The Fisher Queen

by Sylvia Taylor

  “Ditto, baby. I think there’s more Italian in there than I thought.”

  “Yeah, well, apparently there’s a big dose of Viking in there too.”

  “Okay, get back to work, show’s over, but I’m leaving this here just in case,” he said and propped the eyeball up on the hatch cover, looking straight at me. “Oh, uh, by the way, you forgot to dress the spring in the checkers. Jesus, you just can’t get decent deckhands anymore.” He sauntered back to the cockpit to start pulling in the gear.

  This was the first spring he’d let me dress and I turned it into a work of art. When I was done, I dropped it down into the hold and joined him in the cockpit to pull gear, lulled by long, low swells and quiet winds and peaceful, companionable silence.

  Suddenly, a powerful intuition told me to look up. We were no more than 15 feet away from hitting a boat broadside coming up from our starboard side. Shouting “Paul, wheel,” I vaulted out of the waist-high cockpit, over the checkers and across the deck into the wheelhouse. I shut off the pilot and threw the engine in neutral and Paul cranked the wheel. With less than six feet between our poles, we held our breath and watched the other boat troll by, the guy asleep at the wheel . . . literally. Even though he was out cold, he did have right of way, coming from the starboard, and we would have been at fault. If he had come from our left, or portside, we would have had right of way. Not much comfort when you collide four miles offshore with the Coast Guard hours away. Where he came from and how we didn’t see him beforehand I never knew, but strangely, we didn’t lose one single piece of gear. The last thing I saw was his startled face in the wheelhouse window when we blew the emergency horn after we had passed safely. The gods were having a bit of harmless fun, it seemed.

  With the blazing sunset firing up the sky around us we headed into the familiar landscape of home to drop anchor and tie up with Gerry, Steve and little Peter, already waving and smiling from their deck. My heart sang to see them.

  After huge hugs all around, I cooked up a scrumptious meal of thick snapper steaks fried in thin pancake batter, mashed potatoes and peas while we hatched a plan to replace the mountain of gear we had lost that morning to keep both our boats running. Paul would hitch a ride from Bull Harbour to Hardy and back over a couple of days; Gerry would run his boat with his six-year-old son, who could already dress fish like a grownup; his deckie, Steve, and I would run ours. I was totally confident I could handle it, as were Paul and Steve. I could barely contain my excitement then or my disappointment when Gerry’s Dutch sensibility finally won the day and he offered to lend us more gear and help restring the lines the next day in Bull Harbour instead. I loved him dearly for all his caring and generosity, but loved the idea of surprising Paul with a pile of fish I had caught on my own even more.

  Taking advantage of the reasonably calm evening, we ran over the bar, which seemed so tame now, and down the channel to slip into Bull Harbour for the peaceful night’s sleep we desperately needed. As we crossed the still bay and quietly tied up to a spot on the float, I felt like a college kid come home to Mum and Dad.

  “Hey, anybody home?” A familiar, warm voice called from the float with the tap-tap on the hull. I thought I must be dreaming until I heard Paul stir in the day bunk, jump into his jeans and run onto the deck.

  “Jesus, Dan, it’s great to see you,” Paul said, his voice excited as a kid’s.

  Dan? Oh my God, it couldn’t be. We’d heard rumours he had survived the storm from Winter Harbour but weren’t sure.

  “Oh Dan, I’m so happy to see you,” I shrieked, running out to the deck in my flannelette nightie to throw my arms around him, weeping.

  “It’s okay, Sylvie, I’m all right,” he said, hugging me and patting my back. “My boat took a beating, but I got here.”

  As I hurried to the fo’c’sle to get dressed while Paul made coffee, I heard Dan whisper, “Don’t tell her, but I was going to take The Big Jump to get it over with after my poles and mast came down, but something held me back and I just kept going.” My eyes filled with tears again and I put my sweatshirt over my mouth to cover my sob as I remembered the sound of his voice whittling away and the crashing rigging and his instructions for where someone could find his love note to his family. But he was alive and here and nothing else mattered and I thanked the gods for sparing him.

