Free Extreme Fishing by Robson Green

fishing, but my pleading every five minutes with Jason has
obviously paid off. It went something like this: I’m lying in the closet on the bottom bunk, I shut my eyes, oh God going to be sick, I run to the toilet, dry retch, dry retch, flush, wash my
mouth out and knock on Jason’s closet door: ‘Please, Jason, I can’t take anymore! For the love of God!’ I go back to bed and repeat the process. It was worth the begging,
though, because
we are heading home
. I get a burst of energy and rush up to the wheelhouse to see if it’s really true. Bob, being the hero he truly is, has taken pity on me after
thirty-six hours of hell and guides us back to safer waters. The crew are apparently pissed off – they’re losing money and it’s our fault. I apologise.
    Bob offers me a glass of red wine and a fillet of black cod, which the crew eat for breakfast, lunch and tea.
    ‘I couldn’t, Bob, I’m sick to my toenails.’
    He insists I drink with him. As I sip the claret I feel as if I’ve taken a quantum leap back to the seventeenth century.
    ‘Thank you for the experience. I will never forget it, Bob.’
    His face cracks into smile. We finish our drinks and shake hands.
    After dropping us off, the crew head back out to endure another five punishing weeks at sea. I honestly don’t know how they do it, especially in light of what I found out
several days later. Just weeks before we arrived, Bob had lost an entire boat, out of his fleet of a dozen trawlers, in a force-9 gale. Sadly, eight of the crew members were also lost at sea.
It’s a sobering thought and one that should make us all value our fishermen all the more. So when you’re next eating black cod, give a nod to Bob and his crew – and whatever
happens don’t you dare waste a morsel!
    As soon as we reach the shore I ring Vanya. She has been trying to get me for days. She was worried and knew something was wrong. Taylor knew, too.
    ‘I can’t wait to be home with you,’ I say.
    Nothing on the face of God’s earth is as important as my family. I’ve been humbled by the experience on the trawler and have discovered a new-found respect for Mother Nature, not
only in her beauty but in all her might.

Chapter Four
A LASKA
‘Thanksgiving’
    November 2008, Series 2
    Everything is alabaster, including the sky, frozen by the White Witch’s own hoary hand. It’s bitter, harsh, perishing, arctic, glacial, numbing, polar,
penetrating, raw, COLD! But unlike in the
Narnia
books, I haven’t just fallen through the wardrobe to get here; instead I have endured another commercial plane journey, over 2,000
miles this time. It’s more mundane than magical – well, the flying bit is definitely magic, but the loos and the tea not so much. I mean, that’s the paradox of the human spirit,
isn’t it? We can make a tube of metal fly through the sky with all our clobber on board but we can’t improve the food or the plumbing! Well done, the Wright Brothers; buck up, Gate
Gourmet.
    A clinically obese passenger across the aisle from me asks, ‘You been to Alaska before?’ I shake my head.
    ‘It’s staggering,’ he says. ‘Over a hundred thousand glaciers and most places you can only get to by plane. I hope you got your warm clothes and boots or you’ll be
getting chilblains.’
    He then goes on to tell me about the terrible problems he has with his feet. I look concerned but inside I’m thinking,
Yeah, you can’t keep them out of the bloody pie shop,
mate
. (Will I go to hell now?)
    I walk like a zombie to a waiting transit van to begin a six-hour butt-clenchingly awful journey due south from the city of Anchorage to a place called Homer. We are driving in a blizzard in the
dark, which makes
Ice Road Truckers
seem positively tame.
    My
Extreme
team comprises Jonathan, the AP whose job it is to make sure all the filming runs smoothly, director Jamie Goold, Mike Carling on camera, soundman Patrick Boland and location
fixer Hector MacKenzie. They have all