Sushihunter
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http://www.alaskamagazine.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1291&Itemid=46
Saying Thanks, With Halibut
Written by Tim Woody
December/January 2009
Charter captains express their gratitude by taking war veterans out to fish
The crowd started gathering in the pre-dawn gloom outside the harbormaster’s office in Seward. About a hundred. Mostly men, mostly young.
They were waiting to board charter boats for a day of halibut fishing, but they weren’t the usual sportfishing crowd. For one thing, they were wide awake at 5 a.m. And despite ingesting copious amounts of coffee and taurine-enhanced energy drinks such as Red Bull and Monster, they were mellow. These were guys used to going without sleep and standing around waiting for orders.
Before long, two or three buses rolled down the street behind a police escort, stopped at the curb and disgorged more of them. Charter captain Bob Candopolous grabbed a bullhorn and started calling out names and boat assignments.
Skippers holding small signs bearing their vessels’ names soon found themselves surrounded by eager faces that were simultaneously youthful and worldly.
While the rest of us were fishing over the past few summers, this crowd was doing time in The Sandbox—the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan. Some of them went more than once. But now they were back, and it was their turn to bend the rods.
They were here for the second annual Armed Services Combat Fishing Tournament, and more than 30 boats were waiting to take them into Resurrection Bay to catch fish and say thanks.
+++
The weather off Puget Bay is perfect. White clouds clutter a blue sky, leaving plenty of room for the sun to help warm a late-May morning. Skipper Steve Zernia anchors the Pursuit, and his deckhand starts a quick lesson in fishing the seafloor for flatfish.
Lines are soon dropped, and guys lean against the gunwales and chat, waiting for the action to begin. Some don’t say much. There’s no way to determine whether they’ve always been the quiet type, or if they’ve grown leery of conversation that might drift toward places they’d like to leave behind.
Zernia—one of the captains donating his boat, time and fuel for the day—asks his guests where they served.
Chad Marino is among the first to speak up. He’s an Army staff sergeant with Charlie Company, Third Battalion, 309th Infantry Regiment. He has done two tours of duty in Iraq, the first starting with the initial invasion in 2003 when he arrived in the country via parachute.
Across the deck from Marino is Fred Wetzel, a technical sergeant in the Air Force and another veteran of two tours in Iraq. Wetzel served on the Flyway Security Team, providing armed protection for U.S. aircraft flying in and out of unsecured airfields in the war zone.
Their experiences are the kind that qualified about 200 U.S. troops to take part in this fishing tournament as guests of the Seward sportfishing fleet. The only requirement for entry is at least one wartime deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan.
The men on Zernia’s boat have patrolled dangerous neighborhoods, rolled down IED-infested highways, carried their M4 rifles to breakfast every day, searched remote mountains for terrorists, and done things most people wouldn’t, or couldn’t.
But for today, all they have to do is enjoy the sun-dappled coast of Alaska and, hopefully, exhaust their arms pulling halibut to the surface.
A rumble interrupts the conversation as heads turn toward a nearby mountain face where rocks, warmed by the morning sun, have broken loose and set off a landslide. Tips occasionally dip and wiggle on the ends of rods nestled in holders on the Pursuit’s gunwales, snapping fishermen to attention as they respond to false alarms over the course of an hour.
Finally, Sgt. Ben Daigle, one of Marino’s buddies, sets a hook and starts reeling. As it always does when the first angler gets a fish, excitement grows with the thought that the bite is on, but Daigle boats a yelloweye rockfish, not a halibut.
Zernia decides it’s time to try a new spot, so the lines come up and the Pursuit moves farther out to sea.
That’s when the trouble starts.
In the wheelhouse, Zernia becomes distracted by an unexplained vibration and slows his boat. A few minutes of investigation result only in a loud bang when he tries to accelerate. One of the Pursuit’s twin shafts has broken, and leaving Zernia staring at the prospect of a couple of thousand dollars in repairs and a dilemma about what to do with six veterans whose fishing day just started.
A few radio calls later, Candopolous’ partner, Steve Babinec, pulls up on the Pursuit’s port side to take extra fishermen aboard the larger Legacy, leaving Zernia, his deckhand and one seasick soldier to make the long, disappointing run back to Seward.
****
If there’s one thing military families understand, it’s sacrifice. Sometimes, it’s the worst kind—a loved one doesn’t come home. More often, it’s the disruption of lives and the separation from spouses and children. Wetzel, the Air Force technical sergeant, knows that all too well as both an airman and the husband of an Air Force civil engineer.
