I live in a small coastal town in Washington State. For many people in my town, fishing is a part of life. The summer of my freshman year, I was given the chance to work for a fishing boat out of Bristol Bay, Alaska. It was a chance to get work experience and to make good money.

It started when one of my friends was talking about it to me and asked if I wanted to go with him, and mentioned it to the guy he was going with. I was very skeptical about going to a remote place for a month without my parents by my side to help me through things. When I first left on June 23rd, I was very nervous. I got picked up from my house to go to the airport. On the way to the airport, I was feeling all the emotions and just wondering how long I would really be away from home because when you're out fishing, you don't know when the fish will stop going upriver, so you're there until the fish aren't. It could be a month, 2 months, or 3 weeks. We just didn't know.

Once I got to the airport, I got on a plane to Anchorage, Alaska, to go on a small bush plane to Pilot Point, Alaska. I had never been on such a small plane before. It was kinda weird; it felt like it would drop out of the sky every 5 minutes, every time a little bit of wind would hit it. The part I was most nervous about was landing. We landed a small plane on a short gravel runway. But I made it safely, and it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be.

My first few hours there were good. I met the rest of the crew and got ready for the next day, which was the first day of fishing for me, and it was supposed to be really windy and rainy the next day. When we got all ready and went out, it was the worst day of the whole month to be fishing. The boat was rocking every which way. The rain was so bad that I couldn't see. The nets were full of fish, and I'm still trying to learn how to pick the fish out of the nets. Toward the end of the day, it got so bad that we had to quickly pick all the fish out of the net while being blown towards the beach. It was getting so bad that we had to just bring in one of the nets with all of the fish in it. Once we got all of the nets and fish into the boat, we had to drive all the way to the tender, which is a huge boat we drop all the fish onto. On the way to the tender, we were so heavy that the boat was going so slow, and the waves were 6 feet high, which is really high for a 20-foot skiff to go through. One of the waves was so close to going over the side and almost filling the boat with water. By the time we got to the tender and unloaded all the fish, it was 1 in the morning.

From that day on, it got a lot better, and I started enjoying it. This made me look back and say that you have to go out of your comfort zone to get a good experience and to have fun sometimes.

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