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

Bristol Bay is the biggest wild salmon fishery on earth. For about six weeks every summer, tens of millions of sockeye salmon come in from the ocean to spawn. Thousands of boats are waiting for them.

It’s also one of the most dangerous places to work in America. Cold water, huge tides, sudden storms, eighteen-hour days.

I hired a crew of two. Kenji, 24, a quiet college student from Seattle who’d fished three seasons. And Maggie, 31, a former Coast Guard rescue swimmer who’d decided she wanted to be on the other side of a rescue for a change.

On my first day, I tangled the net in the propeller.

On my second day, I got so seasick I couldn’t stand up. Maggie handed me a bucket and said, “Welcome to Alaska, Wall Street.”

That became my name.

But I learned. Slowly. I learned how to read the tides and the water. I learned how to set a net and pick fish out of it until my hands bled through my gloves. I learned how to sleep for three hours and get up again.

By the third week, we were catching fish. A lot of fish. The boat was making money. More importantly, I hadn’t thought about the stock market in twenty days.

Then, on the night of July 12th, the weather radio crackled.

Gale warning. Winds to sixty knots. Seas building to eighteen feet.

We were twenty miles from the harbor.