Behind The Cover

It’s author picture day for my memoir, BERING SEA STRONG, at Seattle’s Fisherman’s Terminal. I’d initially met my photographer, Greg Westhoff, when I photobombed him on the streets of Seattle a month earlier. By the time we’d walked two blocks together, I discovered he’d commercially fished in Alaska and he’d be the one to shoot my photo.

“Well, Greg, there was a great view from here last week. The whole line of commercial fishing boats is gone. And with it, my perfect backdrop,” I said.

“Yeah, much of the fleet went fishing already,” he said.

Now, a line of ducks bob in their place.

“Let’s try here,” I said. “I like that boat behind me.” I back up on the rustic planks of the dock.

Click, click, click. He shoots from various directions and views. We are impatient for the sun to drop from this longest day of the year, the summer solstice.

“We have some good ones. We did it!” He did it.

We gather our gear and Greg says, “By the way, that ship behind you is one of the few owned and operated by a woman. You need to meet her.”

Hollis Jennings, a 5’ 7” strawberry blonde beauty, calls her 58’ seiner F/V Natalie Gail, who she named after her two sisters. She walked these same docks at the age of 22, much for the same reason I ventured to Alaska: opportunity and higher wages. With each jump aboard another ship, she climbed higher in rank from cook to engineer to skipper, and finally, in 2012—to owner. She is now 34.

We talked about our experiences as women aboard, she as a crew and mine as a scientist. We showed more similarities than differences:

“The scientists and the fishermen should want the same things,” Hollis said. “We have to manage the fisheries. We fishermen should be the most invested of all. It is our livelihood and our future.”

She reminded me, “It’s amazing to feel lonely on a boat when you’re always surrounded by people, and yet, you can’t find your own space.” I wrote in my memoir about this same feeling, one of my biggest surprises at sea.

“Shipmates are like family,” she said. “Sometimes we’re comrades; other times we fight. But you know they always have your back.” I worked on three different vessels on the Bering Sea. Each had different crew sizes, chemistry and levels of “brotherhood.” Some I couldn’t get far enough away from, and others I wanted inches from my side.

I asked, “Have you considered hiring an all-woman crew?”

“I hire the best four or five I can find,” she said. Often that includes women.”

 

Hollis and the Natalie Gail ship out around June and will fish salmon in the cool, Alaskan waters from Ketchikan to Juneau until September.

 

Her voice fills with gratitude, “I’m just so thankful I found fishing and the lifestyle. I absolutely love it.”

“I do, too, Hollis. Maybe there’s room for me aboard?”

These serendipitous encounters with Greg, the fisherman/photographer, and Hollis, the cool-chick fisherwoman, hold great significance to me.

Hollis is Bering Sea Strong, and I’m thrilled have her vessel on my book cover. Now, I attach this special story to mine.

Love This Day.

Please read my memoir, BERING SEA STRONG, to see what it was like to spend three months as the only woman and scientist aboard a commercial fishing vessel on Alaska’s high seas.