Article submitted by Donn Leiske, ARC President

I have lived on the Harbor all of my life. Commercial fishing has been in my family for as long as I can remember. My dad owns a 40 foot gill netter name the Thunder Bolt. It is a great boat…much better than the poor excuse of a boat that my dad and his dad had to fish with in the old days. The Thunder Bolt has all of the latest toys on it, sonar, fish finding equipment, nearly indestructable gill nets and fish retrieving equipment. It even has GPS, global positioning system, so we can never get lost when we are out to sea.

My brother, my dad and I love the sea. We live to fish. There is no greater thrill than to see those gill nets hit the jackpot by snagging a whole school of huge fish and see the boat strain to real them all in. It is an exciting day when we cross the bar into Westport with the Thunderbolt heaving with a full capacity load of valuable fish. On a good day we can take in $10,000.

Of course there are good years for fishing and there are bad years. The harbor actually has been quite a depressed economy for about the last decade due to government regulations hurting the logging and fishing industries. I remember when I was a kid that my dad would really haul in the bucks fishing. It has been pretty lean for most of my life. But now George W Bush is president, the Republicans now dominate the house and the senate and already there has been some changing of regulations that had been restricting logging and fishing.

Now we are excepting a long fishing season with unrestricted catching limits, and best of all…the highest yields of fish in 20 years. So finally we are going to be allowed to fish all we want, at the right time, and with the highest fish runs in recorded history, it’s going to be awesome! I can’t wait.
Next Saturday is the opening of commercial fishing and we are eager to get at it and push the Thunder Bolt to the limits. This will be the most fun we have had all of lives. My brother and I have looked forward to this our whole life.
It was a beautiful morning in the Westport marina. The sun was coming up and there was a ground hugging layer of morning fog hovering over the shoreline and the surface of the water. My brother and I had the gill nets stretched out on the dock, to check for any last minute repairs needed, while dad was inventorying the boats supplies for our first fishing trip of what promises to be the best fishing season in our lifetimes!

The routine of our checking the nets was interrupted by the sound of footstseps on the dock’s decking. My brother and I looked up at the same time as we saw the tall, thin guy…obviously not a fisherman…according to his clothing. He introduced himself as John Ernhardt, a cousin of the most famous race car driver, Dale Earnhardt. It as pretty cool to meet someone who knew Dale Earnhardt…even cooler to meet someone who was a cousin.
We stopped our net repairs and listened as John explained that he was traveling through the area and was going to be a speaker at a special event in the Weatherwax auditorium. Opening night was tonight. Wow, not only had we met the cousin of Dale Earnhart, but he was speaking tonight in town, and had personally invited us to come. A fisherman’s day starts long before the sun comes up so our evening was free being as we were not allowed to head out to sea until opening day of fishing season. So we checked with dad and we all decided to spend the evening listening to John Earnhart.

Weatherwax auditorium was packed when we got there that night. We felt lucky to get a seat. It was thrilling to hear John tell, first hand, what is was like to grow up with his cousin Dale Earnhardt, the most famous auto racer of all time. Dale was older than John but he still got to hang around the pit crews at the races. John was, himself, into midget racers. Seemed like everyone in the Earnhadt family was absorbed by racing something that had four wheels and an engine.

We were spellbound as we listened to his stories. Then John got sober as he told about that fateful day when the world watched as John Earnhardt’s NASCAR #3 was bumped by a fellow racer’s car, sliding John’s car into the wall. Every NASCAR racer had this happen to him an untold number of times. It was just part of the strategy of NASCAR racing. After all, Dale Earnhardt had bumped more drivers into the wall than anybody. So today should have not been any different than any other day….but it was. It was forever different. Dale, in an attempt to take advantage of every possible benefit, had refrused to wear his neck brace. It was not a NASCAR requirement at the time, as it is now.

Dale’s famous #3 car, slid into the wall, in what seemed like a nonthreathening crash…but it ultimately took Dale’s life. The emergency crews made valient efforts to save his life….air-lifting him to the ER, but he died.

As John Earnhardt told the story, with first hand detail, even tough fishermen had moist eyes and found it hard to swallow.

Then John talked about the impact that fateful moment had on the Earnhardt family…the grieving parents and mourning extended family. NASCAR fans and the world were sobered as each person viewed replays of the crash and the chopper leaving the track. At that moment, Dale Earnhardt’s fate was sealed. His life had ended. He no longer had any opportunity to do the things he always wanted to do but never got around to it…the things that really matter in life when life is over for good….spend time with the kids…giving his wife an extra long hug and making sure she knows that he loves her…telling his folks how much he appreciates what they did for him all his life. But the race of life and the rush of success and the drive to be the winner in the next race had consumed his life until this fateful day…this moment in time, when he no longer would have the opportunity to make choices that could change the direction of his life. His eternal destiny was now sealed.

John Earnhart than turned the story to us in the audience. What about us? It was not too late for us to evaluate out lives, to sort out what was really important in this life, what was eternally important. Things we could do and choices we could make now that would make a difference when our life was over. What would people remember us by at our funeral? Did we spend our time doing things that were important in the grand scheme of things or were we just consumed with the day to day drive for success?

Then John told us about a guy named Peter and his brother and father who were fisherman on the sea. He told about how one day when they were planning for a great fishing season. They were on the shore repairing their nets for the next day’s early start into the new fishing season. A man, not dressed like a fisherman, walked up to them on the shore and told them about things that were of eternal importance. Jesus told them about being fishers of men. He told them about things that were the important things in life…things that matter when this life is all over. Jesus captured their attention as he told about heaven and a better world to come. He told about how they could be fishers of men, gathering people into the eternal net of salvation.

Then Jesus spoke to their hearts, inviting them to give it all up for Him and live a life that would make a difference in their lives and eternally in the lives of the people they would meet. Then, instead of enjoying just the thrill of a big catch and stories of "the one that got away," they could experience the excitement of seeing people eternally changed and taught to be fishers of men.

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