I’ve been working on charter fishing boats in Homer, Alaska since the summer of 2017. I started out deck handing on a six-passenger boat, and I liked it so much I stuck with it and eventually got my captain’s license and started running boats myself.

Summer days are long and summer season is short here in Alaska. And when you’re working a fishing boat, there’s not many down days. It’s easy to get caught of in the minutiae of things when most weeks I’m working every. single. day. That’s right, seven days a week when the fishing is good, roughly late-May through mid-September.

Read more: One Roll of Film Shot During a Summer Fishing in Homer, Alaska

Every year I tell myself I’m going to take more photos, but most years I get caught up in the daily grind and the artsy stuff falls by the wayside. However, the past couple of years I’ve kept a cheap point-and-shoot camera onboard and managed to snap a few photos here and there.

One of my favorite film photography exhibitions is this roll of Tri-X 400 I shot during the summer of 2021. It was kind of dumb luck that this single roll — the only roll of film I shot at all that summer — did such a great job capturing my life on the water that year. A lot is left out, of course, but these 33 frames definitely tell a story.

I didn’t even know what a freshwater “whitefish” was when I applied for a permit to spearfish them. I’ve lived in Alaska for 7 years now and never drawn a tag. I’ve put in for moose and mountain goat and Kodiak elk and a bunch of other things with no luck. So I figured my chances of getting a whitefish tag was slim to none.

Then, in August, I got an email back from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game awarding my first ever Alaska draw tag: to spearfish whitefish in the Chatanika River near Fairbanks. Me and my friend Dan were the only 2 people on the Kenai Peninsula to earn a tag.