That's more than 26 years, if you were counting.

When Carp takes his seat for a final stint behind the anchor desk on Friday, it will be the end of an era for the Anchorage-raised sportscaster – and for his audience.

When a then 25-year-old Carp first joined KTUU on April 15, 1984 Ronald Reagan was president and "When Doves Cry" by Prince was the top song on the radio. Since then, he’s done everything from fish the Kenai River to attempt to interview Dorothy Hammill at the start of the Iditarod to follow Alaskan mushers across Europe.

Today, he retires to move on to a job that he says is really a calling.

He'll be associate pastor at the Baxter Road Bible Church, an independent non-denominational Christian church. While he says the job is the fulfillment of a long held dream, leaving KTUU, is "bittersweet."

"Channel 2 is who I am, where I've been," he says. "It’s sad to leave and it hurts to leave because it's been a quarter of a century. But I’m excited for what’s next."

Carpenter says he feels called to his new vocation as a pastor, a feeling that's been building for over a decade.

"I personally had my own Christian epiphany years ago," he said. After that he earned a degree from the Alaska School of Ministry and Mission, attending classes in the morning and working at KTUU in the afternoons and evenings.

“I thought, this has got to be God because (former news director) John Tracy isn’t just going to let me get out of work,” he said.

After that, Carpenter began speaking occasionally at area churches. When the opportunity to join the pastoral staff at the Baxter Road Bible Church opened up, he and his wife weighed the decision long and hard, he says.

"We got to the realization, how can we not do it?" he said.

The 250-member congregation is growing, he says, and his duties will include delivering Sunday sermons, ministering to congregants and "generally shadowing" the church's senior pastor Bob Mather.

This week he was up until 3 a.m. preparing a Sunday sermon.

At his sendoff on Friday afternoon, staffers reminisced about great Carp moments – a scary ride in a small plane with a pilot known as "Banzai" and a misplaced tape of an interview with Kitty Dukakis among them.

But he won't totally disappear from KTUU’s broadcasts or office – he's been asked to contribute Fishing Report segments during the summer months and work some special events. And he acknowledges that will probably take him "a while" to clean out his desk, stacked with tapes and papers.

"It could take me months," he said.

As he says goodbye to the job he's had for a quarter of a century, he says he's thankful and still a bit awed that he's been able to make a living this way.

"To me, it's a blessing to do something you love," he said. "And I've been blessed for 25 years."