I have an admission: This is the most excited I’ve ever been for a Fish Alaska saltwater issue. Not that we haven’t had many excellent articles and photographs from contributors in the past, all extolling the virtues of fishing in the state’s bountiful offshore environment. I’ve just never been that crazy about the sea, even when it’s as filled with great gamefish as the waters around Alaska, even when every glimpse of coastline looks like the glossiest tourism brochure—forests without blemish, four thousand-foot peaks climbing straight from the surf, glaciers saddling the valleys they’d carved.

Yes, I’m a product of the land, infinitely more comfortable on those mountains, in those forests, near water that moves. I’ve spent the vast majority of my fishing life prospecting small alpine creeks or casting badly on the much larger freestone streams they eventually join. The challenges of both have kept me well occupied, enough that I never really had the time or inclination to learn much about the salt. Besides, like much of the unknown, it can scare the bejeesus out of me.

However, over time, that’s begun to change. Slowly.

I didn’t exactly return from my first few trips off the Alaska coast raving about the experience. If I remember right—and a friend or two insists that I do—more than one of those outings featured a lot of staring at a specific point on the shore, hoping like hell I didn’t get a second look at breakfast. I believe the approved, family-friendly term is chumming, or so insists a fishing buddy who thinks he’s a lot funnier than is actually the case. I also distinctly recall my first-ever jaunt into the blue from Seward. Well, the ride back anyway.

We’d spent a great morning fishing for silvers running along the shallow beaches and in front of the rocky points tucked into a Prince William Sound bay. The sun was out, the wind down, the water calm, and I was having no trouble imagining what I’d order for dinner when we got back to Seward. Then, arms tired, action receding, we motored towards a little cove where the tide was rushing into a wall of sheer stone. There we dropped jigs and soon produced a limit of tasty lingcod. I was starting to really get it.

Sometimes, I now know, there’s some wind in the Seward area, and sometimes, that wind funnels right through the valley and into Resurrection Bay. The only problem, I quickly learned, is that you never realize it until you round the corner from the sound and see the resulting chop laid out like a minefield between where you are and where you want to go.

In a smaller boat, say twenty-six feet or so, it tends to get a little bumpy.

Of course, we made it back fine, and honestly, I’m not sure it even bothered anyone else. But let’s just say that after a day’s fishing on any of my favorite Mat-Su Valley streams, I’ve never been forced to make appointments with both the dentist and a chiropractor.

After that, I reevaluated my fondness for the taste of halibut, rockfish, and lingcod, and swore off the saltwater for good. Like that was going to last.

Not six months later I found myself in Chignik, on the verge of seasickness again but without the slightest care because the fishing was just that good. And varied. Staging silvers, halibut, extremely large halibut, lingcod, black sea bass, some really funky-looking rockfish—every strike was a mystery you could only solve by hauling the fish in.

Somewhere in there, I think, lies the real power of fishing in the Alaska salt. It’s not the fast and often furious action; it’s the unpredictability, the knowledge that the tap just felt on the end of your line might be a three-hundred-pound halibut, fifty-pound ling, twenty-pound silver. You might also reel a few hundred feet only to find an Irish lord had inevitably been very greedy about the consumption of your bait. But what the heck, you think. Re-bait, drop the line back down, and see what comes along next. In Alaska, it probably won’t be a long wait.

More and more, I’ve started to think this way, my formerly stream-obsessed mind now hopelessly corrupted. So, I sit here reading through the articles for this June issue, thinking about halibut and salmon in Chatham Strait instead of rainbows in the valley, pondering insane visions of salmon sharks only a few miles from Cordova, wondering what kind of tides we’ve got this week.

The grayling fishing near my home is really good right now—and I spent a good bit of my winter tying dry flies for precisely this reason—but I think maybe I’ll run to Ninilchik or Homer instead. Should be able to catch a nice halibut. Maybe a king.

You just never know.