Four Thousand Hooks: A True Story of Fishing and Coming of Age on the High Seas of Alaska

Working on an Alaskan fishing schooner, sixteen-year-old Dean Adams learned to bait thousands of longline hooks, handle the daily halibut catch, respect the ocean's raw power and navigate the seedy bars and guilty pleasures of shore leave in Kodiak. Looking back forty years, Adams tells an absorbing adventure story of maritime Alaska. Four Thousand Hooks is both an absorbing adventure tale and a rich ethnography of a way of life and work that has sustained Northwest families for generations.

Dean Adams became the captain of his own fishing boat and earned bachelor's and master's degrees from the School of Aquatic and Fishery Science at the University of Washington. He and his family live in Seattle and Kerikeri, New Zealand.

"I relived my own past reading Four Thousand Hooks. What it's like to really feel work and exhaustion, being on your own as a young man in Alaska--it brought back memories I didn't know I had." --Sig Hansen, Captain of the Northwestern as seen on Deadliest Catch

"A marvelous loss-of-innocence book." --Irene Wanner, Seattle Times

"Pure adventure . . . . sinewy and spare, understated and often gorgeously written." --Ethan Gilsdorf, Boston Globe