Michael Blanchard drifted off to sleep in his captain's cabin, the small fishing tender bobbing off the shore of Knowles Head in Alaska's Prince William Sound. Squeezed into the other cabin were a young man from Spokane and a high school senior from Illinois, deckhands on the New St. Joseph this past summer. They had been in and out of Valdez, Alaska, every few days, unloading the salmon they ferried to port for the hundreds of fishing boats trawling the seas. Things had been going smoothly for two weeks, though the second-season deckhand from the Lilac City, Justin S. Bullock, had seemed a bit depressed lately, said Blanchard, 61.