  Wiping my face dry, I sprinted up the steps, grabbed a coffee and followed the guys down the float to ogle what was left of Dan’s boat. It was damn near stripped to the deck. I closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths to still the vertigo—it was a miracle the boat had survived, never mind him. I thought of Dan’s wife and kids getting the news from him instead of the Coast Guard.

  In Dan’s usual sunny way, he said that he’d already set the wheels of insurance in motion and because there was no fire or evidence of foul play, and he wanted to do repairs ASAP and get back out fishing, he would not be accused of framing a Viking Funeral, where a fisherman intentionally scuttled or set his boat ablaze for the insurance money. It also helped that the boat had a history of successful seasons and prompt mortgage payments.

  Not only was our pal safe and well, but everyone on the floats seemed genuinely happy to see us back home after almost a month on the west coast chasing coho and came by to invite us for coffee—even offered to help Paul and Gerry rewire the gurdies and repair the aerial. Everyone except the managers, who gave us the cold shoulder when we checked in at the office. I suspected they were miffed because we’d sold 17 springs in Hardy instead of here before we left for Winter Harbour for the coho opening July 1.

  Paul had justified selling to another buyer for the higher payout because we needed the money so desperately. I didn’t agree and had insisted that loyalty was more beneficial in the long run. And now the proverbial chickens had come home to roost. When I bought a few groceries, Pat asked for the money up front instead of just putting it on our tab. On a practical level, we couldn’t afford a bad reputation with the camp staff, but they were also good people who had been very kind and helpful to us. Even Paul realized he had blown it when I told him about the grocery bill and gladly left me to the human repair work while he repaired the lines.

  I waited until the cramped grocery store/gear shop/fish tally check-in/library/post office was empty and padded across the worn lino past the wooden-plank shelves of tired carrots, tide books, super-hot hoochies and bent-corner detective novels. I leaned through the cut-out window above the counter and spied Pat in the back office at her worn lead-grey metal desk, deep in a pile of fish slips, her hand a blur over the calculator keys. I made a little throat-clearing noise and pulled back to my side of the counter.

  “Hi, Pat.”

  She glanced up from her work with an annoyed look, then a brief softening before shifting to distant.

  “Oh, hi. I’m pretty busy here.”

  “Sorry to bother you. I hoped we could talk for a couple of minutes. Should I come back later?” I nervously fiddled with the bag of jujubes in my hands.

  She sighed and looked up again, still distant. “What is it?”

  “I guess I just wanted to say that I have a feeling you guys were upset with us for selling our springs in Hardy. I know things are tough for you too, with the fishing being so bad. And I just wanted to say I’m sorry.”

  “Okay.” She shifted back in her seat and turned the old wood swivel chair, her face softening a bit.

  “You’ve all been so good to us, Pat, and we really love it here. I really wish we hadn’t sold there. But we had that engine trouble and the pilot thing and Paul just wanted to run straight to Hardy to get things done. I would never want to . . .” I swallowed and swallowed and tried smiling wider to stop the damnable tears from welling up.

  “Hey, honey, it’s okay.” Pat came to the window and put her hand over my clenched fists holding the bag. “I get it. I know you’re trying to make things right. He’s not a bad guy. A bit of a loose cannon, maybe. None of this can be easy for you.” She squeezed my hands gentl
y. “God, you’re thin as a stick and I don’t like the look of those dark circles under your eyes. You need a time out with the girls.”

  Pat invited me to cocktail hour in the first-aid room behind the office, an exclusive invitation-only event I’d only heard rumours of before. We whiled away the afternoon with Anne, Pat’s daughter-in-law, and a spunky 30-something French–Canadian woman who decked for an inside troller I’d heard over the radio. Sipped gin and tonics, smoked lung-stunning French cigarettes and feasted on smoked salmon and cream cheese on Swedish crackers. Talked about everything from meditation to sailing the Greek Islands to smoking salmon. About home and kids and lovers and dreams for our futures. Laughed and bitched and cried just a bit. I was even offered the use of their state-of-the-art salmon smoker any time I wanted.

  Nothing in this world could have nourished me more—mind, body and soul—than those three hours with those fine women in that beautiful place, and we hugged long and hard before wandering back to our business.

