Catching the Ebb: Drift-Fishing for Life in Cook Inlet

By Bert Bender

In a memoir that recounts thirty summers of fishing Alaska's Cook Inlet, Bert Bender describes his parallel careers as a commercial gill-netter and a professor of American literature. His narrative celebrates the fishing life as he knew it; it also explores issues of sustainability in the commercial salmon fishery.Bender started fishing in 1963 with a thirty-foot sailboat converted to gas power; it had a 45-horsepower engine but no equipment for pulling in the net. Over the next decades, the fishery shifted as canneries adapted to new world markets for frozen salmon and fishermen built larger and more powerful boats. Following the Exxon Valdez disaster of 1989 and the subsequent rise of the farmed salmon industry, the Cook Inlet fishery experienced a decline. Bender traces this path of change, drawing on his academic specialties, American sea literature and the influence of evolutionary biology and ecology in American writing.The only book on Cook Inlet's drift fishery, Catching the Ebb will appeal to readers interested in the sea or in the Pacific Northwest. In addition to its stories of people, boats, and the fishing life, the memoir addresses a question Bender posed in Sea-Brothers, a history of American sea fiction: Can we restrain our heedless pollution of the sea and avoid depleting ocean resources?

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0870712969
• ISBN13: 9780870712968
• Release Date: October 2008
• Publisher: Oregon State University Press
• Length: 285 Pages
• Weight: 1.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.4" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Adventurous, Insightful, and Lots of Fun

Catching the Ebb, like so many books I've come to love, takes us deep into a fascinating--and, for many of us, new--world. It's Bert Bender's world, and the life we follow in his memoir about fishing Alaska's Cook Inlet for thirty years offers plenty of adventure and close shaves, tender portrayals of family and life-long fishing friends, and observations that come from his other life as a professor of American literature. As readers we benefit from the way Bender's two careers complimented each other; the result is a professional fisherman's take on the fishing life that is enhanced by observations and discoveries made during his more than three decades of researching and teaching Darwin's influence on American thought and literature, particularly sea fiction. Read Catching the Ebb if you're interested in learning what the fishing life is all about and where our place in the natural order is. Read it if you're interested in ecology and evolution and what makes us humans tick. Read it if you're simply after a damned good read. Catching the Ebb is an important book for all of these reasons and more, and I loved it.

Loved it

An engrossing personal memoir of a literary academic whose summer vacations were spent fishing dangerous Alaskan waters. The early frustraions of securing a suitable boat, making it seaworthy and the excitement of the first catch are exuberantly told. From initial amateur success to later consolidations of a moderately successful business, the narration never loses its enthusiastic tone, such that the reader is drawn to thoroughly participate in the adventure. A remarkably interesting slice of life, engagingly conveyed, and told with all the consummate skill of a novelist.

This one kept me up all night

If you live a challenging life or only think you might want to, "Catching the Ebb" will inspire you. It spans thirty seasons of gillnetting in Alaska, by a guy who started with a 30-foot converted sailboat with a gas engine, hauling his nets by hand. Bender spent the off seasons teaching American literature at the University, and knows how to tell a compelling story. This one moves like a Jim Harrison novel, and it's all true. You learn a lot about commercial fishing along the way, but what it's really about is the dangerous, funny and poignant adventure called life.