My late uncle, Shawn, would have been the next in line to captain the family boat, but he passed before that was possible. I often think about what it would have been like to fish alongside him, or if that would have even been possible. I cannot know him first-hand in my adulthood, but when I am on the water and engaging in the same labour that he loved so dearly, I feel a closeness and a deeper understanding of him that I could not have accessed otherwise.