We report on a passively mode-locked fiber laser emitting around $976\mathrm{nm}$ . The self-starting mode locking is achieved in an unidirectional ring cavity by means of nonlinear polarization evolution. Stable single-pulse operation is observed for $480\mathrm{mW}$ of average output power. This all-normal dispersion laser generates naturally chirped pulses with $1\mathrm{ps}$ duration. The repetition rate is $40.6\mathrm{MHz}$ , resulting in $12\mathrm{nJ}$ pulse energy. External compression using bulk grating shortens the pulse duration down to $286\mathrm{fs}$ .