Fishermoms

Reflections on motherhood and fishing.

Like many who grew up commercial fishing, most our family’s rhythms and roles have been determined by the sea. Our mom and dad moved to western Alaska, had kids (us!) and started their fishing careers all in their mid-twenties. Before babies, our parents setnetted for salmon and longlined for halibut together on the tip of the Alaska Peninsula, where they moved to live on a remote, off-grid homestead. Claire and I were born 13 months apart, and without family or friends nearby to help out with us (the closest neighbors lived a boat-ride away), our mom traded in spending her summers working on the water to raise us. Our dad continued to fish seasonally, leaving home for months-long stretches while our mom stayed with us on land.

Our mom raising kids & picking fish on the Alaska Peninsula

This is a model true of many fishing families: while one partner braves the intensive challenges of working on the water, the other takes on…everything else; The logistics and care needed to raise and educate kids, maintain a household, maintain friendship and family relationships, the communication and support needed from land to keep the business and perhaps other full-time or part-time jobs operating smoothly. In our parents’ day, there was no Starlink or Amazon or Google making life a little more streamlined from the water, just a VHF radio to call the cannery or home with a scratchy request for parts that would have to be mail-ordered from a big old catalogue on the shelf and shipped out on a slow boat from Seattle, or to relay a mechanical question to someone somewhere who could help. The role of both parents in a fishing family is immense, each the captain of their own ship, yet sailing on waters worlds apart during the fishing season.

Emma & Claire on the deck of our family’s first drift boat, the F/V Lucky Dove

I’m not sure if the transition from sea to land felt like a loss or a gain to our mom, it would seem a little of both. As Claire and I have recently become moms ourselves, this tension has been at the forefront. It’s a conversation we have with our girlfriends often: how do you fish with kids? We know it’s possible, proven by the few incredible women running boats or beach sites who bring their babies with them and don’t miss a season. But how do we go about it? Should we all go in on a setnet camp together and strap our babies to our backs and let the older ones run wild on the beach while we pick fish and live on a fishing momune? (Yes). Should we take a few years off until our kids get a little older and then get back out on the boat as a family? Should we send our kids to stay with their far-off relatives so we can get back out there? What if we fall in love with summer on land while we’re away from the sea? What if we forget what it feels like to fall asleep to the sound of waves on the hull and to wake up to swollen hands and a salty breeze for breakfast. What if we miss it all so much.