Catching the Ebb

by Bender, Bert

• ISBN13: 9780870712968
• ISBN10: 0870712969
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-10-15
• Publisher: Oregon State Univ Pr

Summary

In a memoir that recounts thirty summers of fishing Alaska's Cook Inlet, Bert Bender describes his parallel careers as a commercial gill-netter and a professor of American literature. His narrative celebrates the fishing life as he knew it; it also explores issues of sustainability in the commercial salmon fishery.Bender started fishing in 1963 with a thirty-foot sailboat converted to gas power; it had a 45-horsepower engine but no equipment for pulling in the net. Over the next decades, the fishery shifted as canneries adapted to new world markets for frozen salmon and fishermen built larger and more powerful boats. Following the Exxon Valdez disaster of 1989 and the subsequent rise of the farmed salmon industry, the Cook Inlet fishery experienced a decline. Bender traces this path of change, drawing on his academic specialties, American sea literature and the influence of evolutionary biology and ecology in American writing.The only book on Cook Inlet's drift fishery, Catching the Ebb will appeal to readers interested in the sea or in the Pacific Northwest. In addition to its stories of people, boats, and the fishing life, the memoir addresses a question Bender posed in Sea-Brothers, a history of American sea fiction: Can we restrain our heedless pollution of the sea and avoid depleting ocean resources?

Author Biography

Bert Bender taught literature at Arizona State University for thirty-three years.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
The Life and the Waters	p. 1
Chart of South-central Alaska from Cook Inlet to Kayak Island	p. 2
Emergence	p. 4
The Thing	p. 7
Cook Inlet	p. 17
The Wake	p. 27
The Ebb	p. 43
Chart of Cook Inlet from the Forelands to Seldovia	p. 44
Catching the Ebb	p. 45
First Drifts with Margaret	p. 62
The Cannery	p. 78
Bowline Bill	p. 96
Anna A	p. 104
Poopdeck's Hand	p. 118
Ngul-a Fatica!	p. 127
Desdemona Sands	p. 134
Sounion and Scrivener	p. 144
Ishmael	p. 158
Revenge	p. 170
Moontide	p. 180
Sea-Brothers	p. 187
Sign of Wind	p. 195
Judith on the Bluff	p. 202
Mouthful of Sand	p. 208
Exxon Valdez	p. 224
Captain and Crew	p. 242
The Cutting Web	p. 253
Ninety-Two	p. 262
Call Me	p. 272
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.