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

I’d spent eighteen years making decisions worth millions of dollars in a few seconds.

This one took less than that.

“We’re going to them,” I said.

Maggie looked at me for one second. Then she nodded and pulled on her survival suit.

We found the Kittiwake twenty minutes later, low in the water, her deck almost awash. Two fishermen, a father and son from Dillingham, were clinging to the rail in survival suits.

Maggie talked me through it, step by step, in that calm Coast Guard voice. I brought the Solveig alongside in eighteen-foot seas. Kenji threw the lines. Maggie went over the rail on a safety line and pulled the son aboard, then the father.

Three minutes after we pulled away, the Kittiwake rolled over and sank.

We made it into the river at four in the morning. All five of us. The father, a fisherman named Moses, hugged me so hard my ribs hurt.

“Your grandfather would be proud of you, Wall Street,” Maggie said, sitting on the deck in the gray dawn, still in her survival suit.

“You knew my grandfather?”

“Everybody in Naknek knew Olaf Brandvold,” she said. “He pulled my uncle out of the water in 1987.”

I sat down next to her and laughed until I cried.

We finished the season. It was a record year for the bay. My marine insurance agent nearly fainted when he heard about the rescue. My business loan was paid off by August.

On the last evening, we sat on the deck at the dock, the three of us, with cold beer and the sun still up at eleven at night, and watched the boats come in.

I mailed the life jacket back to my old office in Manhattan.

Under “ONE SEASON,” I wrote “AND MANY MORE.”

I’m going back in June.

Would you ever walk away from a safe life for an adventure like this? Tell me in the comments.