The Fisher Queen

by Sylvia Taylor

  For most of us, it wasn’t just a way to make money or run from conformity; it was the call of the wild, the last great frontier of our great country that still rang with the ancient songs lodged deep in our bones. We were here to be a part of something so much greater than the domesticated life of the urban treadmill and to continue the tradition of our courageous ancestors and people throughout history who had chosen the unknown, the devil they didn’t know, over the safety of the mundane. Something that would last who knows how long, but probably not as long as we hoped.

  The Cauldron had gone from a simmer to a bubble overnight with a marine forecast for a bit of a boil by that night. The clanging of riggings and uneasy shifting of boats before first light dragged us from our separate beds to make the 22-mile run from Port McNeill to Port Hardy before things got nasty. I was not by nature an early riser, but I loved the simple choreography of morning we had already fallen into: Paul would start the engine and turn up the oil stove in the galley to boil water; I would dress quickly and come upstairs to make coffee; he would start up all the radios and electronics; I would make sure everything was secured inside and out using a checklist I had devised; he would untie the bow and stern line and pull up the bumpers hanging on ropes that protected the hull from the float; I would untie the midships line and wait for his signal from the wheelhouse to push the boat out a bit then jump on deck with the rope.

  I was a vertical-learning-curve kind of girl and had always detested standing on the sidelines of anything, so I asked Paul for more and more to do so I could feel useful and a part of things. He would mete out tasks and information bit by bit: what an underwater pinnacle looked like on the depth sounder, steering left to go right and right to go left, how to light the cantankerous oil stove, that a little port left in the bottle meant that starboard was on the right, how to read the tide book for highs and lows, and the brief slacks in between when you could safely run the narrows and shallows. I chafed under the slowness of my learning and always snuck in a little extra something. It was hard for him to stay mad at me when something was beyond me, like tying gear, because I was so damn smart and earnest about it and it did take more of the workload off him. At times, though, I slid right past competent worker to over-eager puppy and, occasionally, into just plain stupid risk-taker. Like when he had told me in no uncertain terms to never pull up the trolling poles alone because they were too heavy and came out of the cabin to find me dangling six feet above the deck, still hanging onto the rope and slowly swinging back and forth.

  We slipped out of Port McNeill’s choppy bay and around the corner of Malcolm Island, coffee and cigs firmly in hand, and into a mounting lump that signalled our first foray out of the sheltered Inside Passage into the relatively open waters of Broughton Strait. By Port Hardy, we would be in Queen Charlotte Strait and full on to the winds and water finally let loose and funnelling down the coast from Alaska, diverted and maddened by the Queen Charlotte Islands, which would wait another 30 years to be renamed Haida Gwaii.

  It kicked up fast and mean, so we ran full throttle with stabilizers up to squeeze out the Central Isle’s maxed-out running speed of eight knots. The stabilizers were used primarily while fishing at a two-knot speed to ease the boat’s movement, but they were also used to run in heavy, dangerous seas, although they slowed the boat considerably. Fishermen often gambled the risks and benefits in a high-stakes decision to sacrifice speed or stability.

  But these were hardly ideal conditions and eight knots is pretty slow even for a troller. Knots and nautical miles are hangers-on from the days of the old sailing ships, when a sea mile was based on one minute of latitude. The length of one minute of latitude is 1.85 kilometres, or 1.15 miles. A vessel travelling at one knot along a line travels one minute of latitude in one hour. The nautical mile is about one minute of latitude along any line. Originally, sailing ship speed was calculated by how many knots on a rope attached to a board flung overboard would pass a mark on the stern in 30 seconds measured by a sand-filled hourglass.

  This was the kind of information I devoured while running, along with the stash of books under my bunk and anything else that caught my interest. It was the best way to sublimate our pitching and rolling, Paul’s almost-daily temper tantrums in the engine room and his brooding over the early reports of lousy fishing. Besides, I really couldn’t do anything else when it was rough. I’d either wreck something or myself or both. The most productive thing I could do was read or journal or daydream, or endlessly study the charts. The view didn’t exactly inspire: everything a dark, mean-looking grey. The lump turned into sharp, crested waves. Spray came over the bow and splattered the wheelhouse windows. Even the coastline seemed to cower like a scared dog.

