by Langdon Cook
Initiated by the Pacific Salmon Commission (PSC), a body jointly formed by the governments of Canada and the United States to oversee salmon stocks, the preseason test fishery is designed to collect data for effective management and sustainable fishing. It’s one of many measures to emerge from a fisheries treaty signed by the two countries in 1985, after a century of conflicts between their fishermen. Because the Fraser’s mouth is right off the metropolis of Vancouver, just north of Washington State, the river’s stocks are of special concern to both American and Canadian fishermen. The test fishery allows the reef netters to fish, but as the catch is technically the property of the PSC, the fishermen have to pay the commission for what they haul in, cutting into their profit margin. On the other hand, without the test fishery they wouldn’t be able to fish at all until the season opened. This money helps fund the PSC’s data-gathering operations, and more data mean a more accurate picture of what’s happening on the spawning grounds. One of the main ways to promote sustainable fishing is to ensure that enough salmon make it to those spawning areas, and it’s the PSC’s job to set openings and closures to do just that.
The first reef-net test fishery of the season opened in late July. Lummi Island Wild caught nearly three hundred fish. The catch increased to nine hundred fish a few days later—and the full fleet wasn’t even fishing yet, just those gears that had agreed to participate in the test fishery. I could hear the fever in Riley Starks’s voice on the phone. He said I’d better get up to the island soon. It was time to fish.
—
ON A BLUSTERY MORNING, I woke up well before dawn and drove north through a steady rain to Ferndale, Washington. At the Lummi Indian casino, an unsightly six-story complex overlooking the Nooksack River Delta, I followed a peninsula that divides Lummi Bay from Bellingham Bay to its end and boarded the 5:00 A.M. Whatcom Chief ferry for Lummi Island. It was fifty-three degrees—unseasonably cold even for Puget Sound. Twenty minutes later, after a short ferry ride, I crossed the island on Legoe Bay Road and parked just south of Village Point, next to a dilapidated red shack. Across the lawn, one of the oldest living reef netters, Jerry Anderson, Lummi Island’s former postmaster, was on his covered porch, hardly breaking a sweat on his StairMaster and reading the morning paper. I walked over to say hello. Jerry looked trim and fit in his gray sweatsuit, his snow-white hair crew-cut in a military style, and after a little chitchat I asked him a possibly impolite question: When did he first start reef netting? He didn’t think twice about dating himself, figuring it was probably in 1943, at age ten. “Then in ’47 my dad put me in charge, which was totally uncalled for,” he said, thinking back over his years with the fleet, his legs moving like steady pistons on the workout machine. He punched a button on the control panel and the speed kicked up a notch. It pleased him, he said, to see a younger generation still on the water. “Good luck out there. Go get some.”
Riley Starks and several of the reef netters met me at the beach with extra foul-weather gear and fleece. The rain had stopped but it was still moody out, with gusts of wind and dark skies. “Clouds on Little Bear and Big Bear,” one of the crew noted, pointing west toward the San Juan Islands. We stood on the beach, looking out. This is what reef netters do when they aren’t fishing—they think about fishing and the weather and what the heck an inscrutable bunch of schooled-up fish might be doing beneath the surface of pewter-stained water. “We’ve been dragging our heels a little bit to see what might happen,” said Ian Kirouac, the crew chief of one of Lummi Island Wild’s four gears. Soft-spoken and bearded, wearing a hoodie and ball cap, Ian scanned the horizon. To the south, whale-backed Lummi Mountain was shrouded in clouds, its broad peak nonexistent.
“I’ve got stuff to do,” Starks said finally, reluctantly, after another minute or two of staring at the water and sky, both of which seemed to meld together into a seamless gray vista. I could see the yearning in his face. Wearing the marketing hat wasn’t the same as grabbing web. His days of actual fishing were mostly over, except on those special occasions when he got to stand in the tower and make the call, for old times’ sake. Now he had to drum up business.
With Ian at the helm, eight of us rode out to the gear in a dented aluminum skiff that might have been used by Jerry Anderson back in the day. Once aboard, the crew spent the next half hour deploying the net and fine-tuning the reef. Lines whistled through pulleys, and winches cried like overworked table saws. “Coming up on the bunt!” hollered Ian as he adjusted the back of the net. Sierra, his girlfriend, stood by herself on the opposite barge, struggling to get the net into position. “Hold on, guys, you’re fighting Sierra,” Ian admonished his crew. “Drop the stern line.” Once the net was taut between the two barges, Sierra would spend the day inside a cramped cabin, watching a monitor with images fed from an underwater camera attached to the reef. Fish TV, they called it, one of the more recent innovations along with the solar panels. Ian continued to call out instructions while the crew scrambled around.
