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Mary Jacobs (Gold Beach) is a retired commercial fisherman and fishing boat captain and an active writer who is a favorite reader at Astoria’s annual FisherPoets Gathering. Jacobs, who captained an all-women crew for many years, is an experienced fisherman and eloquent writer. She writes vividly about her occupational life and her perspective as a fisherman’s wife. Her stories about commercial fishing delve into the dangers as well as the humorous moments of a life at sea. She’s captained both the Invader and the Renaissance during her nearly four decades of commercial fishing. In 2003, she sold her fifty-foot Renaissance and retired, though she continued for some years to help her daughter with her Bristol Bay set-net operation. Though her daughter is no longer fishing, Jacobs’s granddaughter has worked on crews for more than a few summers.

Jacobs fished for 40 years in Alaska and for 30 as captain of her own boat with a crew of up to five women (including herself). She studied Anthropology at UC Berkeley during the late 1960s and quit college in 1970 “to seek adventure and fortune in Alaska.” After a year of cannery work, she began crewing on fishing boats. Her boyfriend, with whom she’d traveled up the coast, got fired but she stayed on for several years until she had a daughter and, as she put it, “experienced the anxiety of being a fisherman’s wife.” By 1979, Jacobs was captaining the Invader and working with an all-women crew. Over the next 25 years, she had a successful career fishing for herring, salmon, and halibut in the waters of Kodiak Island, Prince William Sound, and the Bering Sea.

Thanks to her success as a fisherman, Jacobs was able to buy larger vessels and hired quite a few men but her most memorable seasons were the result of a crew of independent women working in harmony. To achieve that harmony, Jacobs had certain criteria for picking her crew: experience on a fishing boat, some knowledge about seining, and the ability to live in tight quarters with others (and not get sea sick). As Jacobs’s longtime friend and former crew member Terri Stone, says, “And she was so smart. You know, Tom, her husband at the time would say, ‘Well, I’ll out fish you ’cause I’ll out work you,’ and Mary would say, ‘Well, I’ll out fish you, because I’ll outthink you.’ And I thought, I'm going with her. . . . Now, there's a lot of people out there like that, but there's only one Mary, for sure.”

Jacobs studied creative writing at Kodiak College and University of Alaska, Southeast. She has won Kodiak’s showcase of excellence award for her writing and had articles in Pacific Fishing and her stories have been included literary compilations. She has spent most of the Covid-19 pandemic writing her memoir. Jacobs has experienced the boom days of fishing in the 1970s, boat fires, and hair-raising crossings of the Bering Sea as well as the beauties of the natural world—the northern lights, boats lined up for the first set of the day—and the camaraderie of those who experienced those days on the water.

Deeply committed to putting her lifetime of commercial fishing experiences on paper, Mary Jacobs has been a regular and popular reader at Astoria’s annual FisherPoets Gathering. Her stories bring her motley crew to life with anecdotes about the work of a commercial fishing vessel—stacking nets, seining, cooking, engineering, and wheel watching. She also writes about the dangers of commercial fishing, and, in particular, about one nerve-wracking time when husband’s boat was sinking and she was listening to his call to the Coast Guard. The Gathering is particularly meaningful to her because, as she says, it “brings back those special moments so that, you know, you just lose living a day-to-day life. And those are the people that I spent my life with. Those characters.”