1986-1990 North Pacific fishery as a micro-event

The Road to the North Pacific Fish Farm is a collection of essays on sea life by poet Heecheol Choi, who worked as a sailor at North Pacific fishery near Alaska, USA as a young man. The poet, who was engaged in a deep-sea fishing in the harsh high seas, describes the sea and its dynamic life as a person who feels the sea as a home.

The open seas are not an empty sea, and sailors are not just “sea men”

Not like the open sea that people often imagine as the sea, North Pacific fishery is a place that has its own order. As a navigator, the author had to grasp all types and names of ships only with its locations or numbers of the lights on other ships during the night fishing. He communicates with other fishing vessels in the international fishing grounds through voice communication to determine the boat's course of the seine(a large fishing net). It is both difficult to find a fish group and throw the seine safely. There are episodes of the three consecutive ‘net accidents’, one caused by an “outlaw” Polish fishing boat at the Northern Fish Farm, and one by an arbitrary Japanese boat, and one by the same company’s boat, who never changed the course. It is especially interesting to peep over real voice communication between the ships.

Fishing is not all for those sailors who would even work sixteen hours a day during the time of pollack roe. During the breaks, he repeatedly calculates his income with a pocket calculator and dreams of the future, or plays and competes with other sailors, and makes small model boats as souvenirs for those waiting for him on land.