The test fishery is a chance to relearn the process and get the kinks out. Now there was a problem with the live well—screws were coming loose. “Tighten ’em up,” someone called out. Morgan Shermer, with close-cropped ginger hair and chiseled features, waved a wrench in the air. “We’ve tried. They don’t tighten.” Morgan is a stonemason in the off-season, and sometimes he deckhands on other fishing boats. Ian told his crew in a friendly yet firm tone to find a solution. “Make new holes. Get it tight. Figure it out.” This was his thirteenth year as a reef netter. Or fourteenth? Anyway, he was young by any measure. “I’ve always considered myself one of the new guys,” he admitted. The old-timers, he said, guys like Jerry, they had more experience in their pinkies.
Josh Thomason, a tall, lean Texan with aviator sunglasses, stood up after a fruitless battle with the wrench. He was swimming in his cavernous rubber-coated Carhartt bibs. Despite the chill, he had cut the arms off his green hoodie, a simple alteration that, I would soon learn—once my own arms were soaked through after a couple of hauls—made perfect sense. Josh was second in command after Ian and conscious of modeling leadership in his own sometimes profane, down-home way. “Find me some bolts,” he drawled. “I can get in there and do it, but it’s gonna be shitty.” Now that Josh was a new father, his fishing career looked as though it would be limited to the fairly safe arena of summertime reef netting. His winter work, crabbing, was on indefinite hold. But that was okay; he was just happy to be here. The first time he escaped the flat, arid country of West Texas and got a look at the Pacific Northwest’s topography and rain-drenched evergreens, he knew he wasn’t going back anytime soon.
Cara Blake, barely old enough to drive, performed her chores in a neon-orange jacket that made her the most visible person on board. A volunteer with the Lummi Island fire department, she had the quiet demeanor of someone wise beyond her years. In little more than a month she would begin her junior year in high school, and though the youngest member of the crew, she was starting her second season grabbing web and gilling fish.
Ben Siegel, a stocky, bearded deckhand with little wire-rimmed glasses that gave him the quizzical look of a professor, was the greenest. He had a paperback book with him that he pulled out whenever there was a bit of downtime: a well-worn copy of Cod. In his former career he was a cook in Manhattan, so everyone called him Chef. “It’s about weather and visibility,” Chef said to me, “and whether the fish are actually here. If they’re not here, it’s hard to catch them.” He stood up from his seat next to the bleed tank and paced the deck. “I’m excited to pull some web.”
Morgan kept his seat and continued to stare off into the distance. “It doesn’t feel like a record season.”
“Not yet,” Chef fired back. The fishing life is all about optimism. You can see this through the centuries. You can read about hopeful fishermen in the first printed books, see fragile clay tablets under glass blanketed with cuneiform depicting the sanguine angler. Before the season starts, hope rules the day. This is something t
hat attracted me to the fishing life from the beginning, that still attracts me today: the irresistible combination of mystery and desire. To catch a fish is to eavesdrop on one of nature’s profound conversations. “It’s in here,” Chef said, waving his book in the air. The cod guys knew how to find fish. “Right until the end,” someone said. The story of cod, everyone knew, was a cautionary tale.
Once the net was in the water, Ian climbed the ladder to his post in the bow, known as the head stand, where, peering through an oversize pair of polarized sunglasses that covered much of his face, he was usually the first to spot a school of incoming fish. Josh watched from the stern tower, or bunt stand. Sometimes Morgan stood up there with Josh, a cigarette dangling from his lip as they talked in muffled voices, their arms hanging over the railing like bait. Chef and Cara waited patiently on deck, sitting beside the live tank.
There was one other crew member today, a guest from another gear, named Sean Croke. With a mop of unruly blond hair and brilliant green eyes, he possessed the slightly unhinged look of a true believer. Sean didn’t try to disguise his enthusiasm. He was pumped up for their first haul. “A bunch of winches go off,” he warned me. “This area where you’re standing gets busy, so look out.” Sean described himself as a gardener and herbalist when he wasn’t fishing. “I used to live on this weirdo commune. I lost my job and came up here.”
It was hardly a surprise to learn that several of the reef netters had lived together on the same commune, near Olympia, Washington. The idealism that had brought them together in an intentional community years earlier had eventually led them north to the reef-net fishery. The job wasn’t just about making money (though no one objected to a good paycheck); these fishermen were proud to be taking part in what they considered the most sustainable fishery in the world. It was almost like a secret society. Who had ever heard of reef netting? This ancient way of catching salmon numbered less than a hundred devotees in its ranks globally. Here on Lummi Island there were a total of eight gears, which made Lummi the center of the reef-net universe. Half of those eight gears were owned and operated by a single entity, Lummi Island Wild, the co-op. It was the co-op’s hope that all eight gears would one day be aligned with the same mission, but as it stood, the other four gears were taking a more traditional approach to the fishery. The co-op’s mantra of carefully bleeding and icing each individual fish—a time-consuming process that gave off, perhaps, the white-tablecloth whiff of overly fine dining—was not part of everyone’s game plan.
