A Bristol Bay setnetter reads the science in the grit

“She Takes the Helm: Lessons in Grit from Alaska’s Fishing Grounds“ by Mary Jacobs; Bookhouse Publishing, 2026; 384 pages. 

Mary Jacobs first came to Alaska behind a boyfriend and a boat that did not yet exist. She and Dave had left Berkeley, California, with a plan that sounded simple in the way young plans do: fix up a livable, seaworthy sailboat and point it at far water. Alaska was supposed to bankroll the dream and get them off campus, away from the talk of the Vietnam War protests that had soured the air at school. He quickly got a job on a fishing boat. She got the never ending, machine grinding, scales flying, fluorescent lights of the slime line in a Southeast cannery. Women, the fleet still said, were bad luck on deck.

At 6 p.m. next Thursday, Sept. 24, at the Homer Public Library, Jacobs presents an author talk on her new book, “She Takes the Helm: Lessons in Grit from Alaska’s Fishing Grounds.” The book will be available for sale and signing.

Wishfully staring out at the open water and imagining Dave laughing and fishing, Jacobs did not stay at the cannery. She cooked her way onto a boat, learned the work by watching and later skippered her own salmon seiners — first the Invader, then a run of boats named Renaissance — with an all-women crew. One thing she noticed early and kept: a good deckhand, like a good member of any team, anticipates the needs of the boat and crew and fills it before anyone has to ask.

Jacobs fished the Kodiak Management Area and later Prince William Sound and Togiak — sockeye and pinks on the seine, halibut on hook and line, king crab when that fishery still looked like a gold rush.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game still manages those Kodiak salmon districts the way it did in her era, by escapement. Weirs and aerial surveys count fish past the nets. Openings lengthen or slam shut according to whether Karluk, Ayakulik, Upper Station or the Mainland streams are making quota. The science is blunt: leave enough spawners or there is no next season.

I operated a much smaller patch of water. I fished an outside set-net site in the Naknek-Kvichak District. The site was quickly figured out. Unlike a lot of nearby set net sites my site rarely if ever ran out of water. My crew and I went out early, while the water was still high enough to get the nets in the water. In that little piece of the district, the salmon really hit at slack low. We mostly left the big nighttime tides alone, as the bigger tides and faster current caused the net to flag, any salmon just swimming underneath. It was not worth trading much needed sleep for a few hundred pounds, when thousands were around the corner.

A setnet only fishes if the leadline stays down. Drag on the web rises with the square of current speed. Double the current, and the force is not double. It is four times. On a big night tide, that is why a net flags; the leads cannot hold, the fish go under, and you lose sleep for little fish. Slack Low is a different physics. The water pauses. Sockeye moving the beach are not fighting a river of current along the leadline. In a small known site, that pause can be the hour.

Behind the hour is Oncorhynchus nerka, sockeye salmon —years in Iliamna Lake or Naknek Lake, years in the Bering Sea, then a homing run so tightly timed that Naknek-Kvichak can go from empty to a wall of fish in a tide. ADF&G still manages the district the way it managed Jacob’s Kodiak openings: by escapement.

Towers and sonar on the Kvichak and Naknek count fish past the fleet. If the towers on the Kvichak and Naknek are short of escapement, Fish and Game shortens the period. If the rivers are filling, the openers last, and the district loads up. Jacob’s hung her own seine every spring and had to relearn each new piece of Alaska. A setnetter on one site learns one piece deeply. Both are knowledge.

Jacobs had to learn that kind of Local Law again and again. She seined Kodiak and later worked Togiak, Prince William Sound, halibut, and king crab— different bays, different currents, different fish. Each ground has its own slack, its own flagging tide, its own hour when the fish show.

She writes that when she started fishing, “everything made sense, as if the knowledge had been stored away and was waiting for when she needed it. She felt at home.” I felt the same.

Jacobs can write water. Crossing from Kodiak to the Alaska Peninsula, she sees glaciated peaks against an ice-blue sky, fulmars working the surface, a whale off the port bow. Fulmars and gulls mark bait. A blow can mean a current line.

The “speck in a vast, inky ocean” is also a navigation problem: Shelikof Strait funnels weather between the Alaska Peninsula and the Kodiak Archipelago the way Kachemak Bay funnels off the glaciers. Lose steering on a dirty night, as Jacobs did, drifting toward rocks with adults and babies aboard, and the ocean stops being scenery. It becomes displacement, fetch, and the minutes you have before the hull meets the reef.

