Near the mouth of the Kvichak River in southwestern Alaska, there is a knob of tundra reaching into the water that locals call Graveyard Point. Atop a small bluff lie the dilapidated remains of an abandoned fish cannery, and below is a vast, swampy delta. Every summer, the remote camp fills with fishermen – and a few fisherwomen – who come to seek their fortunes in the waters of Bristol Bay, home to one of the largest runs of sockeye salmon in the world. Among them is Corey Arnold, a native Californian who runs a wild salmon netting operation from two small skiffs in the bay. Like others at Graveyard Point, Mr. Arnold is drawn by the promise of wilderness adventure, the challenge of making a living from what he can haul out of the sea, and the pleasure of chasing a legendary fish. Unlike most others, he is also there to take pictures. Mr. Arnold, 36, is a fisherman, photographer and a photographer of fishermen. He was 2 when his father first took him fishing. From then on, they spent weekends angling for shark and tuna off the coast of Southern California. Like his father, Mr. Arnold became obsessed with the ocean. He took sea creatures to school for show-and-tell and dressed as a fisherman for Halloween for years in a row. “When I grow up I want to be a professional fisherman,” Mr. Arnold told anyone who asked. When he was 10, his father gave him a camera. Mr. Arnold took pictures casually at first and later studied photography at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. But during the summers, he fished. After driving to Alaska in 1995, Mr. Arnold walked the docks of a harbor in the Kenai Peninsula and landed a job salmon fishing in Bristol Bay. He returned summer after summer until the dot-com crash, when photo assignments grew scarce, and he went looking for fish work in winter. That was when he became a deckhand on a king crab boat in the Bering Sea. “Life on a crab boat is pretty jarring for the first time,” Mr. Arnold said. “We work 20-hour days on average and get four hours of sleep or so. It’s hard to know if you’re getting in really good shape or completely destroying your body. You’re super remote and it’s cold. It’s a whole other world of big boats, a lot of noise and hydraulics, and 800-pound crab pots slamming on deck.”
Posted on: Sat, 07 Sep 2013 14:18:42 +0000
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