His son, Logan, was born four days before Wetzel left for pre-deployment training and an eight-month tour in Iraq. As soon as he returned from the war, his wife handed Wetzel their baby as she said goodbye for her deployment. And, by the way, she told him, the baby has an ear infection and a fever of 103.
“Is that bad?” Wetzel asked.
He—and his son—survived the abrupt immersion into domestic life and bonded even more closely as a result of having no one else to turn to for months at a time. A lot of new parents have the support of nearby relatives, of family members willing to fly to Alaska and help out awhile, but “I didn’t get none of those offers,” Wetzel said.
But he did get the support of a community that takes pride in its troops.
“This place is amazing,” he said. “Nowhere have I seen such nice people. Alaska shows loads of support you don’t see elsewhere.”
Wetzel and his wife requested extensions of their assignments to Alaska, but they were denied because Elmendorf Air Force Base can’t keep all the troops who want to stay here. The family was scheduled to leave last month.
“I’m damn sure gonna be sad leaving this place,” he said.
Marino, the infantryman, agreed. With 15 years in the Army, he has served in Louisiana, North Carolina and Italy, but says Alaska is unmatched. The state’s support for the military is phenomenal, Marino said.
“My guys feel really good about doing our jobs up here,” he said.
The Combat Fishing Tournament is just one slice of the pie, Marino said, but it was a wonderful, stress-free outing for soldiers returning from stressful, dangerous deployments.
“A lot of us will probably be seeing another deployment. Whether it’s Iraq or Afghanistan, we don’t know,” Marino said.
For Seward’s captains and deckhands to take the veterans fishing to express their gratitude, Marino said, was “an awesome thing.”
***
Aboard the Legacy, music wafts out of speakers and across the busy, sun-splashed deck as about a dozen troops catch halibut and soak up a perfect spring day. Except for the abundance of camouflage clothing, the crowd looks like any other group of anglers on a full-day charter.
The burly Marino hooks into his first halibut of the day and cusses it to the surface with the butt of his rod jammed into his hip and beads of sweat breaking out under the brim of his bucket hat.
Everyone gets his or her turn boating a fish and—for those who have never done it—learning how hard it is to pull halibut up from the depths. One by one, the troops start limiting out with pairs of fish, and the successful anglers relax in the sun to watch the action. Glimpses into the gore of the fish hold prove irresistible, especially for the first-timers.
The bite isn’t fast but it’s steady, and the Legacy’s fit, young deckhands stay busy baiting hooks, gaffing halibut and marking fish with colored bands to identify which anglers will take them home.
It’s turning out to be such a perfect day that one angler looks at the skipper and says, “We should skip the banquet and stay out here.” But she changes her mind when she remembers there are prizes to be won, including a new pickup for whoever catches the biggest halibut.
***
Sportfishing is a competitive business. Skippers fight for fish and customers. Sometimes nerves get raw and stay that way for months or years. But at the captains’ meeting the night before the Combat Fishing Tournament, Candopolous said, they “were all buddies.” If there was anything they could agree on, it was the desire to show U.S. troops that they’re appreciated.
Candopolous and his friend Mike Hester hatched the idea for the tournament after seeing an anti-war protest while they were at a Safari Club International convention in Reno, Nev. When they started the tournament in 2007, it was with the boats owned by Saltwater Safaris, Candopolous’ charter business.
More than 30 boats were involved in the 2008 tournament, and Candopolous didn’t do any recruiting—the skippers called him and volunteered.
Even deckhands gave their time. When the Legacy docked at the end of the day, troops dug into their pockets and started pushing cash toward the young men who had worked hard for them all day, but crewmembers declined the money and thanked the veterans.
“Nobody forced them to go to work that day for free,” Candopolous said, adding that the captains volunteered but told their employees they didn’t have to. “Every kid said, ‘Absolutely. We wouldn’t miss this for the world.’”
Candopolous hopes the tournament will continue annually, even in peacetime. When asked if his motivation had any roots in the painful memories of how Vietnam veterans were once treated when they returned from another unpopular war, Candopolous said, “I think that helped a lot.
“I think we’re a generation that doesn’t want to see that happen again, and we can make a difference.”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-Tim Woody is editor of Alaska magazine.