  Since it was a bit snotty out there, we stayed in another day and ran down to Hardy. We made the most of our harbour time by picking up the pilot we’d dropped off on the Coal Harbour escapade, then had a Chinese supper with pals before begging off a night at the bars to tuck in early. That was before the call for Nurse Sylvia came.

  It was always night when the knock came. First the rumble and jolt of voices, sometimes loud and rough with intoxicants, sometimes hesitant and meek with apology. Then the clomp and sway, the clanking and shushing, as they slipped and stumbled aboard, sometimes a pair, sometimes a committee, but never alone. It took gumption to drag a weary deckhand from her bed, to steal those few precious hours of sleep and stillness to come to the aid of a hapless fisherman. Idiots and drunks for the most part, with the occasional innocent thrown in just to remind us of how precarious the fishing life was, how every moment was an opportunity for injury.

  I had been a rescuer since I could hold a hand or navigate a Band-Aid. Even though my medical training was a couple of years away yet, it was me they came to, not the first-aid attendant at a camp or the emergency room or doctor in town.

  I had already removed my share of hooks, even a halibut hook the size of an anchor, the right way: by cutting the shank with wire cutters and pulling the ends out from either side—usually of hands. Every boat had wire cutters, but not always a first-aid kit and sometimes not even disinfectant.

  One night I was hustled to an acquaintance’s boat to find his strapping young deckhand shirtless and in shock, drinking straight from a bottle of whiskey at the galley table. My first thought was, wow, he’s even more gorgeous with his shirt off. Then I snapped out of it when I saw there was something very odd about his chest and the inside of one whole arm—a strange pasty whiteness surrounded by odd little pillows of skin, and around that a fiery red, all of it covered in dark smudges and bits. Even through his fisherman’s tan, his face was grey and sweaty.

  Turns out he had gone out on a bender and tried to crawl into the upper bunk, lost his balance and fell flat onto the red-hot oil heater. He had seared himself like a steak, and what I saw was a massive area of first-, second- and third-degree burns with grease and toast crumbles embedded in his flesh. I gently took the bottle from his fist, saying that would only make him feel worse later. When I asked for the first-aid kit, there was none, and ours had been cleaned out by the last first-aid event. I had to get the open wounds cleansed and covered fast to avoid a massive infection, knowing full well that he would not go to a doctor or leave the boat.

  What they had was a handful of four-by-four gauze pads in sealed packets, and when I asked for vinegar, one of the guys broke the silence by asking me if I was going to pickle him. I said he was pickled quite enough, which sent even Mr. Sirloin Steak into guffaws of relief. I poured the vinegar in the coffee cup I had the skipper scrub out with soap.

  For over an hour, I swabbed and scrubbed the grime and crud from him. Then, while he air-dried, I taped the remaining gauze pads together with duct tape and secured the whole apparatus onto his chest and arm ’til he looked like he was wearing body armour. My heart went out to him as he stoically withstood the scouring and the return of feeling in his nerve endings, making the sweat run down his face. Six months later, when that deckhand spotted us on the False Creek wharf back home, he called my name and pulled off his sweater. I couldn’t tell which side had been burned.

  But that paled by comparison to what I now found in the Port Hardy hotel room Paul and I were driven to at 3:00 a.m. from our boat at the wharf. A bunch of thugs had ganged up on some poor bastard behind the Thunderbird bar a couple of hours earlier and accused him of hustling some chick one of them claimed was his girlfriend. A bystander waded in to pull them off the guy and the nastiest little wharf rat took offense—didn’t appreciate the attempt at breaking up the fight, so he bit down hard on the good guy’s thumb like a demented pit bull until even his pack tried to pull him off.

  Nobody called the cops; nobody wanted trouble. They just brought him to the hotel room and sent someone to collect me. I found him in the bathroom, his hand in the sink, wrapped in a blood-soaked towel, and when I softly said his name he lifted his pallid face, lips trembling in agony. I took a couple of deep breaths and gently unwrapped the mangled mess of his thumb, bitten to the bone, drawing gasps and curses from the men crowding around us. I said he would have to get to the outpost hospital immediately because human bites were the deadliest of any animal’s, then went to the room phone and called the local RCMP to get the emergency room opened right away. Something in my voice must have struck a chord, because they sent a car to bring us the few blocks to the hospital. After giving our names and contact info, Paul and I hitched a ride back to the boat with the police and slept as long as the bustling fish camp would let us.

