TRUCK FIRE – Firefighters knock down a fire in a Ford Explorer truck in Arrowhead Trailer Park in the 1200 block of Sawmill Creek Road Saturday evening. One person received fire-related injuries and was taken to the hospital, Sitka Fire Department Chief Craig Warren said, and the truck was considered a total loss. The cause of the fire is under investigation, Warren said. The fire hall received the call about the fire at 5:33 p.m., and one fire engine with eight firefighters and an ambulance were dispatched, he said. (Sentinel Photo by James Poulson)

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Daily Sitka Sentinel

A Sitka Family Story, a Fishing Tradition

By KLAS STOLPE
Sentinel Staff Writer
    Moses Johnson didn’t know what commercial fishing was when he fell in love with it.
    He was about three years old.
    “The first day I stepped foot on the dock, I looked over the side and saw little black cod swimming around, some bull heads,” he said.
    His voice trails off as he seems to walk along that memory road.
    “Me and my sister, as soon as we got out of Etolin grade school by Crescent Harbor we would come down and work on the boat, hit the dock,” he said. “My mom and dad would be working on the boat.”
    He was four when he first was officially “on the boat.”
    That would be his father’s 56-foot wooden seiner F/V Ocean Cape. His father, Moses Sr. – “Mo” to all who knew him and the name his son goes by today – instilled in him a work ethic and respect for the resource that Johnson recently was recognized for as one of five winners of this year’s Advisory Committee Excellence in Service Award. He was among more than 700 Alaskans in 84 communities.

 

Sitka fisherman Mo Johnson stands in front of his family’s boat, Cloud Nine, at the Halibut Point Marine Services Haulout recently. (Sentinel Photo)