For more information about the Combat Fishing Tournament, or to help defray costs of future events by making a donation to the Armed Services YMCA of Alaska, go to www.thankthem.org
Jim's Fishing Charters
www.JimsFishing.com
http://ca.youtube.com/user/Sushihunter250
Saying Thanks, With Halibut
Written by Tim Woody
December/January 2009
Charter captains express their gratitude by taking war veterans out to fish
The crowd started gathering in the pre-dawn gloom outside the harbormaster’s office in Seward. About a hundred. Mostly men, mostly young.
They were waiting to board charter boats for a day of halibut fishing, but they weren’t the usual sportfishing crowd. For one thing, they were wide awake at 5 a.m. And despite ingesting copious amounts of coffee and taurine-enhanced energy drinks such as Red Bull and Monster, they were mellow. These were guys used to going without sleep and standing around waiting for orders.
Before long, two or three buses rolled down the street behind a police escort, stopped at the curb and disgorged more of them. Charter captain Bob Candopolous grabbed a bullhorn and started calling out names and boat assignments.
Skippers holding small signs bearing their vessels’ names soon found themselves surrounded by eager faces that were simultaneously youthful and worldly.
While the rest of us were fishing over the past few summers, this crowd was doing time in The Sandbox—the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan. Some of them went more than once. But now they were back, and it was their turn to bend the rods.
They were here for the second annual Armed Services Combat Fishing Tournament, and more than 30 boats were waiting to take them into Resurrection Bay to catch fish and say thanks.
+++
The weather off Puget Bay is perfect. White clouds clutter a blue sky, leaving plenty of room for the sun to help warm a late-May morning. Skipper Steve Zernia anchors the Pursuit, and his deckhand starts a quick lesson in fishing the seafloor for flatfish.
Lines are soon dropped, and guys lean against the gunwales and chat, waiting for the action to begin. Some don’t say much. There’s no way to determine whether they’ve always been the quiet type, or if they’ve grown leery of conversation that might drift toward places they’d like to leave behind.
Zernia—one of the captains donating his boat, time and fuel for the day—asks his guests where they served.
Chad Marino is among the first to speak up. He’s an Army staff sergeant with Charlie Company, Third Battalion, 309th Infantry Regiment. He has done two tours of duty in Iraq, the first starting with the initial invasion in 2003 when he arrived in the country via parachute.
Across the deck from Marino is Fred Wetzel, a technical sergeant in the Air Force and another veteran of two tours in Iraq. Wetzel served on the Flyway Security Team, providing armed protection for U.S. aircraft flying in and out of unsecured airfields in the war zone.
Their experiences are the kind that qualified about 200 U.S. troops to take part in this fishing tournament as guests of the Seward sportfishing fleet. The only requirement for entry is at least one wartime deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan.
The men on Zernia’s boat have patrolled dangerous neighborhoods, rolled down IED-infested highways, carried their M4 rifles to breakfast every day, searched remote mountains for terrorists, and done things most people wouldn’t, or couldn’t.
But for today, all they have to do is enjoy the sun-dappled coast of Alaska and, hopefully, exhaust their arms pulling halibut to the surface.
A rumble interrupts the conversation as heads turn toward a nearby mountain face where rocks, warmed by the morning sun, have broken loose and set off a landslide. Tips occasionally dip and wiggle on the ends of rods nestled in holders on the Pursuit’s gunwales, snapping fishermen to attention as they respond to false alarms over the course of an hour.
Finally, Sgt. Ben Daigle, one of Marino’s buddies, sets a hook and starts reeling. As it always does when the first angler gets a fish, excitement grows with the thought that the bite is on, but Daigle boats a yelloweye rockfish, not a halibut.
Zernia decides it’s time to try a new spot, so the lines come up and the Pursuit moves farther out to sea.
That’s when the trouble starts.
In the wheelhouse, Zernia becomes distracted by an unexplained vibration and slows his boat. A few minutes of investigation result only in a loud bang when he tries to accelerate. One of the Pursuit’s twin shafts has broken, and leaving Zernia staring at the prospect of a couple of thousand dollars in repairs and a dilemma about what to do with six veterans whose fishing day just started.
A few radio calls later, Candopolous’ partner, Steve Babinec, pulls up on the Pursuit’s port side to take extra fishermen aboard the larger Legacy, leaving Zernia, his deckhand and one seasick soldier to make the long, disappointing run back to Seward.
****
If there’s one thing military families understand, it’s sacrifice. Sometimes, it’s the worst kind—a loved one doesn’t come home. More often, it’s the disruption of lives and the separation from spouses and children. Wetzel, the Air Force technical sergeant, knows that all too well as both an airman and the husband of an Air Force civil engineer.
