The townspeople, meanwhile, reacted with emotions ranging from disbelief to panic.
"There was one teacher who was running down the street yelling, 'We're all going to get covered in ashes!' " Patty Bickar says. "Well, the story hit [Associated Press] that night, so word was out. Pork's stepmother in Washington [state] called that night and asked me, 'Did Pork have anything to do with that?' "
Big Halibut Don is not interested in this story. It was before his time. And it has nothing to do with big halibut, which is what he is all about.
"We got a 300-pounder the other day," he says. "It took about 30 minutes. The guy's reaction? Oh, he was psyched. He'd never seen anything like it.
"Actually, I didn't think it was as big as it was until we tried to pull it onto the boat. . . . I thought, 'well it's a 200-pounder or something.' Now a 200-pounder, I can pull that into the boat myself. But I went to pull that thing in and went, 'Ooooooohhhhooo!' So a couple of the clients grabbed the ropes [to which the halibut had been tied] and we pulled it in."
Big Halibut Don zips past lush Biorka Island, more commonly referred to as St. Lazaria, a refuge for puffins and other sea birds. Eventually, he rounds Cape Edgecumbe and enters the Gulf of Alaska, leaving Sitka far behind.
Sea birds literally blanket the surface, taking off occasionally in bunches, flying erratically but in unison just above the sea. A giant albatross glides gracefully overhead. Humpback whales surface here and there, blowing plumes of mist into the light gray sky.
Big Halibut Don stops over an area marked by a slight rise on the ocean floor, showing some 300 feet down on his fish-finder. He drops anchor, puts on his gloves and goes to work, digging into a plastic bin of vile-smelling salmon guts, and carefully working them onto the hooks of his clients.
They look at the bloody clumps dangling at the end of their lines, look oddly at each other and drop the tackle to the bottom.
"It might take a little time for them to get a whiff of that," Big Halibut Don says, "but believe me, they will get a whiff."
Alaska's Pacific halibut stocks are in good shape, biologists say, despite heavy, but regulated pressure from a commercial fleet and recreational fishermen, who alone harvest more than 1.5 million pounds annually.
The all-tackle world record is a 459-pounder caught last year in Dutch Harbor, on Unalaska Island of the Aleutian chain. But much bigger halibut are believed to exist throughout Alaska, as well as off British Columbia and Washington.
