has a twenty-five-pound breaking strain. Nevertheless, if you don’t keep yourself focused and the line
tight, you will most likely lose your prize. I land the fish.