His son, Logan, was born four days before Wetzel left for pre-deployment training and an eight-month tour in Iraq. As soon as he returned from the war, his wife handed Wetzel their baby as she said goodbye for her deployment. And, by the way, she told him, the baby has an ear infection and a fever of 103.
“Is that bad?” Wetzel asked.
He—and his son—survived the abrupt immersion into domestic life and bonded even more closely as a result of having no one else to turn to for months at a time. A lot of new parents have the support of nearby relatives, of family members willing to fly to Alaska and help out awhile, but “I didn’t get none of those offers,” Wetzel said.
But he did get the support of a community that takes pride in its troops.
“This place is amazing,” he said. “Nowhere have I seen such nice people. Alaska shows loads of support you don’t see elsewhere.”
Wetzel and his wife requested extensions of their assignments to Alaska, but they were denied because Elmendorf Air Force Base can’t keep all the troops who want to stay here. The family was scheduled to leave last month.
“I’m damn sure gonna be sad leaving this place,” he said.
Marino, the infantryman, agreed. With 15 years in the Army, he has served in Louisiana, North Carolina and Italy, but says Alaska is unmatched. The state’s support for the military is phenomenal, Marino said.
“My guys feel really good about doing our jobs up here,” he said.
The Combat Fishing Tournament is just one slice of the pie, Marino said, but it was a wonderful, stress-free outing for soldiers returning from stressful, dangerous deployments.
“A lot of us will probably be seeing another deployment. Whether it’s Iraq or Afghanistan, we don’t know,” Marino said.
For Seward’s captains and deckhands to take the veterans fishing to express their gratitude, Marino said, was “an awesome thing.”
***
Aboard the Legacy, music wafts out of speakers and across the busy, sun-splashed deck as about a dozen troops catch halibut and soak up a perfect spring day. Except for the abundance of camouflage clothing, the crowd looks like any other group of anglers on a full-day charter.
The burly Marino hooks into his first halibut of the day and cusses it to the surface with the butt of his rod jammed into his hip and beads of sweat breaking out under the brim of his bucket hat.
Everyone gets his or her turn boating a fish and—for those who have never done it—learning how hard it is to pull halibut up from the depths. One by one, the troops start limiting out with pairs of fish, and the successful anglers relax in the sun to watch the action. Glimpses into the gore of the fish hold prove irresistible, especially for the first-timers.
The bite isn’t fast but it’s steady, and the Legacy’s fit, young deckhands stay busy baiting hooks, gaffing halibut and marking fish with colored bands to identify which anglers will take them home.
It’s turning out to be such a perfect day that one angler looks at the skipper and says, “We should skip the banquet and stay out here.” But she changes her mind when she remembers there are prizes to be won, including a new pickup for whoever catches the biggest halibut.
***
Sportfishing is a competitive business. Skippers fight for fish and customers. Sometimes nerves get raw and stay that way for months or years. But at the captains’ meeting the night before the Combat Fishing Tournament, Candopolous said, they “were all buddies.” If there was anything they could agree on, it was the desire to show U.S. troops that they’re appreciated.
Candopolous and his friend Mike Hester hatched the idea for the tournament after seeing an anti-war protest while they were at a Safari Club International convention in Reno, Nev. When they started the tournament in 2007, it was with the boats owned by Saltwater Safaris, Candopolous’ charter business.
More than 30 boats were involved in the 2008 tournament, and Candopolous didn’t do any recruiting—the skippers called him and volunteered.
Even deckhands gave their time. When the Legacy docked at the end of the day, troops dug into their pockets and started pushing cash toward the young men who had worked hard for them all day, but crewmembers declined the money and thanked the veterans.
“Nobody forced them to go to work that day for free,” Candopolous said, adding that the captains volunteered but told their employees they didn’t have to. “Every kid said, ‘Absolutely. We wouldn’t miss this for the world.’”
Candopolous hopes the tournament will continue annually, even in peacetime. When asked if his motivation had any roots in the painful memories of how Vietnam veterans were once treated when they returned from another unpopular war, Candopolous said, “I think that helped a lot.
“I think we’re a generation that doesn’t want to see that happen again, and we can make a difference.”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-Tim Woody is editor of Alaska magazine.
For more information about the Combat Fishing Tournament, or to help defray costs of future events by making a donation to the Armed Services YMCA of Alaska, go to www.thankthem.org
Jim's Fishing Charters
www.JimsFishing.com
http://ca.youtube.com/user/Sushihunter250
