In rough weather, you need all your senses. My entire camera, even through a plastic bag, was soaked. A huge wave came over and I was swimming underwater for a minute. The last Bering Sea trip I went on, I snuck out to take photos of really big seas. I’ve been in situations where the boat is getting covered in ice and it’s night and I’m on a stack of crab pots as the webbing on them freezes and everything is slippery. Today’s digital world has us so out of our bodies, but here you’re so present, so alive. It is hard on your body, the weather is stressful, and there can be all kinds of haywire dangerous stuff happening. I’m known for photography but fishing is where I’m in my element. When you’re crabbing you’re facing the full force of nature, risking injury and death. The fame got to the folks who kept doing it. I remember being a little disappointed they didn’t bring us back the next year but I’m relieved now. I had been crabbing for about a year and a half before we ended up on the reality show Deadliest Catch. When I was 19, I drove up to Alaska with a friend to search for a fishing job. My dad got me into sport fishing when I was still in diapers. I grew up in southern California on the ocean. For me, it says something about commercial fishing: the work is so gruelling and dangerous that there is a lot of joking around, to blow off steam. I overlooked this image for a couple of years. Life on a commercial boat didn’t offer her much chance of longevity so after two seasons I retired her and she’s lived at my home ever since. She was always trying to stalk seagulls but she was too small – they were way bigger than her. Several times, I had to yell up at the crane operator, to let him know Kitty was there, looking up at a pot that was about to drop on her head. She would saunter out in the middle of storms or sit on the back deck as we were trying to stack up an 800-pound crab pot. I was like: “OK, this is the cat for me.” But then I opened Kitty’s – she never got a name, just Kitty – and she was just standing there, her tail flopping back and forth. I opened the cage doors and most of the cats were pinned against the backs of the cages. I had gone to the pound looking for one with a mellow temperament, because I knew that, what with all the pots banging around and storms at sea, I didn’t want a pet who would be scared and hiding all the time. The captain had cats on the boat and I had decided to get one myself.
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