“She Takes the Helm: Lessons in Grit from Alaska’s Fishing Grounds”
By Mary Jacobs; Bookhouse Publishing, 2026; 384 pages; $24.95.
Kodiak’s Mary Jacobs was well-known in Alaska fishing circles as an early woman fishing skipper and the first one, in Kodiak at least, to have an all-women crew. Now retired to garden and write in Anacortes, Washington, she has put together a deeply honest, gripping and beautifully written memoir about her decades of commercial fishing.
Told chronologically, the book begins with vivid descriptions of working the “slime line” in a Southeast Alaska cannery in 1971. Jacobs had dropped out of college and come to Alaska with her boyfriend so that they could earn enough money to live their dream of sailing to the South Pacific. The boyfriend got a job fishing, but Jacobs — like women of the time — was relegated to cannery work. She was told repeatedly, “Women are bad luck on boats.”
While working the slime line, Jacob processed her reasons for being there. For one, at Berkeley, she’d been “sick to death of the Vietnam War and the endless protests.” For another, the professor in her introductory writing class told the students they couldn’t write because they hadn’t lived. He advised them to quit school and go to Alaska. Jacob took him literally.
Jacob soon tricked her way onto the boyfriend’s seiner and made herself useful by cooking the best meals the crew had ever eaten. She observed the operations carefully and realized that what she’d imagined as cold, wet and dreary work, with heavy machinery that only strong men could operate, was something much more appealing. “Now, I saw it as uninhibited freedom, an adventure on a majestic coastline with a small team. There was intimacy, passion, and money. In that instant, I vowed to myself and the sea that I would become a commercial fisherman.”
The next summer she and the boyfriend relocated to Kodiak, a “wild west” at the time. They struggled to find jobs but were both eventually hired on a small boat to fish halibut. Jacobs cooked, cleaned, organized, baited hooks, and again made herself useful. When summer came, they seined for salmon. Before long, the boyfriend was gone and Jacobs was partnering with the boat’s skipper.
Beyond the actual fishing, Jacobs fell in love with the entire coastal environment. Alone on wheel watch, crossing from Kodiak to the Alaska Peninsula for her first time, “Glaciated mountains jutted into an ice-blue morning sky … We were a speck in a vast, inky ocean full of the developing colors of dawn. Fulmars hunted for breakfast, and gulls treaded water alongside … A whale spouted off the port bow, making me stand up and fight the desire to pound on the cabin roof and wake everyone.” Such passages deliver the concreteness of Alaska’s natural beauty and the reasons that so many seek fishing and other outdoor lives.
Throughout, Jacobs is remarkably frank about her vulnerabilities and questionable decision-making. Her youthful judgments, especially about men, are often painful to read. The skipper she’s so attracted to treats her badly, and when he kidnaps his infant son from his drug addict girlfriend, Jacobs becomes responsible for the child. She asks herself, am I a girlfriend or a babysitter?
A recurrent theme throughout the book becomes the role of women within commercial fishing fleets and communities. In those early years, women surrounding the fishing industry had very few opportunities and were routinely disrespected and abused. Jacobs struggled against the bad behavior of men while she tried to find a balance between fishing and parenting. In port, the men go to bars and hook up with other women while Jacobs and the wife of the skipper’s friend tend babies on the small, dank boat. When she had daughters of her own, and was still parenting the boy she considered her stepson, Jacobs often had to leave small children for weeks or months at a time. Her women friends and crewmembers made the same agonizing choices.
For armchair adventurers, Jacobs delivers plenty of drama. After one fishing season, Jacobs and three other adults, with a toddler and two babies, headed around Kodiak Island toward a remote, abandoned cabin where they planned to spend the winter trapping fur animals. When the boat lost steering during a dark and stormy night, the men shouted at one another while the women bundled up the children, fearing for their lives. They drifted so close to rocks that Jacobs could clearly see waves crashing against cliffs and smell kelp. At the last minute, another boat came out of the darkness to throw them a tow line.
The story moves more quickly after the early years. Jacobs and her partner bought a bigger boat. They fished salmon, halibut and king crab. They had a daughter. When the toddler fell from a boat window into the ocean, Jacobs jumped after her and pulled her to the surface. For a while, she stayed in Kodiak and focused on parenting, but she was soon drawn back to fishing. She fixed up the old small boat and hired her first all-women crew. She moved up to a bigger boat and then a bigger boat. She worked hard, made mistakes, had good seasons and bad. She separated from her partner and partnered with, then married, another fisherman and had a second daughter. She fished other fisheries, in other parts of the state. As her daughters grew older, they joined her crew.
Jacobs sometimes thought of her old professor, the one who said she should go to Alaska for something to write about. For years, she performed her fishing stories at the annual FisherPoets Gathering in Astoria, Oregon. With “She Takes the Helm,” she’s now brought to the world the fascinating story of a time, place and remarkable life.
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