Coming Back Alive Book

When the fishing vessel La Conte sinks suddenly at night in 100 mph winds and record 90 foot seas during a savage storm in January, 1998, her five crewmen are left to drift without a life raft in freezing Alaskan waters and survive as best they can. 150 miles away, in Sitka, Alaska, an H-60 "Jayhawk" helicopter lifts off from America's most remote Coast Guard base in the hopes of tracking down an anonymous mayday signal. A fisherman's worst nightmare has become a Coast Guard crew's desperate mission. As one by one, the crew of the f/v La Conte begin to die, those sworn to watch over them risk everything to pull off the rescue of the century...Spike Walker's memoir of his years as a deckhand in Alaska, Working on theEdge, was hailed by James A. Michener as "Masterful...This will become the definitive account of this perilous trade, an addition to the literature of the sea." In Coming Back Alive, Walker has crafted his most devastating book to date. Meticulously researched with hundreds of hours of taped interviews with the survivors, this is the true account of the La Conte's final voyage and the relationship between Alaskan fishermen and the Search and Rescue crews who risk their to save them. AUTHORBIO: Spike Walker has spent more than a score of seasons working as a deckhand aboard commercial fishing boats in Alaska. He has voyaged across storm-tossed seas from the ports of Kodiak in the Gulf of Alaska, to Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian Islands, and north, across the Bering Sea, to the edge of the polar ice cap in search of king crab, halibut, and codfish. Now a full time writer, Mr. Walker is the author of Working on the Edge and Nights of Ice, about the lives of commercial fisherman in Alaska. He divides his days between Clatskanie, Oregon; Castle Rock, Washington; and Kodiak, AlaskaRead More