    Johnson remembers as a boy being in the galley when the boat would list over, and feeling the fear and the excitement.
    “We would be rolling a bunch of fish and it would list way over,” he said. “I would be scared but run out and get in the way too. That was my earliest memory of the first time out seining. Trying to help.”
    At age seven he was operating the Ocean Cape’s seine skiff, teenage sister Patricia giving most of the orders at first. She would tow the net off, but when it was connected back to the boat she got on deck and young Moses took over.
    “I would do the side tow,” Johnson said.
    The first day he went skiff solo was for fall chums.
    A float plane landed in Chiak Bay to take Patricia off to college, and Mo jr., now eight, became the youngest power skiff operator in the fleet.
    “I was left alone in the skiff,” he said. “We ran out of fuel in the skiff that day.”
    He never ran out of fuel again, but the first openings featured an odd assortment of happenings.
    “Back then we didn’t have hydraulic steering,” he said. “I was pretty small, clinging to that steering wheel, and that skiff wanted to wander back and forth.”
    Other skippers would rush their 50-foot vessels up to the F/V Ocean Cape, thinking they had found an unmanned seine skiff just tugging away on the side of a seiner, with the possibility of a crewman fallen overboard. But they would find the boat under control of a boy they didn’t see at first.
    “I was too small to see over the side, so most boats didn’t see me,” Johnson  said. “I didn’t grow until my senior year in high school.”
    His reputation grew much sooner, much in line with his father’s.
    He earned enough to buy his first fiberglass speedboat when he was 13 and in the seventh grade (his first land vehicle wasn’t purchased until after high school).
    The skiff was docked at the same harbor as the F/V Ocean Cape. As soon as an opening was over he’d hop in and be gone, off by himself or to take his family on tours, hunting trips or camping.
    “We would all use it a lot in the early years,” he said. “I think I went through four different engines.”
    He just traded it two years ago, exchanged for work on the F/V Cloud Nine.
    The family’s commercial boats also served as transports to their cabin in Tenakee twice a year. Moses learned more than fishing from the lifestyle.
    “Pretty much everything,” he said. “You probably couldn’t get a better childhood, from day one.”
    “We were not exposed to some of the temptations others might have been.”
    Moses graduated high school in 1985.
    One day Mo senior asked his son to join him in the wheel house as they headed out for a seine opening. Moses had operated the skiff for 21 years.
    “That was probably one of the best days of my life,” Johnson said. “He said, ‘Here, you get to make some sets today.’ It was at Bee Hive, one of my favorite seine hookoffs near Sitka, and I got to make the sets for a day. That was really a nice thing for him to do. It was a really awesome feeling.”
    They spent the whole day setting.
    “We caught some fish, it was near the end of the season,” he said.
    A few years after he became the skipper, his father would crew. Both would work the winter troll line together, father steering, son working the lines. Both worked the long line sets, father teaching son about currents, bottoms and baits.
    On one 4 a.m. trip he and his dad were heading out to the winter troll line path from Cape Edgecumbe to Biorka Island.
    Suddenly the top house of the boat lit up like “the Fourth of July.”
    “Super bright, white light, and here comes this big meteor right over the top of the boat,” he said.
    The cosmic wonder continued on over Sitka sound, over Mt. Edgecumbe and into the water.
    “It was one of the strangest things we had ever seen,” he said. “It was blinding almost, it just shot over the top of the boat.”
    It was not a fishing tale. The Coast Guard was out later in the day, as the event had other witnesses.
    Another event involved the Coast Guard, which was bringing in a submarine for the first time – an under-the-radar operation until the vessel reached the dock.
    The USCG did not account for a fishing boat being out so far and at such an odd time.
    “We were the only boat fishing the winter troll line,” Moses said. “We were looking in our binoculars, here comes a submarine.”
    Like every good head of a household you call your boss. Moses’ father called his wife and announced the craft. Wife and daughter called friends on base and asked what a submarine was doing out there.
    “It just so happened when she called they were in a secret meeting discussing how they would bring the submarine in undetected and confidentially,” Moses said. “It was all hush, hush and everything. So during this meeting they get a call that someone is reporting a submarine in Sitka Sound.”
    The boat was their classroom.
    “He always gave me lots of advice,” Moses said. “We were always up in the top house together when seining. Always looking for jumpers.”
    Mo senior would impart wisdom on which hook off was good for which stage of tide, detailed information on hook offs across Southeast. The same with trolling wisdom, the number of fish caught on which line on what drag on a particular day and area of an opening.
    “When my dad started seining they didn’t have power blocks or power skiffs or wear gloves,” Moses said. “They just had row boats for seine skiffs. He was always telling stories from those days, when he was running the F/V Sockeye King. You would get some green crew member on a boat and you would see them rowing like crazy as if they could move the seine boat and the net.
    Or a lot of boats would set around too many fish and they would be floating there all day trying to deal with the mess instead of making a small set. We would go unload, come back and they would just be floating out there.”
    Moses went through his learning curves.
    “But he always said, ‘Well done,’ when we unloaded, no matter the catch,” Moses said.
    It wasn’t all fish talk. Topics also included hunting and basketball.
    Senior was a Sheldon Jackson superstar in his day. Junior stopped playing when he bought the Glasply.
    “He taught me to be respectful when you are fishing around other boats,” he said. “Taking care of the resource, that was number one. He wasn’t a screamer or a yeller, and always treated his crew fairly.”
    Mo Sr. passed in his 80s, the day before 9/11. Moses’ mother, Amy, is in her 90s, recovering from a hip injury but bugging Moses about getting on the boat.
    Moses fishes his mom’s longline IFQs, along with his twin sister Karen, who is also on the advisory committee. Sister Clarice, now office manager at Sitka Conservation Society, fished on the boat until she married and had children.
