Many years ago I lived along the coast of Norway. It was a wonderful time in my life, where I learned a great deal about the ocean and fishing. Jorn was a friend from high school, an exchange student. I visited with him in Norway and stayed the summer. We were out with his Dad, Julian quite often. I learned to longline with him on board their varnished wooden powerboat. Longlining entailed hundreds of yards of line, with hooks attached every foot or so. As we let this line out, to sink the hundred plus feet to the ocean floor, we attached bits of cut up fish to the hooks. This was a good afternoon's work. We came back the next day to bring the line in. This was the fun part. We brought in Steinbit (Stone Bite) a nasty fish shaped like an eel with a set of jaws built for crushing. Julian displayed their power by holding a wooden gaff in front of a Steinbit that had just been brought aboard. The fish dropped the hook, latched onto the gaff, and bit right through it. The sound was incredible as this fish demolished a inch thick piece of wood, and then dropped into the cold Atlantic. A little later, with a smile, Julian handed me the end of the longline. I could feel a distant tugging on the end of the line. As I drew in the line and carefully wound it into a wooden crate I could feel the tugging increase in strength. I remember seeing a white object, very very deep down....and the tugging became more intense. Soon, with some pulling we had the fish to the surface, my first view of a Halibut. It was a huge fish, the size of a kitchen table. It was shaped like the flounders I had known from Cape Cod, but larger than anything I had yet seen come from the ocean depths. It was a pure white, and I remember the vivid red running down the pure white skin as Julian killed the Halibut.

At the time, back in the 70's, Julian salted every fish he caught. A few weeks later we had the halibut for dinner. It was tough and needed a sauce to make it palatable. It was decades later that I bought Halibut in a fish market in New Bedford, and discovered what a delicious and tender fish this was. But of all the Halibut steaks I have seen since, none matched the enourmous size of my first Norwegian Halibut.