I'm woefully out of my depth on the ocean, amateurish, awkward, generally anxious and sometimes sick, but that doesn't mean I'm unable to understand - or resist - its allure. I know precisely what Dr. Johnson was getting at when he presumed that "[e]very man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea."

This quixotic notion of the sea as proving ground, as both redeemer and the ultimate rival, as metaphor, is at least as old as the first boat. And I don't think quoting from the Western canon's foremost critic is out of place, since long before The Deadliest Catch it was literature that assigned romance to the open ocean, the rhythms of eloquence to rolling swells, glamour to hardship caked in salt. The young man setting out for adventure, exotic ports, impossible storms, the old man alone against the violent sea: these are indelible images, the iconography of an ideal that we all share. Realism is hardly welcome here.

Impossibly, I think of these things as I sit tucked away in the fo'c'sle of the Alysa June, a 58-foot limit seiner captained by Aaron Anderson, who started commercial fishing with his father at the age of ten, was drawing a full crew-share by fourteen and who had the run of his own boat before he turned twenty. It's an impressive resumé for a bookish landlubber to behold, and it reminds me of Ishmael: A whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard. I actually write that line in my journal, and without blushing.

Only this is not the Pequod: twin 600-horsepower luggers power us towards Castle Bay on the Pacific side of the Alaska Peninsula; Aaron has yet to show any of the brooding, tyrannical behavior of Ahab, and well, there aren't any harpoons aboard. We're primarily on the hunt for migrating coho, and despite a vaguely white-whale quality to my plan for catching halibut on the fly, there appears to be little chance I'll stumble upon either glamour or eloquence. Adventure, though - I felt nothing less from the moment I first stepped on deck.

As I sit and jot old ideas and first impressions, I realize that even the night sky has chipped in, as black and shapeless as the ink-colored waves that try to push us around while we make for the bay. Floating like loose buoys in my over-stimulated memory are stories I've heard - like Aaron's tale of watching a pod of Orcas hunt gray whales - and stories I've read - Melville, Hemingway, Conrad, even Antonio Pigafetta, whose mostly non-fiction journals chronicled Magellan's voyage over the edge of the world. I know that much of the exposition in Moby Dick was based on the young Melville's experiences aboard the nineteenth-century whalers, but that the novel was also at least partly inspired by the fate of the Essex, which was attacked by an 80-ton sperm whale in 1820 and foundered almost 2,000 miles off the west coast of South America. I remember that Conrad snuck off to sea as a teenager and spent sixteen years in the British merchant marine before becoming captain of a steamboat and making his fateful voyage up the Congo River. I think of Hemingway's weather-beaten Santiago, " . . . thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck . . . The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords. But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert."

Lastly, just before drifting off to sleep, I'm reminded of the penalties for hubris: the Pequod was smashed to bits and sunk, Magellan was struck down by natives in the Philippine Islands, Hemingway once shot himself in both calves while trying to gaff a shark.

First thing in the morning it's feeding silvers on an incoming tide. The sheer rock walls of Castle Cape tower above the Alysa June, which, despite being the largest boat I've ever stepped foot on, suddenly feels quite small. The swells calm to a meager three feet. Sea birds arrive from nowhere. I still have no rebuttal for Dr. Johnson, knowing that I'm only borrowing moments from an archetype, but I am a long way from home, and utterly out of my depth - and that feels just about right.