    Moses met his wife Betsy in 1996 when she was a broker and sold him his first longline IFQs. They served on the advisory committee at the same time but didn’t have their first date until 1999 when they realized their fishery policies were not the only attraction.
    The 54-foot F/V Cloud Nine, a Monk design, was built in California in 1979 as a tuna and swordfish boat.
    The Johnsons got it in 1990. They spent four months in Port Townsend, Washington converting it from “bare bones” to a seiner.
    The first launch test produced the first catastrophe as a hydraulic line for the anchor winch was run through the top house and not connected by the boat works company hired, meaning 110 gallons of hydraulic fuel emptied up top and ran down behind the walls, through the wiring, to the engine room.
    “My dad just turned around and walked away,” he said. “We were down there another month. We had to strip the woodwork and wiring… and we had to sleep in a hotel.”
    With Mo the engines have been rebuilt twice. Just like the boat, some things in fisheries change, and some stay the same.
    “You get what you put into it,” he said.
    He likes that young fishermen can still get into the troll fishery inexpensively.
    “There are a lot of complaints that the runs are done but if you put the time in and learn the craft you are going to do well, even on the bad years,” he said.
    He acknowledged the seine fisheries have changed, becoming too expensive for younger fishermen to get started.
    “You have to be in a family operation or run a boat for somebody,” he said.
    He suggests young fishers concentrate on getting black cod and halibut IFQs, which makes it easier to get a boat or permit loan.
    He has watched seine permits drop from 400 fishing, to 320, to 250 in the last ten years. NOAA is voting on the second round of seine permit buy-backs, purchasing 36 more from fishermen.
    “It used to be limited number of markets for companies,” he said. “Now it is limited number of boats. The last two years the interest in fishing has gone up again. This year in Sitka we will have four new people that will be running their own boats. There was a big spike in interest after the big record year in 2013. People bought in in 2014 thinking they would make a lot of money, but things got back to reality.”
    He said Sitka needs growing resources for the fleet: diesel mechanics, welders, refrigeration and an improved boat haul-out operation like Wrangell has, where boats wider than 19 feet can be sandblasted and painted.
    Moses will fish as long as he can, and continue his advocacy for the resource.
    Twenty-one years ago he was selected to the Sitka Fish and Game Advisory Committee and still serves. He has also spent a two-year term on the Northern Southeast Regional Aqualculture Association board.
    As an advisory member, he has helped set the boundaries for Sitka Sound halibut fishers, making sure skiff fishermen get their opportunities as well as charter fishers, helping protect the resource; and established the Redoubt Bay threshold plan between sockeye fishers, the Forest Service and ADF&G, among other notable achievements.
    Recently he helped secure three days of fishing for seiners and gillnetters at an NRSSA board meeting.
    He has been trolling and caught in 80 mph winds and 30-foot seas trolling, and in 50-knot winds and 40-foot seas long lining.
    “When me and my dad fished in the winter we fished in anything,” he said. “Any kind of weather for our first 10 years with this boat.”
    Father and son fished all over Southeast, enduring the hardships of seven out of nine years when no seine openings were allowed in District 13.
    “Those were really tough times,” he said. “That is one thing about young people who have got in the fishery the last 10 years, they have no idea. All they have seen is mass fish in the Sitka area. It can turn on you. You have to love what you do to get through it. Nowadays you couldn’t even operate a standard limit seiner on what we were catching and what the price was on bad years. We fished on years when most boats in Sitka tied up.”
    They have shared great catches and low catches.
    He says Sitka has been lucky to have really conservative fisheries management.
    He said fishers have a right to be angry about the Pacific Salmon Treaty. “But right now the king stocks are so low in some of the river systems that you can’t be arguing about who is going to take a bigger cut, you have to cut.”
    He learned to put the resource first from his father.
    “The only thing he cared more about was family,” Moses said. “The best part of being a family operation was whether you had good days or bad days you are all in it together.”
    He doesn’t have a son to pass the boat on to. Some able crewmen have grown into their own operations. He has his eye on a few seamen out there.
    “It’s going to be tough to let go of the boat,” he said. “It was never a tool or a means to make money, it has always been a part of the family. When I get older I will scale back, a part time troller maybe. Over the horizon there may be a crew member who is interested.”
    For now, the boat and the memories are his.
    Something about being on the water at 4 a.m. and the lights of home when the Cloud Nine approaches harbor at 8 or 9 p.m. will never grow old.
    Now if he stands alone in the wheelhouse, he thinks back to when his father stood next to him.
    “When I go past a certain point of land, or a place where we made a certain set, I remember the positive memory that happened there,” he said. “I have that a lot.”
    Their happiest moments were scouting an area, anchoring out and awakening to find the fish and no other boats in sight.
    The hook offs they perfected: Eagles Nest hook off near Broad Island, Peril Strait, Slocum Arm on the outside of Northwest Salisbury Sound.
    Their favorite was Bee Hive.
    “Something about it, the way the fish move there, the current is not really strong,” Moses said.
    His gaze drifts off to a faraway wheel house.
    A father is saying to son, “Here, you take the wheel. You make the set.”

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20 YEARS AGO

March 2004

Businesses using the Centennial Hall parking lot testified Tuesday against a proposal to charge them rent in addition to the $200 annual permit fee. City Administrator Hugh Bevan made the proposal in response to the Assembly’s direction to Centennial Hall manager Don Kluting to try to close the $340,000 gap between building revenues and operational costs.


50 YEARS AGO

March 1974

Alaska Native Brotherhood Grand President William S. Paul Sr. will be special guest and speaker at the local ANB, Alaska Native Sisterhood Founders Day program Monday at the ANB Hall.

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