  Before I dove into my book, I thought I’d check in with The Skipper, and slid off the day bunk to crab-walk the six feet to where he stood steering and staring intently through the spray-mottled windows in the wheelhouse—a silly name, as it was just the front end of the same space as the galley. I gripped the dashboard shelf edge and planted my feet far apart to stay put and spoke matter-of-factly, as if we were lounging in our apartment kitchen back home instead of bouncing around on the northern ocean.

  “Would you like something to eat or more coffee or something?”

  “Uh, it’s a bit rough through here until we get to Hardy in a couple of hours.”

  “How about a sandwich? You can’t go without anything.”

  “No thanks.”

  “Crackers and cheese? I put some in the kitchen sink before we left and I won’t cut anything, just break off a chunk.”

  “Okay fine. Can you get another pack of cigarettes from the cupboard too? God, I’ve got to cut down. What are you reading?” He stole a quick glance at the day bunk to the striking black and green cover. “Daughters of what?”

  “Copper Woman. It’s written by a woman named Ann Cameron who lives on the Sunshine Coast and interviewed all these Native elders about their myths and legends and wrote this incredible book. I’ve just read a couple, but they’re amazing. Reminds me of when I was volunteer-teaching West Coast Ethnology once a week at the Vancouver Museum to school kids with Connie. You know her—my Cree friend in North Van. When I was recovering from the car accident, after I could walk around. God, I’ll never forget the look on their faces when I showed up in my big neck brace for the orientation.”

  “Pretty brave. Did they ever charge the guy who hit you?”

  “Just a sec. I’m gonna get the crackers and cheese and bring them up here,” I said, and crabbed over to the sink, grabbed the goods and some paper towel and crabbed back.

  “Here, I’ll put yours right in front of you. And no, they never did charge him. His top-notch lawyer got him off. Since he was driving a company car he didn’t even have to pay higher premiums. Anyway, the next story in the book is about a terrible sea monster called Sisiutl, and facing your fears.”

  “Well, let’s hope we don’t meet him today,” he said, taking a bite of cheese and turning up the marine radio for the continuous weather forecast.

  We pulled into the relief of Hardy Bay about the time most people in the other world were sipping morning coffee in their pyjamas. I had been up for hours and had already rodeo-rode a rising gale and got my first dose of the frontier town of Port Hardy. Everything and everybody seemed as restless and rough as the weather, stirred up by the swirling masses of men and the occasional woman who carved a life from the seas and woods and rocks. Fishermen, loggers and miners kept to their own kind, and even within those tribes, there were smaller packs. No self-respecting troller Swivelhead would hang out with a gillnet Ragpicker or a Circlejerk Insaner purse-seiner. And nobody went near the draggers, whose massive apparatus scraped the ocean bottom raw, or the dog fishermen, who smelled like hell’s privy. Part of this was the human tendency to run with our own kind, but the truth was, we were all competing for the same fish. ’Specially this year when catch numbers were coming in low and there were rumours of hikes in fuel an
d interest rates and rumblings about sport-fishing camps and fish farms appearing in sheltered inlets and bays all over the coast.

  Trollers considered themselves the elite of the salmon fishermen. They were restricted to fishing at least a mile offshore, and there was a certain gentility about quietly dragging hooks through the water away from stream and river mouths. Their surgically dressed and gently handled fresh fish were the elite of the marketplace, destined for artfully arranged displays in fish shops and chi-chi foodie boutiques.

  The sportys and yachtys were restricted to the public dock and so were naturally kept separate from the lowlife fishermen. (We wouldn’t be called the gender-friendly but clumsy fisherperson and then the sensible fisher for some years yet.) If a pleasure boat did try to sneak into a commercial float, they could be reported to the wharfinger or harbourmaster. He would ask them to move, and if they refused he was authorized to call the RCMP. As competition for tie-up space heightened over the years, altercations would blow up with threats of legal action from both sides, especially if there happened to be an American accent or boat involved.

