Strugell’s career graph shows that he has fished close enough to the Farallones to eye the elephant seals lounging on the rocks, and he has fished off most every piece of the Oregon and Washington coasts and, sure, even off Alaska, west and north and far into the Bering Sea, to the very edge of the ice floe. It is no doubt that he has made millions, has lost millions, has brought life to the world and watched life go away.
It is told that Sturgell has filled boats with crab and fish, and he has kept law enforcement busy. He is a father of four, divorced once and married again. He lives in Hammond, Ore., and keeps his boats a few miles away in Warrenton, a town of fishermen and loggers at the mouth of the Columbia River. Sturgell said that the fishermen wanted $5 per pound for their Dungeness that year, an almost-unheard-of price.
Sturgell got his start on fishing boats when he was 12. At 17, he had put away enough to buy his own boat, a 35-foot salmon troller. Then he purchased a larger boat and his first crab pots. Within two years he bought more crab pots and added a shrimp boat to keep him working during the summer and fall, and in that way, he became the only thing he ever wanted to be, a full-time professional fisherman, opined Strugell.
He informed that he made millions pulling crab from the autumn and winter misery of Alaska’s cold sea. He eventually amassed a fleet of five boats and profited mightily. As he grew old he stopped fishing the Bering Sea. His boats still went, but Sturgell didn’t.
