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Sea Lion
TANYO RAVICZ
Lonny K was already on probation for a felony when he was
photographed shooting at a sea lion. What had begun as a verbal
turf war between him and his neighbors, commercial fishermen
on Kodiak Island’s west coast, had escalated into violence when
Lonny rammed the neighbors’ fishing skiff with his own, a 23-
foot aluminum skiff driven by a 150-horsepower outboard
engine. That’s where the felony comes in, because in the eyes of
the law a moving boat is a lethal weapon.
As a felon Lonny shouldn’t have been anywhere near a
firearm, but there he was shooting his rifle at a sea lion that was
robbing the salmon from his net and tearing holes in the mesh.
Lonny’s setnet, anchored in place and stretching perpendicular
to the beach, was completely vulnerable to the sea lion, but
shooting at a sea lion is a federal crime, and the neighbors, the
ones Lonny had feuded with, snuck over and photographed him
doing it. That’s how Lonny K came to spend the next part of his
life behind bars.
It’s hard to say where a life pivots, where a fateful course of
events is set in motion. Character is one thing, circumstance is
another, and if the one looks inescapable, the other may look
freakish or unfair. People who knew Lonny, friends and family,
thought it was a mistake to have accepted a five-year felony
probation in the first place. “Five years! That’s a long time to stay
out of trouble.” “You better not even have a bullet, Lonny. You’re
a felon. Don’t take your gun to fish camp. They’re watching you.
They’re laying for you.”
All this turned out to be true. “In one ear and out the other,”
his mother Audrey said. Sometimes Lonny drank too much, and
it wasn’t for nothing that he had a reputation for hot-headedness.
Even after the photographs emerged, the ones that showed him
shooting at a sea lion, the Alaskan prosecutors would have
dropped the probation violation if Lonny had been willing to sell
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