What I admire most is not only that she took the helm of a boat. She really took the helm of life, her life, and explored, lived and conquered far away and isolated areas throughout Alaska. Years at Mush Bay, homesteading on the East Arm of Uganik Bay on Kodiak’s west side, taught her the shore the way a season teaches a site.

She is a vast wealth of knowledge — from the water to the land to the history of Alaska — and she writes it the way a good skipper reads a coast: not as decoration, but as information. Birds. Marine life. The difference between a bay that holds fish and a bay that only looks like it should. The human story under the place names. She writes that knowledge poetically. The South Pacific voyage was the story she arrived with. The grounds were the story she kept.

Fishing is an adrenaline life, even on the hours when you are silently hating it. Picking and hauling thousands of pounds while the tide is leaving is ugly work. Hands spent. The net is heavy with fish. You are racing the water that will strand the skiff or lay the web over if you are late. Risking more work, or even imposing tickets and fines. Then you offload.

The fish leave the boat, along with your worries. An overwhelming sense of accomplishment and overcoming what once, mere seconds ago, seemed impossible. The offloaded weight becomes a ticket, a promise of money. Nothing else in the job compares to that feeling — delivering what you just fought the tide for.

Jacobs is honest about what water does when it turns — a lost steering system on a frozen winter night, a toddler climbing out a boat window and having to jump in the frigid waters. She is also honest about how hard it is to leave. I know that, too. The fleet and the communities become one big family. You can sell a boat, or a site, and still feel the opener in your body when the tides line up in June. You can remember hating the pick, and the pain, and still miss the laughing, camaraderie and the sense of pure accomplishment. Jacobs tried to step off. The book does not pretend that it was simple.

Then there is the chapter that is not about a set or a seine. When Jacobs writes about the Exxon Valdez, she does not look away. Prince William Sound was water she knew. Birds and marine life she could name became a shoreline of oil.

I cried as she cried on the page. Anyone who has made a living from clean water will understand why. The spill was a scientific event — crude oil on feathers, on gills, on intertidal life — and it was also a grief. She lets it be both. That is what a long education in a place costs. You know enough to feel the loss in detail.

On March 24, 1989, the Exxon Valdez grounded on Bligh Reef and spilled about 11 million gallons of Alaska North Slope crude into the Prince William Sound. Fresh oil kills by coating. Feathers and fur lose insulation. Birds and otters die of hypothermia as much as of poison. Early estimates ran to some 250,000 seabirds, about 2,800 sea otters, hundreds of harbor seals and hundreds of bald eagles. Resident and transient killer whale pods that swam the slick lost large shares of their members; some of those losses never fully reversed.

Jacobs fished a different style and waters than I, but she fished the same problems: how to read the water, weather, fish and a crew well enough to come home.

“She Takes The Helm” will not teach you how to hang a seine. It will remind you why the people who do the work keep doing it — the money, yes, but also the uninhibited freedom of a small team on a big coast, and the knowledge that the ocean does not care who is at the wheel, only whether that person can keep the boat off the rocks.

Thursday night is not only a reading. It is a chance to take notes from someone who learned Alaska the long way. Jacobs can pass along the practical file; how a net is hung, how a diesel is kept alive, how a crew works when the good ones move before they are asked, how each new bay has its own slack and its own flagged tide.

She can pass along the naturalist’s file: birds, marine life, geography. She can pass along the homestead file from Mush Bay — weather, wood, winter, the history under a place name. She can pass along the harder file too: how to take the helm when the dock says no, how to raise children in the same season as a fishery. That is useful in Homer.

Some in the room will have setnetted, seined or run a skiff. Some will only have stood on the Spit and watched the boats. The information is the same. The water does not care who is listening. It cares whether the next person to take a wheel or a running line, or a homestead has been told the truth about the work.

Anna Torzillo is an intern for the Homer Independent Press through the Semester By the Bay program at Kachemak Bay Campus. She fished for more than 15 seasons in Naknek, one summer tendering (aboard the Lady Jesse) and one grueling season of fish processing in Seward. She now lives in Homer and, in addition to being a student, also works at Nomad Shelter building yurts.