Kodiak Fishermen Report Bigfoot Sighting, Federal Officers Seize Phone and Logs

A story out of Kodiak Island, Alaska has resurfaced and it's the kind of account that stays with you long after you hear it. Back in October 2019, the crew of a crab boat working the east side of Kodiak logged a sighting that would end up costing them their logbook, their memory card, and one crew member's phone. Nine days after the encounter, a federal officer boarded the vessel at Saint Herman Harbor, seized the items, and issued a receipt that listed them only by count, not by content. The log never came back. The National Marine Fisheries incident file is closed. And the cove where the crew had been working hasn't been fished since. The account comes from Renick Fenner, who was 26 at the time and serving as deck hand on the Nev Marie under Captain Hoy Coloulstad. Colstad, then 51, refused to write the sighting in his own hand and had Fenner do it instead. After the seizure, Colstad sold the boat in the spring of 2020 and left the island. What survives of the story is Fenner's memory and a single steel frame he had already sent to his sister in Anchorage before the officer ever came down the ramp. What makes this account stand out isn't just the sighting itself, but the pattern of strange behavior that built up around it in the weeks before. The seals on the rock shelf at the north side of the cove started thinning out near the end of September. Colstad noticed before anyone else and counted them every time they came around the point. When he mentioned it, Fenner suggested orcas. Colstad agreed, but he didn't sound like a man who thought it was orcas. There was nothing else it could be, so they said orcas and kept working. Then things started disappearing in town. The Ecberg family smokehouse out past the cannery was stripped clean one night, racks emptied, door left standing open, and a single print in the mud out back that Delberg photographed and then refused to show anyone. Two boats on the float lost their bait freezers overnight, 200 pounds of herring and pink salmon gone off two decks in one night, lids leaned carefully against the rail, and nobody heard a thing despite the crew sleeping aboard because of incoming weather. The cannery dumpster was dragged 30 feet and torn open down the side. The night shift manager, a quiet man named Tobin Bramwell, told Fenner the tracks around it weren't bare, but he wouldn't say what they were. Bramwell later shared that he had started staying at the cannery through the night on purpose, sitting in the dark office with a rifle across his knees. Twice he saw a tall shape come to the treeline at the edge of the lot, 300 feet out, and stand there looking at the building. The second time he put the scope on it and it was looking right back at the dark window he was in, as if it knew exactly which black square of the building held a man. He took the scope off and sat in the dark until it left. He told Fenner he never once felt like the hunter. He felt like the thing had let him sit up with his rifle because it wanted him to understand the rifle didn't matter, that it could come to the lot any night it chose and chose not to, and that the choosing was the whole message. That's a detail that should give anyone pause. Restraint as communication. A presence that could approach but doesn't, not because it can't, but because not approaching is the point. The sightings themselves started coming in around the same time as the thefts, but they took longer to reach Fenner because a sighting is easier to keep to yourself than a stripped smokehouse. A young deck hand on the Calio boat, working the same water, came in one afternoon and wouldn't talk to anyone. It took Fenner two weeks and a lot of beer to get it out of him. They had come around the point at dusk and there was a wet animal smell off the cove, strong enough to carry over the diesel. Then he saw something standing on the beach at the treeline, too tall and too still and the wrong shape to be a man in waders. It didn't move the whole time they could see it. It just stood there and let them look. When the boat came around and the beach slid behind them, the deck hand kept his eyes on the shape as long as he could. In the last second before the point cut it off, it lifted one arm. Not a wave. He was very clear about that. It lifted one arm slow and held it up, and the deck hand had the feeling, and he knew how it sounded and told Fenner anyway, that it wasn't signaling to the boat. It was signaling to something further down the beach that the boat couldn't see. That detail alone is worth sitting with. A solitary figure on a beach that signals to another of its kind out of sight. Whatever was out there that October wasn't alone, and some part of that young deck hand had known it weeks before the rest of the town let themselves know it. Sable Iverson, who ran the fuel dock and was not a woman who scared, told Fenner one morning while topping them off that she had seen something cross the road up by the tank farm at first light. Tall, dark, moving on two legs, taking the ditch on the far side in one step without slowing. She thought it was a man until it took the ditch. No man takes that ditch in one step. She hadn't told anyone but her husband. Bramwell's nephew, riding the school bus out the road, swore he saw something big at the treeline through the fogged-up window, and the driver told him to sit down. Everyone laughed about that one because it was easier to laugh about the kid than to think about the fuel dock and the smokehouse and the bait in the same breath. Fenner had all these pieces by the second week of October and he was still holding them separate, the way people do in a small town when the shape of the thing starts to show and you can't unsee it once it does. The full account, including the night with the camera and what was on that surviving frame, is worth hearing in Fenner's own words. The video lays out the timeline carefully and lets the witnesses speak for themselves. Anyone interested in coastal encounters, in the way a community processes something it can't explain, or in the strange pattern of restraint that runs through the whole story should really set aside the time to watch it. It's one of those accounts that reminds you how much can happen in a place where everybody knows everybody and nobody wants to be the first to say the word out loud. The video can be found on YouTube and is well worth the listen.