  Late the next day, we went to see the patient before leaving to run back to Bull Harbour with our pilot and more gear. The doctor told us it was a good thing we’d done what we did because he would have been dead within a day from the venom of the dirtiest mouth in the world.

  After a pit stop in Bull Harbour to set up the pilot and let the sou’east blow itself down a bit, we revved up for a long night run around the top and down to Winter Harbour. We couldn’t wait for the morning; we had only 36 hours to get ice and diesel, anchor up behind Kains Island and try to get some sleep before humpback season opened August 1. We had to hit the run hard and fast before it petered out.

  “Bring it on,” I whispered from my bunk.

  For the Living and the Dead

  The humpbacks are coming! The humpbacks are coming! And we were ready for them: a pile of new red gear, a hold full of Winter Harbour ice and a pile of cigs, fresh fruit and jujubes for us. All reports said the bulk of the annual run would split at the top of Vancouver Island and come down the outside. That’s exactly where we were, anchored up behind Kains Island the night before the August 1 opening, ready to run The Gut with everything working (for once)—pilot, sounder and loran—and an empty bank account hungry for some money.

  Since opening July 1, the coho run hadn’t been any screaming hell, so the entire trolling fleet was counting on a fish that a few years ago they would have turned up their noses at and left to the ragpickers while they chased the hefty, well-paying springs and sox. But trollers were a practical and adaptable bunch, spending so much time on the seas, and a buck was a buck, which was pretty much what those little humps would be worth that year.

  Because humpbacks were the lowest-paying fish of the species, we had to catch a lot to keep our numbers up. They were small and slimy and very hard to dress, especially for big hands. This made for a very labour-intensive situation with a high potential for belly-cut fish and infected-cut hands. Some fishermen brought their kids on board to dress humps for a couple of weeks until the run moved on, but Paul had my little monkey hands to do the job.

  Before dawn on August 1 we picked up the hook behind Kains Island and ran The Gut to join the fleet already for
ming the mile-square grid pattern 10 miles offshore. I should have been exhausted after 80 days of brutal seas and back-breaking work, but I felt like I was just hitting my stride. I was thinner than I had ever been in my life. Pitiless work had burned the dross from my body, leaving only bone, muscle and sinew—whittled by the wind, scoured by the sea, parched by the sun, pummelled by the relentless rain.

  Every cell was attuned to the pitch and roll of the boat as the boom swung and the hooks flew and the guts arranged themselves on the deck in a slimy minefield of fatal falls. If I went overboard I’d die. In 10 minutes I’d be dead from exposure or dragged under by my filling gumboots.

  I lost track of what I looked like. Layers of clothing took the place of curves and mounds. That cloudy, cracked little glint above the galley sink could hardly be called a mirror. The best it offered was a mosaic view of myself, and after a while that was just too much trouble and seemed less and less important. Every 10 days or so, I got to hose myself down in a fish-camp shower. It was such a novelty being naked, such a visceral grunt of pleasure.

  Day One: 127 fish—17 coho, 110 humps

  Day Two: 144 fish—3 springs, 12 coho, 2 sockeye, 127 humps

  Day Three: 131 fish—2 springs, 14 coho, 115 humps

  And I dressed every damn one of them while Paul pulled and iced, pulled and iced, grabbed a coffee, a strip of Indian Candy, a hunk of cheese.

  The weather was spectacular, the seas millpond smooth. We tacked the grid with a hundred other boats, moving in unison, turning in unison, until it was too dark to see. Then we dropped the hook right where we were, still in the grid, scrubbed and cleaned and dressed and iced deep into the night, music loud for those who had none: Men Without Hats to Mozart, Karen Carpenter to Cream. A sea of mast lights reflected a sky of stars. Then the roar of a hundred diesels as everyone began to move: forward and turn and forward and turn and forward and turn.

  On the fourth day, the weather and seas turned and we had the best day ever: 111 fish, but 6 were big springs. We ran in to sell to the cash buyer who wanted day-caught fish and paid 10 percent more for them. He paid us $857 in $100 and $50 bills. We held on to the rest of our catch for BC Packers so we could get more ice.