A Life Wasted

Sea Otter

Of all the animals in Alaska, in the world really, I love the sea otter the most. The first sea otter I had seen had been the one that wintered on the docks at Seward. She was cute, and I was always careful to walk slowly past her so as not to disturb her. She was larger than I would have thought a sea otter would be and she always watched me pass with intelligent eyes. I liked looking at her as I passed. I'd even tried feeding her a few herring. (She never took food from humans.) I liked her fine, but I hadn't fallen in love with sea otters until I saw one in the water.

Billy and I had set anchor in a large bay south of Kodiak Village. We were exhausted and slept until the middle of the day. When I woke and went out on deck with my coffee I spotted a sea otter floating on her back twenty feet from my boat. It was a female, which I knew because of the two nursing babies on her chest. Also on her chest was a small rock and a hand full of clams. As I watched she cracked a clam on the rock. Once she opened the clam she used her other paddle like a hand to hold the babies, rock, and clams, then in a quick movement flipped over in the water. She was up right again so fast I wasn't sure I'd actually seen her flip over.

I'd watched her for about ten minutes before Billy appeared. It wasn't until he explained that I understood what she was doing. After breaking open the clam there were little pieces of shell on her chest. She didn't like this so she flipped over to wash the shell pieces away. Billy called it "cleaning the table." Which made perfect sense after he explained it. When she ran out of clams she pushed the babies off and dove to the bottom for more. The babies floated so close to each other they must have held hands or something, but I couldn't tell. When she came back up it was always perfectly under the babies. They reattached to the nipples like there'd been no interruption. Mom got busy with a fresh stack of clams and the process repeated. I could have watched her for days.

Billy said, "You know we could get about five thousand dollars for her hide on the black market." He misunderstood my shocked look, thinking I was amazed by the price. "I know a guy in Anchorage. I even know how to skin it out." "No," I said. My voice too full of anger. "Never, Billy. Never." Billy nodded and took it in stride. He'd already figured out that I was funny about animals.

Earlier in the week, a Japanese national in a thousand dollar suit, stepped on to my boat uninvited at Kodiak and offered me $1,000 an ounce for Dungeness crab eggs. There was no season on Dungeness crabs because the population was dangerously low. The guy didn't understand no, so I got angry and threw him off my boat. The species was in danger and this idiot wanted its eggs. I had talked to other skippers with the same story from Japanese buyers. They had too much money and no sense of ecological right or wrong. I've heard that Dungeness crabs have come back strong. That was good to hear.

On one trip our fresh water tank was damaged and all the water drained into the sea. Unfortunately, I didn't have any emergency water stored, so we were more than a hundred miles at sea in a brutal storm with nothing to drink. The one thing we did have plenty of was canned peaches. So for the two days it took me to reach the protection of a remote cove we'd spent drinking nothing but sweet peach syrup. There was no services on that part of the island, but I knew that we could go ashore and find fresh water somewhere. That night when we pulled into a protected cove we knew well, I was surprised to see another boat anchored there. I was pleased because of the extra level of safety in numbers, but also because it was a larger fishing boat that would have water to share.

The instant I saw the other boat they called me on marine channel 16. The skipper offered practical advice on the best area of the cove to drop anchor. After dropping anchor I called the skipper back and introduced myself. We made so small talk about how ruff the protected cove was. His boat was equipped with a devise to measure the wind, so he shared the bad news with me: Sixty knots gusting to 80 knots. Wind shifting from three basic directions to cause a williwaw. I'd never heard the term so he explained it to me.