Publisher's Synopsis
Jack McKnight, Captain of the Emma Dawn, a Prince William Sound purse seiner, wants what any twenty-five-year-old Alaskan commercial fisherman wants; a family, a state of the art boat, a cult following, and an engineering firm. March 24th, 1989, a month after Jack invests his life savings into his dream boat, he awakens to the news that the Exxon Valdez has fetched hard ashore Bligh Reef and is spewing crude oil into the pristine waters of Prince William Sound. Jack is enraged but has learned to channel his anger, wrath, and a will to do violence, into more productive emotions - after venting properly by yelling, cussing, and smashing things for therapeutic value. His Father and Uncle, who bought boats the same time as Jack, have no interest in such control. They want revenge, hot, smoky, smelling of singed flesh and bullet seared blood. With every order of his life delegated to apt partners that he might focus on saving his livelihood in Cordova, Jack quickly turns his mind from enraged victim, to peace keeper and opportunist. He returns to Cordova and begins the battle to hold his fishing operation together, heal Prince William Sound and, somehow, come out on top. There are years when everything just seems to click! And then there are years like 1989 for a tiny segment of the worlds population devastated by the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill. The Eco Disaster was easily swept under the carpet of time and myriad distractions as the media marches ever onward with it's next big selling horror story to captivate the mind. This is a novel, where everything clicks, as everything is destroyed and for once, the little guy wins just a tiny bit. Jack is the mosquito who sucked the blood of a giant, escaped with it's payload, giggled as it created thousands more mosquitoes, took great satisfaction in knowing that he had caused a temporary itchy bump and greater satisfaction knowing that thousands of his children would continue to create those itchy bumps.
