Sometimes you have to travel 6,000 miles to be among so many friends, said Katrina Porteous, starting her 15-minute set Friday night at the Astoria Events Center.

Traveling from Beadnell, United Kingdom, on the Northumberland coast (thats about 4,600 miles away), she was the farthest-flung FisherPoet this year.

And Porteous, along with BBC documentarian Julian May, hopes to further bring FisherPoets, a reunion turned into a multiday festival, to the world.

The two, funded by BBC Radio 4, are making a documentary on the 17th annual FisherPoets Gathering, which will air within the next three months and be available online at www.bbc.co.uk/radio4

Porteous said she first learned of FisherPoets about five years ago through a friend who read about it in a New York Times article.

I really wanted to go, because Id written poetry about fishing for a long time, and I live in a fishing community, and its part of my life, said Porteous, now one of Britains leading radio poets.

Ive just been around the industry an awful lot, she said. When I was a young woman, I went out on the boats with the old men, and I fished for salmon with them, and also for crabs and lobsters and was just with them a lot, but I didnt draw a wage. Its very carefully regulated, so I couldnt.

But I was there doing it alongside them rowing the boat, actually … for free.

Her long-time partner in other poetry documentaries, May, later pitched the idea of a FisherPoets program to the BBC.

Every week on Radio 4, at half past 4 on Sunday afternoon, like on Sunday teatime theres a poetry slot, said May. Often its a request program called Poetry Please, but they also have one-off programs to do with poetry.

May and Porteous sealed the funding for their exhibition by agreeing to also do a documentary on poet William Stafford, who would have been 100 years old Jan. 14. Stafford moved to Oregon in 1947, taught at Lewis and Clark College and died in Lake Oswego in 1993.

Hes a very interesting poet, but not much known in Britain, said May. So were killing two birds with one stone.

Porteous and May continued on to Portland Monday.