Floating Alone in a Sea of Childhood Memories

I have been frightened at sea more times than I like to remember, and I am not like fishermen, who learn their trade, as small-boat sailors do, in the school of hard knocks. “The Fisherman’s Son” is a remarkable novel about fishermen and the vast, unpredictable ocean.

After a horrifying shipwreck, which left his shipmates drowned, Neil Kruger drifts in a life raft at the mercy of a winter gale off Half Moon Bay, Calif. As he shivers with cold and seasickness, he recalls scenes from his childhood in the 1940s, his close attachment to his fisherman father, a member of a close-knit fishing clan, a group of men which is as close to a priesthood as you can get without wearing a collar. His mother works in the local cannery and resents her husband’s calling. She makes Neil promise he will never follow in his footsteps. Inevitably, he does and joins an industry plagued with heavy debt, low prices and overfishing. He struggles to survive until a rash enterprise wrecks his boat and casts him helpless and alone in the Pacific, far from shipping lanes.

As he faces his destiny on the sea, Neil remembers his first trip, when he was 11, with his taciturn father--the terror of steering at night for the first time, watching his father catch and gaff salmon “like an Oriental dancer, not a fisherman,” and the exhilaration of the passage home as the wind rises.

Memories of other occasions--fears, hardships and heroics--cascade freely in his mind as he tries to keep warm: a collision in fog between a tanker and a hospital ship off the Golden Gate when the fishermen catch bodies rather than fish, conversations among his father’s fishing partners and friends. He remembers capsizing a small boat and having to rescue a crippled friend who was aboard with him, being weather-bound for days in a 50-knot gale in Drake’s Bay north of San Francisco, and the dreadful moment when a veteran fisherman, Cort Hienkel, founders in a vicious storm, his last words, “The old man is calling.”

Eventually the story of his own shipwreck unfolds--an illegal pickup of drugs and immigrants, a risky inshore passage and a sudden wave that dashes the boat on a dangerous inshore reef. Only Neil survives, the chilly stars his only company as he is blown far offshore, his fate in the hands of the brutal ocean. “The Fisherman’s Son” is a gritty novel with a hard-hitting intensity that comes from Koepf’s 19 years as a working fisherman. The pages reek of fish guts, hardship and rough companionship. There is a passionate authenticity in his words. Koepf knows the people he writes about and has lived among, so his reach into the California fishery of the 1940s and the present is comprehensive. Moments crackle with affection and humor. Brilliantly written and mesmerizingly evocative, Koepf’s extraordinary novel is a tribute to tough men and their long-suffering, and sometimes not-so-long-suffering, families.