I did something a week ago that I haven’t done in a long time, and since I became a big boat owner and charter operator, something I thought I would never do again.

I paid to go on a fishing charter.

I had heard about Homer Capt. Josh Brooks for a long time. He is well known in Homer, and Southcentral Alaska, as a premier guide with a lot of knowledge. He should be because he started early, at 13 years old, as a deckhand Homer charter fishing boat. And when the boat he was crewing on won the Homer Jackpot Halibut Derby in 1993, “it pretty much sold me on owning my own boat," he said.

When he turned 18 he fished commercially for eight years, building up the resources to buy that charter boat. He bought the Huntress, a spacious 31-by-11.5 foot 1979 vintage Chris Craft Sportfisher, which he has been running for the past eight years.

I thought I would learn a couple of things from him, but I learned a lot. Some things I did for my clients he also did. And he did other things that I had never thought of. It’s all about procedure onboard a boat and how to make things work efficiently. So, some things that work well on the Huntress work well only on her, and the same holds true for my own boat, Skookum.

I liked the way Josh explained what he had planned for the day as we left the harbor. His safety briefing was the best I’d ever heard, and it was clear from the start that he would work hard for us.

Even though we were not going trolling, I talked to him a lot about winter king fishing and how he goes about it, from the minute details of how he rigs his troll herring, to the color flasher he uses on different weather days, to what to look for on the fishfinder.  Josh was surprisingly generous with his information and I appreciate that in a person.

Our trip to the Chugach Islands at the bottom of the Kenai Peninsula was in search of halibut, lingcod, and rockfish. I wasn’t too interested in the halibut because I have a freezer full, so the lingcod was my main target.

The video is primarily of the halibut we caught, because when it came time to target those lingcod I put the camera down! (You can see the lingcod and rockfish at the end of the video.) The halibut action was pretty good with my angler buddy Larry Keller getting two fish in the 60-70 pound range. Larry went out the next week with Josh on another expedition and pulled a 240 lb. flatfish onto the boat and that put him in third place in the Homer Jackpot Halibut Derby for the month of September.

The main thing I learned from Josh that day is that there is no substitute for experience. His understanding of the tides and conditions in that remote area we fished was based on many years of travel there. He knew where to fish during a particular stage in the tide, where a rip would begin to build, how long to stay there, and when and where to move when the weather started to change for the worse.

He is a consummate captain anyone would like to emulate.

Jim Lavrakas is a retired photojournalist who caught the fishing fever late in life. He lives in Homer with his wife Ruth, and owns Skookum Charters, a saltwater fishing and eco-tourism charter business.