A sea captain licensed with the U.S. Coast Guard, Michael Wann has worked and traveled in
Alaska regularly since 1992. Wann has toiled as a crab fisherman in the
frigid Bering Sea and a salmon fisherman in rainy Southeast Alaska. He has
gutted fish and packed salmon eggs in fish-processing plants in Kenai and
Homer, and he's processed crab on floating processors in Southeast Alaska
and the Bering Sea. He also has worked on the fish tenders and break-bulk
cargo ships that travel through the Inside Passage to the Aleutian Islands
and Alaska's most remote areas. He spent one summer working for Kenai
Princess Lodge, a resort that employs more than 100 seasonal workers. He
worked as a newspaper reporter for the Homer Tribune in Alaska;
prior to that, he was a reporter for the Austin Business Journal
and the Austin Chronicle in Texas. Wann has worked in the human
resources department at American Seafoods Co. in Seattle and as a
supply-boat captain in the oil fields of the Gulf of Mexico. He also was
managing editor of The Prague Post
, Central Europe's
leading English-language newspaper. Currently he works as a travel writer and lives in San
Diego with his wife, Laura, whom he met while packing salmon eggs at an
Alaskan fish-processing plant. Raised in Alaska, Wann moved to Texas with his family in 1980 and went
on to attend Southwest Texas State University. He never got Alaska out of
his system and was happy to return in 1992, imagining he would earn a
small fortune working on a fishing boat. Like most travelers who go to
Alaska without any idea what they're doing, Wann ended up gutting fish on
a slime line. Undaunted, he went back again and again until he earned a
captain's license. Wann has traveled to more than 20 countries in Europe, Africa, the
Middle East, Southeast Asia and Central America, as well as Canada and
Alaska. He has driven to Alaska twice, flown there five times and traveled
there by sea more times than he can remember. He also has hitchhiked the
entire state from one end to the other. Wann understands the art of combining work and budget travel to make a
traveling experience both meaningful and affordable. In fact, he has
funded all of his journeys by combining work and travel. In the late '80s
and early '90s, Wann worked for a wine maker in Germany, taught English in
Spain and volunteered in a nursing home for the Magen David Adom (the
Israeli equivalent of the Red Cross) in Tel Aviv, Israel during the Gulf
War in 1991. His job was to get residents into sealed rooms and put gas
masks on them every time the Scud missile attacks began.
