In the first several years of our marriage, my wife, Eliza Owens, and I taught school and began our family in the Bristol Bay watershed villages of Port Alsworth and New Stuyahok. We fell in love with the people and the place that is home to the largest sockeye salmon run in the world. 

Our family brought us back to Rockford, Michigan but the desire to stay connected to Bristol Bay motivated me to purchase a small setnet fishing operation downriver of New Stuyahok, where I had been Assistant Principal and Eliza a teacher for three years.