  We wandered the Port Hardy commercial docks and waited for the electronics repair shop to open, hoping to get our pilot fixed that day while we were kept in port by the weather. Four days had slid by already, and without a pilot I would have to sit in the cabin all day steering the long, slow tacks back and forth on the fishing grounds while Paul worked the gear on deck. I would do what needed to be done but was restless to get out there in the stern and really fish. I wanted to do the real stuff: play with the boys, run with the Big Dogs, or the highliners in this case. There was nothing more demeaning than being referred to as a lowliner, someone who barely scratched out a living and had to struggle to make the dreaded mortgage payment and licence renewal fees every year. And the federal government’s good ol’ Unemployment Insurance Commission (UIC) purse strings were beginning to tighten, offering little solace to a seasonal worker who relied on financial support through the winter.

  The glory days when a fisherman could take it easy over the winter and enjoy some down time would soon be over. A lot of outsiders were beginning to see this as ripping off the system and often lumped all fishermen into the same group that appeared to work the occasional 24- to 48-hour opening, goofed off the rest of the time and made a killing. A distorted view of net fishermen and completely untrue of trollers, who worked up to 18 hours a day for 10 to 12 days straight with one or two days’ turnaround at the fish camps in incredibly dangerous and exhausting conditions for four or five months. Even though the trolling season ran from mid-April to the end of October in 1981, the first and last month or two were often just too unpredictable and rough with bad weather. But no one could have imagined the industry would be in such conflict and peril that by the mid-’90s the seasons would be down to eight weeks and sometimes six.

  So as the season lengths and catchments steadily decreased over the years, and UIC was becoming damn near impossible to get, it got harder and harder to survive—and many did not. What the restrictions did do was gradually hone a fleet of savvy, entrepreneurial career fishermen. In 1981 there were 1,600 BC trollers working the entire coast from north of the Queen Charlottes to the southern Gulf Islands; 20 years later there would be 540.

  And it seemed the entire fleet was here in Port Hardy now, jamming the wharves and floats, waiting out the weather and as restless as we were to get their season going.

  I was awestruck by the bald eagles that scrounged around every foot of shoreline and mud flat and their massive nests in every tree with a decent horizontal branch.

  “Thick as seagulls,” Paul said. “You’ll get used to it. It’s a shock to see them, coming from the city. This is how it used to be everywhere, but you have to get this far north now to see them like this.”

  I didn’t ever want to get used to it, or the feral forests and waters that crouched just behind every human settlement carved out of this remaining wilderness.

  We waited out the weather and the hours of diagnosis on the pilot by having our first official gear-tying lesson in the cabin. The drop-down Arborite table attached to the back wall turned the day bunk from dining room to workshop as boxes of shoe-sized silver flashers and coppery little spoons and a rainbow of rubbery squid-like hoochies piled up, along with hooks, tiny clamp-stops, bright beads, swivels and spools of 50-pound test transparent Perlon fishing line. It was all I could do not to start making jewellery out of this gorgeous stuff.

  We were only tying gear to attract spring salmon and whatever sockeye showed up, because those were the only two of the five salmon species open to trollers this early. The Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) set the species openings, and in later years the catch-numbers, in keeping with whatever calibrated voodoo equations they came up with to regulate an industry that was already careening into decline. But this year, coho season didn’t open until July 1, and pinks not until August 1, so if we did hook one before then we had to shake it off (hence the barbless hooks). The drowned ones were whisked into our oil-stove oven. Chum salmon were fall runners and mostly caught by net fishermen. A troller could still fish anywhere on the coast, inside or outside waters, for any species (according to openings), then slap on a drum and go gillnetting in the fall. By 1995 the DFO and its Round Table restrictions narrowed the window of opportunity to a porthole. Trollers, who were hardest hit from every direction, were left stunned and angry and asking questions: Why was the most viable, sustainable fishery type being systematically beaten down? Why were fish farms and sport-fishing camps taking over every good anchorage on the coast? Battle lines were being drawn and every user group was ready to fight it out. But some had louder voices than others, and those voices were heard by more powerful ears.

