I Left a Seven-Figure Job on Wall Street to Fish for Salmon in Alaska. My First Season Almost Killed Me

My name is Elliot Brandvold. I’m 46 years old, and for eighteen years I was a trader at a hedge fund in Manhattan.

I was very good at it. I made a lot of money for a lot of people, including myself. I had an apartment on the Upper West Side, a house in Connecticut and a 401(k) that my financial advisor called “a work of art.”

I also had a divorce, high blood pressure and a recurring dream about drowning.

My grandfather was a Norwegian fisherman. He fished for salmon in Bristol Bay, Alaska, every summer for forty years. When I was a boy, he told me stories about it every Christmas. The storms. The fish. The midnight sun.

When he died, he left me his old fishing permit. A Bristol Bay drift net permit. Most people don’t know that a permit to fish in Bristol Bay is worth well over a hundred thousand dollars.

For twenty years, it sat in a drawer.

Two years ago, on my forty-fourth birthday, I sat in my office looking at a screen full of numbers and realized I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been happy.

I quit the next week.

My colleagues threw me a going-away party. They gave me a bottle of champagne and a life jacket with “ONE SEASON” written on the back in marker.

I rolled over my 401(k), took out a small business loan, bought a used thirty-two-foot gillnet boat named the Solveig, and flew to Naknek, Alaska, in June.

I knew nothing.