In this authentic account of a seafaring life, Captain George Moskovita offers a highly personal and often humorous look at the career of a commercial fisherman. George Moskovita was sixteen when he graduated from high school in Bellingham, Washington, and went to sea. Fishing would take him crabbing off Alaska, seining for sardines off California and for tuna off Mexico, and catching soupfin sharks for their livers (a vital source of Vitamin A during World War II). He came to Astoria, Oregon, in 1939, where he was a pioneer of the Oregon ocean perch fishery. In a career that spanned over 60 years, George Moskovita met with many maritime adventures, recounted for the reader in a clear, direct, and unsentimental style. He saw the fishery he had helped build devastated by foreign factory processing ships. He bought, repaired, traded, and sank more boats than most fishermen would work on in a lifetime. Along the way, he managed to raise four daughters with his wife, June. The name of one of his last boats, the Four Daughters, reflects the central importance of family life to a man who was often at sea. Moskovita's memoir provides a unique glimpse of Pacific maritime life in the 20th century, small-town coastal life after World War II, and the early days of fishery development in Oregon. With an introduction and textual notes by Carmel Finley, an historian of science, and Mary Hunsicker, an aquatic and fisheries scientist, this book will be invaluable to fishery students and professionals interested in the biology, ecology, and history of oceans and commercial fishing. It will also have broad appeal to readers of Oregon history and maritime adventure, and anyone else who has ever stood at the western edge of the continent and wondered what life was like at sea.

A beautifully illustrated reference providing fascinating insights into the hidden world of the seafloor using the latest deep-sea imaging.

Provides a top-to-bottom look at the ocean, from birds and waves to thermal vents and ooze.

Introduction: political roles for fish populations -- The fishing empires of the Pacific: the Americans, the Japanese, and the Soviets -- Islands and war -- Manifest destiny and fishing -- Tariffs -- Industrialization -- Treaties -- Imperialism -- Enclosure -- Conclusions: updating the best available science

The riveting story of the exploration of the final frontier of our planet—the deep ocean—and history-making mission to reach the bottom of all five seas. Humankind has explored every continent on earth, climbed its tallest mountains, and gone into space. But the largest areas of our planet remain largely a mystery: the deep oceans. At over 36,000 feet deep, there areas closest to earth’s core have remained nearly impossible to reach—until now. Technological innovations, engineering breakthroughs and the derring-do of a team of explorers, led by explorer Victor Vescovo, brought together an audacious global quest to dive to the deepest points of all five oceans for the first time in history. The expedition pushed technology to the limits, mapped hidden landscapes, discover previously unknown life forms and began to piece together how life in the deep oceans effects our planet—but it was far from easy. Expedition Deep Ocean is the inside story of this exploration of one of the most unforgiving and mysterious places on our planet, including the site of the Titanic wreck and the little-understood Hadal Zone. Vescovo and his team would design the most advanced deep-diving submersible ever built, where the pressure on the sub is 8 tons per square inch—the equivalent of having 292 fueled and fully loaded 747s stacked on top of it. And then there were hurricane-laden ocean waters and the byzantine web of global oceanography politics. Expedition Deep Ocean reveals the marvelous and other-worldly life found in all five deep ocean trenches, including several new species that have posed as of yet unanswered questions about survival and migration from ocean to ocean. Then there are the newly discovered sea mounts that cause tsunamis when they are broken by shifting subduction plates and jammed back into the earth crust, something that can now be studied to predict future disasters. Filled with high drama, adventure and the thrill of discovery, Expedition Deep Ocean celebrates courage and ingenuity and reveals the majesty and meaning of the deep ocean.

Jim Davis, through stories of his remarkable career as U.S. Naval officer, international trial lawyer and Federal trial judge, provides rare insight and humor to exotic happenings on the high seas and in America’s courtrooms. All stems from his improbable youthful achievements . . . appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy faculty at age 23 and to the Federal bench in Washington, D.C. at age 32, youngest ever to the U.S. Court of Claims. He tells of chasing Soviet nuclear submarines from New York to the North Sea, learning the Navy’s ways while working with fellow-officer Ross Perot (America’s computer wunderkind in the late 1950s), navigating the St. Lawrence seaway in 1957 on an aircraft carrier, the first and largest ship to do so, and entering Havana, Cuba in 1957 under threat of Castro’s expanding revolution. In the courtroom, he tangled with the CIA over recovery of a Soviet submarine from the Pacific Ocean floor, prevented China from exporting illegally millions of TV sets to the U.S. after stealing U.S. patents, protected Texas Instruments’ multi-billion dollar position in computer chip production from invasion by Japan and Korea, and thwarted piracy by Mexican and Chinese pirates of National Geographic Society’s world famous yellow-bordered Geographic magazine. As trial judge, he decided a $211 million patent case, second largest in U.S. history, and decided what Time Magazine called the “most significant copyright case of the 20th century,” copyright’s struggle with the Xerox machine. And much more. A great read!

The miraculous account of the man who survived alone and adrift at sea longer than anyone in recorded history. For fourteen months, Alvarenga survived constant shark attacks. He learned to catch fish with his bare hands. He built a fish net from a pair of empty plastic bottles. Taking apart the outboard motor, he fashioned a huge fishhook. Using fish vertebrae as needles, he stitched together his own clothes. Based on dozens of hours of interviews with Alvarenga and interviews with his colleagues, search and rescue officials, the medical team that saved his life and the remote islanders who nursed him back to health, this is an epic tale of survival. Print run 75,000.

In 1993, the New Yorker published Calvin Trillin's memorable article on the eccentric Flavel family of Astoria, the descendants of Captain George Flavel, whose ornate Queen-Anne-style mansion is a tourist draw today. With Trillin's gracious consent, "First Family of Astoria" is reprinted in Part One ofAstorians, Eccentric and Extraordinary,making its first appearance in book form.Part Two carries on the theme with portraits of fifty-five other notable Astorians. Five Oregon writers have captured the essence and the flavor of vivid personalities that include the notorious shanghaier Bridget Grant; the charming scoundrel Mayor Francis Clay Harley; the elusive English "barmaid" Jane Barnes, the first white woman in the Pacific Northwest; and Rolf Klep, who believed he could create a major maritime museum in an economically depressed town--and made it happen.In biology, it is said that the richest life forms reside at the edge of the ecosystem. Astoria epitomizes edges--the edge of the country, the edge of a great river, the edge of the Pacific Ocean, and the edge of our American culture. This book celebrates the larger-than-life quality that has appeared with regularity in the town's two-hundred-year history. As Steve Forrester, publisher of theDaily Astorian,notes in the book's introduction: "Extraordinary people are not necessarily eccentric. But eccentrics are driven to do extraordinary things." Contributors include M. J. Cody, Amy Hoffman Couture, John E. Goodenberger, Nancy Ricker Hoffman, Liisa Penner, and Calvin Trillin.