  A tense restlessness filled the cabin and I learned to tie gear as fast as I possibly could to keep the polite and distant communication from blowing up. I would be the best gear-tier ever: an arm’s length of line attached with a three-wrap knot pulled tight with spit to the swivel so the flasher would spin in the water; then half an arm of line, another swivel, a spoon, a bead, then a green hooch with the line passed through end to end and tied to a barbless hook; then the hooch pushed down to almost cover the hook with its fluttering tentacles.

  “You’re doing okay but some of your knots aren’t tight enough,” Paul said, “so I’ll have to redo them or the gear will just unravel in the water. No, I’ll do it. Your hands aren’t strong enough or toughened up enough yet and the line is starting to cut your hands. Bad news when you’re working with fish.”

  Did I feel bad about luring a fish to its death? No, but I did feel bad that I couldn’t tie the knots tight enough—yet. I had been fishing with my dad since I was eight—ironically, mostly lake trolling—and I could bait a hook with a live worm, reel in the trout, conk him over the head and gut him out for the fry pan. Dad used to joke that he stopped taking me fishing cuz it was too embarrassing getting skunked by a little girl. We had the Kodaks to prove it, especially the one where he grinned sheepishly into the camera with his one little rainbow trout while I stood proud as hell with a string of speckled beauties. I didn’t know it, but those long, quiet days with Dad puttering up and down a lake not only were precious then but were filling a deep well I would draw from for the rest of my life.

  Suddenly a familiar voice called from the float. “Hey, Paul, Syl, you at home?” Boat etiquette insists on a call-out before stepping on the deck, a knock on the door, even if it’s open, and no entry until invited.

  “Richard! Steve!” I bounded out the door and onto the float to give our friend and his strapping good-natured deckhand from Vancouver a huge hug and cheek-kiss.

  “Hey sweetie, good to see you, you little pipsqueak,” Steve said in his mellowed New Yorkese and held me at arm’s length. “You look happy and healthy as always, so things must be going well. Where’s the old man?”

  “Hey, good to see you too,” Paul said smiling in the doorway, broodiness all fo
rgotten. “We’re just about to go check on the pilot. Wanna get together for dinner tonight?”

  “I’ll make spaghetti,” I chimed in. It was the only thing we could afford. With their bread and salad we would feast and laugh and tell stories and ignore the howling gale and that “asshole electronics guy” who hadn’t fixed the pilot and couldn’t get to it for days because he was so busy and needed a part he didn’t have, and the pilot should be replaced anyway cuz it was getting too old. And we’d ignore that the little bit of money we scrounged to get here was almost used up by fuel and repairs and we still had to get to the BC Packers fish camp in Bull Harbour on Hope Island a few more hours north. We would leave exploring Hardy’s handful of streets and infamous hotel bars, the wharf-side Seagate and the uptown Thunderbird, for another trip. I had a feeling they would out-weird and out-rough even the crazy bars in the outposts of Ucluelet and Tofino on Vancouver Island’s west coast. We needed to start fishing and making some money very, very soon, and if the weather calmed down the next day, we would head up to Bull Harbour and do just that. That night in my bunk I felt like an arrow vibrating with energy and ready to spring from the bow.

  Bull Harbour

  I thought Italians were intense! My mother had nothing on Mother Nature, who had cleaned house overnight in a fury of wind and rain until even this tawdry little town shone and fluttered in the soft morning light. All the sullen grey had been swept and scoured away to reveal a world transformed. She had trotted out her best greens and blues and sparkling whites to show off her lovely home as if in preparation for company.

  We sped over the rippling bay and out into the stunningly calm Goletas Channel that would lead us another three hours north to Bull Harbour. I mused on what Mother Nature might be celebrating today and leaned against Paul in companionable silence as he sat and steered the boat. My eyes drifted from the hypnotic sparkling seas over to the Royal Bank calendar, a few feet to my right, thumbtacked to the varnished wall of the wheelhouse under the depth sounder. May’s picture was a Saskatchewan wheat farmer seeding his endlessly rolling furrowed land, and here I was in another world, yet the same country. Amazing. Not so different, really: he was making his living from the land too. We were both working to feed the world. Working from the sweat of our brows with nature’s rhythms and bounties in a simple, honest way—it doesn’t get much nobler than that. I was just about to remark on this when I suddenly snapped to attention.