Captain Dan
by Stuart Murch

Captain Dan Olsen has seen a lot in his life. He has identified whales, driven research vessels, and even had his ship taken over by pirates. But how does some one get started as a boat captain?
         Dan grew up in a town near Seattle, Washington and moved to Alaska ten years ago. “I’ve always wanted to check out what Alaska was like,” Dan said. When he moved to Alaska he settled in Anchorage where he worked as a mountaineering guide. He liked his job as a guide but knew it wasn’t his calling. Dan got his start in boating when he lived in Seattle. He sailed sailboats and other watercraft. He now works for a tour boat tour company where he has worked for the last five years.
         Dan became a captain for a surprising reason, “I didn’t decide to be a captain, I decided to start working on boats,” he said. Dan has always been interested in boats. As he worked on them he gained experience and worked his way up to captain.
         Captains drive the boats, but the things that happen on the boats are what make the job interesting. One of Captain Dan’s fond memories is when he worked on a research vessel “We were trying to photograph these transients [killer whales], one swam over and did a summer salting breach where it’s tale came down and it hit its tale against the water and sprayed, soaked the whole boat and we were scrambling to cover up the catalogs and the photographic equipment and sliding windows shut and the fly bridge up top scrambling to protect things up there. It swam away, then swam over again and did the same thing again,” Dan said. By this point the crew decided that the whale didn’t want them there, but were amazed by what they had seen. Captain Dan has plenty of stories in which he encounters the wildlife found in Alaska. He and his crew have seen whales, sea otters, stellar sea lions, puffins, and even common murres on their trips to out sea.
So that is the grand adventure of Caption Dan Olsen. A Seattle born man who grew up sailing by the sea and eventually made his living doing the thing he grew up loving.