We are one-hundred and eighty thousand pounds from being done with the the

2008 King Crab season. That means I am approximitely ten to fifteen days

from getting on an airplane and heading south. This makes me very happy.

I’ve been doing some reflecting over the last few days, and I’m reminded

of a documentry I saw on Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristopherson,

and Willie Nelson. It showed their graduation pictures from high school.

Looking at the clean cut young men, you never would have guessed that they

would be considered “outlaws”. I think that is in some way true for a lot

of deckhands and I know it is for me. Not really that we are outlaws, but

that when we come up here to fish we really take on a new identity or at

the very least change a little.

When I graduated high school, I wanted to study history at college and

really had no idea what I wanted to do with it. Now some ten years later,

and numerous changes in my life’s direction, I’m in the middle of the

ocean at the top of the world doing a job that no more than four hundred

people do. I look at old pictures of myself with an old girlfriend, who I

was sure I was going to marry, or I think about my first day on the job in

Memphis and I was sure I found what I was going to be doing for a while

and I laugh. Its funny, but I guess that is life.

Paul