Bøker av Joe Upton

"I went up on the Star of Alaska in 1918." It was 1965 and an old timer was spinning a tale for 18-year-old Joe Upton. Of sailing up from San Francisco to Alaska's remote and austere Bristol Bay aboard a square-rigged ship loaded with Chinese cannery workers, Norwegian and Italian fishermen, and American carpenters. They'd drop anchor in some remote Bristol Bay river, the last snow still on the shores. Lower the pile driver and drive a forest of pilings, build a cannery on top. Install the boiler and the canning machines. Finally, the first of the salmon flipping and stirring in the river off the cannery. The run: what they had all come north for and time to launch and rig the sailing gillnetters. And all set on that treeless shore with a steaming volcano looming over them.A few years later, flush from a season on a Bering Sea king crabber, Upton headed north with his own salmon boat at last. That first eye-opening season became the stuff of Upton's award winning Alaska Blues: A Fishermen's Journal. For the next 20 years, as homesteader in a roadless settlement with a floating bar, fish buyer, and finally as gillnetter in what was to become the Legendary Bristol Bay red salmon fishery, Upton fished and also chronicled the powerful drama that is Alaska commercial fishing. His full journey, laid out here, is a riveting tale of what brings young men North, generation after generation.

Young readers will thrill to this breathless story of courage and determination set in the Alaska wilderness. Abandoned by their mother in Seattle, thirteen-year-old twins Annie and David Ross enlist the help of Lars Hansen, an elderly commercial fisherman, to find their father in Alaska. In late November, when most fishing vessels are decommissioned for the winter, the trio sets out from Puget Sound in a forty-foot salmon troller for an eight-hundred-mile journey along the Inside Passage.Pursued by the authorities as runaways, and with Lars's health failing, the three experience one adventure after another as they inch their way North, through terrifying winter storms and frightening encounters with strangers. In the process, Annie and David also make new, lasting friendships and kindle personal reserves of strength that they didn't know existed.