Leaving Protection by Will Hobbs Read Free Book Online Page A

thousand miles from the ocean.”
    It was pointless to make excuses, although fatigue would have been the first on my list. Sorry, I was about to say, but I knew sorry wouldn’t cut it. “I’ll watch it closer,” I said. “I won’t let this happen again.”
    â€œGo get a new glove,” he ordered, not that I wouldn’t have anyway.
    A while later we had a small flurry of kings, threeon my side, two on his. After I’d cleaned mine, he came over to my side, pointed to one just as I was about to throw it forward into the rinse bin, and said, “That one legal?”
    He’d shown me how he’d built the cleaning cradles exactly twenty-eight inches long, which was the legal minimum for kings. I had forgotten to check. With the skipper watching close, I flopped the fish back into the cradle, hoping he was wrong. He wasn’t; it fell short by an inch.
    â€œSet that one aside down below,” he said, “so they don’t catch us trying to sell it. See if you can keep your mind on what you’re doing. Quit that daydreamin’ and do what I’m paying you to do.”
    I’d been working like a mule ever since I got on his boat. I couldn’t believe he was accusing me of slacking off.
    A dark cloud over my head, I went below to ice the few fish we’d caught. When I got back up top, Tor was landing salmon and the pole on my side was rattling, too. I moved across the deck as low as a crab, bracing all the way against the heavy rolling of the boat. Torsen had his eyes on me like I was a greenhorn about to take a swim. I dropped into the cockpit and started bringing up my tip line. I could feel his eyes on the back of my head. I tried to work faster than I should have. As I was hauling in a big king hand over hand, the boat pitched in the direction of the fish. All it takes is an instant of slack in the leader. Just that fast, the fish shook the hook and was gone. I looked in Tor’sdirection. Naturally, he was watching.
    My whole life, I’d never felt time go so slow. This one morning was like a life sentence.
    It got worse. I’d never fished in that much wind. It blew the leaders around and made it tough to keep them from tangling with each other as I arranged them along the rail. At one point I thought I’d snapped a leader onto the wire in the gear tray but I’d missed. As soon as I let go, the entire spread, flasher and hootchie and all, plummeted to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
    My highliner watched it go. He looked at me with undisguised contempt. He didn’t say a thing, just reached for one of his spare spreads and handed it to me.
    Midday, we made sandwiches from cold cuts. Lunch took fifteen minutes and felt like fifteen hours. If Tor wanted to make me feel like a herring in the talons of an eagle, he was succeeding.
    After we ate, we pulled the gear and ran north to Noyes Island and the Cape Addington Grounds. The wind quit and it turned flat calm. The sport boats appeared from the fishing lodges. The sun came out and you could see halfway to China. The bite picked up. Suddenly we had a couple dozen kings, and I quit moping. Just as suddenly, the action was over. Back and forth we worked the drag between the rocky foot of Addington to the big haystack rock to the north. Late in the afternoon the sport boats sped off, and the trollers had the evening light to themselves.
    In all my life I had never seen such a spectacularsight as Cape Addington. I knew my mom would have loved to paint it. Trees with wind-tortured shapes clung to the crevices at the very top of the gray cliffs. Eons of winter gales had scoured the stone clean and so smooth you wished you could touch it. Along the tide line, the grays gave way to reds and oranges. To the south and east, the trees reached all the way to the base of a long arm curling off the cape. It was mostly composed of huge limestone blocks cut so squarely they might have fallen from an