Even in Alaska, Roy Randall Was a Sooner : Pioneer: Former Oklahoma halfback came in before the pipeline and stayed to raise a family.

Among Alaska’s 420,000 residents, the Randall family ranks as pioneers. They lived here before the pipeline was built, arriving during the 1960s, the first full decade of statehood.

Roy Randall, a quiet native Texan, was a halfback at Oklahoma when another Sooner halfback, Billy Vessels, won the Heisman Trophy in 1952. After college, Randall tried living several places before settling in Alaska in 1961 to hunt and trap for a living.

He came to Seal Bay in ’64 and married Shannon in ’68. He courted her by boat, often traveling 2 1/2 hours, sometimes in dense fog, to her uncle’s place on Raspberry Island, on the other side of Afognak.

They built and furnished a log cabin out of available material--even today, their high-back dining room chairs are one-piece cuts from logs--and for the next few years, while starting a family of four children, lived off the land.

“We were the biggest hunters in the state,” she said.

As Russians did on this land long before, they hunted seals and sea lions and trapped beavers, foxes and river otters for market--as many as 1,000 seals and 5,000 sea lions in a year. Then, in 1972, federal law was changed to permit the taking of sea mammals only by natives such as the Aleuts.

First, there was a hearing in Kodiak to consider the matter, Shannon said, “but when they heard the numbers that Roy and I took . . . “

Suddenly, she added: “We were forced into the lodge business.”

More suddenly, they were almost forced out of it by the 1989 oil spill but were spared by a critical wind shift.

Their lodge combines comfort and a wilderness ambience. Alaska’s first Roosevelt elk were placed long ago on Afognak, which also has deer, an estimated 2,500 Kodiak brown bears--the world’s largest land carnivores--and only a couple of dozen permanent human residents in its 1,000 square miles.

One usually gets to Afognak via a Peninsula Airlines Grumman Goose amphibian, the same type of sturdy World War II-vintage plane that transplanted Canada geese to Kodiak Island four years ago. “Geese arrive by Goose,” one report read.

The lodge is open for fishing from spring to fall, and for hunting into December. Shannon grinds her own wheat to make bread for guests. Unlike most sportsmen’s lodges, breakfast is served at the civilized hour of 8 a.m.

Primitive? Hardly. Electricity comes from a diesel generator, water from a rainfall reservoir.

Isolated? Not completely. The mail float plane comes with supplies from Kodiak or Homer at least once a week, if the weather is good. They have a radio telephone that cost $20,000. Five years ago, Roy got a satellite dish and realized how much he missed football.

They haven’t owned a car since 1969: There are no roads on their island.

Their sons Josh, 14, and Luke, 10, don’t have Little League. But when he was 4, Josh caught a 12 1/2-pound silver salmon that is mounted on a living-room wall. When he was 10, he got his first bear--a privilege permitted every four years by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

“It was a proud day,” said Roy, who gets downright talkative about it.

Said Luke: “I’m gonna try to get mine this fall.”

Josh is even more quiet than his dad, but Luke makes up for both of them, willingly serving as fishing guide, backup boat driver and naturalist, imparting such information as: “When a whale shows his tail like that, he’s gonna be down a long time because he’s diving straight down.”

The Randalls take their guests fishing for Pacific halibut and whatever salmon happens to be running. King (chinook), red (sockeyes), silver (coho), pink (humpie) and dog (chum) each have their own predictable times and places to spawn.

Sea otters are common, and bald eagles, whales, seals and sea lions also are seen on the way to the fishing grounds.

“Another three weeks, those trees will just be lined with eagles,” Roy Randall says as he idles one of his three fishing skiffs into Paul’s Bay.

The prey is sockeye salmon. There are no other anglers, but bait, lures and flies are useless because the fish aren’t in a feeding mode but a spawning mood.

So, the approved method, permitted only before they leave the saltwater to go upstream, is to cast size 5/0 treble hooks about 100 feet out and reel in with a series of hard jerks to set the hook--literally, to snag them, in the side, in the tail or anyplace else.

Brad Freitag, a guest from Chandler, Ariz., is most adept, once snagging fish on seven consecutive casts, although all but two threw the hook.

It may not be fishing in the sense that the fish are being fooled, but it’s effective. Three anglers snag 25, ranging from 15 to 30 inches, in 2 1/2 hours.

The halibut angling is more conventional but no less productive. A half-dozen anglers, bumping cut bait along the bottom as their boats drift off Tolstoi Point, collect 40 in a couple of hours.

That includes Aku Takatani, the Randalls’ summertime guide from Maui, who fishes with only a handline.

As an angler reeled in a 20-pound halibut, a salmon splashed by 10 yards off the bow, searching for his home.

Here, at Afognak, it will be just as he remembered it, before the spill.