Free The Last Run by Todd Lewan

of his line. In 1992 he took his master’s degree in digital communications engineering and flew back to Empire.
    After three years of dealing in pigs and goats, Echols returned to Alaska in the fall of 1996 to start his own company, World Seafood Producers. He had since married his childhood sweetheart, Cherie, whom he had met when she was four and he eleven, and had picked up front money from some Japanese and Korean investors he’d met during his robotics days. His latest idea: to sell to Japanese and South Korean buyers the part of salmon everyone else in Alaska tossed in the garbage —salmon roe.
    He set himself up in Juneau in a lakeside duplex and shopped around for a cheap tender to move his product to cold storages in Bellingham. He drew his share of looks. At the University of Georgia he had been a second-string cornerback, but now Echols was somewhat beyond athletic weight, with the shoulders and dignified gait of a grizzly. He had a small, round head, eyes the color of blueberries, a pug nose and a quick grin. He wore European colognes, crewneck sweatshirts under ski jackets, Levi’s 505s, designer hiking boots and a blue beanie.
    The first thing he heard about the
La Conte
came from a cod fisherman in Juneau, Fred Damer. Damer had a friend, Jeff Berg, who wanted to unload an old tender to pay for a divorce. “You won’t find another boat that big for that cheap,” Damer told Echols. In the end, a final price of $109,000 was agreed upon. Echols turned up at the closing $4,000 short, however, so Berg kept the boat’s sideband radio and Uniroyal life raft-items Echols never bothered to replace.
    Echols put Damer in charge of making the
La Conte
seaworthy; a month later he fired him. Damer sued for severance pay. When Echols didn’t show up for the proceeding, a judge ordered him to compensate his former employee to the tune of $8,578.77, mustering-out pay, as it were.
    And he soon realized there were more bills coming. A Petersburg shipwright told Echols it would cost eighty thousand dollars to fully repair all of the vessel’s hatches, cracked frames, decking and hull. Echols nodded and told him to lead-patch the loose, worm-eaten planks on the stern. Then he told him to caulk the grid and add an aluminum bait shed on the aft deck. There went thirty thousand dollars.
    Everything else would have to wait.
    By that time it was nearly summer and Scott Echols wanted his boat to start making money. He turned to a man he’d met the previous winter in Seattle, Rob Carrs, to skipper the first boat of his dream fleet.
    Carrs was college-educated, a New York native with big-city savvy who had moved to Seattle in the eighties to live the Alaska adventure —part-time, summer adventures. Carrs was good. He knew boats, he had sea smarts, and he had the right palaver with fishermen and Alaska natives. He had never seen the
La Conte,
but told Echols he’d accept the job for $30 an hour. Echols offered $26.25—all in cash, all off the books. Carrs muttered and took it.
    Later, he almost wished he hadn’t. Figuring out how the boat worked and overhauling the engine took three months. The
La Conte
did not go out again until September, when Carrs took her tendering between Sitka and Juneau. There were no worries —until the day in October that Carrs filled all three of her holds with chum salmon.
    Halfway across the Chatham Strait, Carrs noticed the sluggishness: the engine room was filling up fast with water. Hurriedly, he connected a hose to the powerful Maxi-Flow that circulated refrigerated seawater through the holds and began pumping water in a six-inch-wide stream over the side. It took him more than an hour to get things under control.
    In port, he traced the leak to several loose planks around the fantail.
    A week later, after one final longlining trip near Petersburg, Carrs returned the
La Conte
to Sitka and told Echols he was quitting. The boat was an icebox, he said, he was sick of repairing everything, and