Ian beckoned me up to his tower, twenty feet above the deck. The gear next to us had just hauled in some fish. A jigsaw puzzle of dark-green islands and enamel-blue water spread before us. “I haven’t seen a thing,” Ian said. “Except for jellyfish.” The reef stretched out two hundred feet, its mouth opened to the south. The salmon would be swimming north through Rosario Strait with the current. Due west of us rose 2,400-foot Mount Constitution, the highest point on Orcas Island. We were in sixty-five feet of water. At its mouth, the reef was sixty feet deep, before shallowing out to twenty-five feet deep at the net. The whole thing is just a bit of legerdemain, a ruse. Strips of bright-blue flagging wave in the current. Salmon allow themselves to be guided by the flagging of the reef as they migrate through the channel. Instead of discerning man-made ribbons, they see shoals of land. The reef leads them into a narrower and narrower slot, all the while forcing them upward in the water column, where they can be spotted from the tower. Seals, on the other hand, see right through the artifice, and they come and go as they please, as if the reef isn’t there. They also know that the salmon are fooled by it, and they use this knowledge to their advantage. Seals, sea lions, even whales, can all wreak havoc on the reef. One time a young orca got caught briefly in the net.
The head stand, with its wide-angle view across the bay, makes one prone to reflection. Ian leaned on his elbows, puzzling over fish and fishermen and what bonded the two. In some ways, the fish were the easy part of the equation. “Getting a boat full of hardheaded fishermen on the same page can be difficult,” he said. “Everybody is passionate and excited about what we’re able to do out here.” He interrupted himself to point out a school of minnows swimming idly through the reef. Even with my polarized sunglasses, I could barely make them out after studying the water. The tide was really moving now. Flotsam coursed by, little specks of foam and plankton slipping through the mesh of the net. Half-submerged, the yellow anchor floats at the head of the reef looked as if they were plowing water. If they got too low in the rip—indicating a current that was dangerously strong—the net would need to be pulled, eliminating drag but also putting a halt to fishing. Ian was reminded of some overanxious reef netters who flipped because of a rushing tide. “Accidents are pretty rare. A couple fatalities before my time, mostly guys that fell overboard and got swept out.” Once you drifted past that point, he said, gesturing north to a spit of land a few hundred yards away in turbulent water, you were swimming to Canada.
“Should we do a water haul?” Josh yelled to Ian from the other tower.
“Just for practice?”
“We have a flounder and a big ol’ jellyfish.”
Just then a bullet-shaped form streaked by a few feet beneath the surface, heading for the net. Normally a lone salmon wouldn’t be cause for hauling—since a much larger school could be right behind it—but something about this fish suggested to Ian that it was by itself, and Josh’s idea of a practice haul was a good one. “Incoming!” Ian announced. “Take it!”
Ian yanked the cord behind him, which activated a winch below us. Just like that, the barge exploded into a frantic scene of activity. The front of the net rose out of the water, scaring the salmon toward the stern. Ian pulled a second rope to raise the bridge in the middle of the net, trapping the salmon, while Josh maneuvered the bunt with his own rope-and-winch system. Morgan hurried down the tower ladder to grab web. He, Cara, Chef, and Sean pulled on the net with abandon. A single pink salmon of about four pounds—not the species they were hoping for—slid into the live tank, where it swam around by itself. Josh came down for a look.
“Now we’re making money,” said Sean.
“We’ll have to call you a pink specialist,” Ian called over to Josh, trying to make light of it. Though no one said anything, they were all thinking it: Where were all the sockeye?
Josh wondered aloud, half seriously, whether this single pink salmon would earn him a trip to the Willows Inn. Everyone knew what had happened to Morgan and Chef the previous evening. They had made a small sockeye delivery, the first of the season, to the island’s destination restaurant. In appreciation, staff at the restaurant had set a table and served them the full seven-course dinner. “Wine, candlelight, and everything!” Chef confirmed. Morgan said it was a nice surprise. He looked over at Chef and batted his eyes. “But I’m just not ready to take the next step.” One of the benefits of being a fisherman is taking home a fresh-caught fish, though some days there aren’t enough to go around. Two days ago, Chef was the only one to get a take-home sockeye. Now he started unpacking his leftovers for an early lunch, pulling out a Tupperware filled with salmon. He had a napkin and a bottle of juice. “Who gets it?” Josh asked with mock indignation. “The guy with a family? No, the single guy!” While everyone else wolfed down sandwiches, Chef produced a fork and started in on his salmon—in soffritto, he added, with baked cauliflower. He then explained to all who cared to listen that he had slow-cooked the fillet—wrapped in plastic with sugar, salt, and butter—at 220 degrees in the oven for about twenty minutes and then unwrapped for another fifteen minutes. Tomorrow, he said, he planned to eat the rest raw as sashimi.
“You need to freeze it, dude,” Josh said.
“I’ve never seen a worm in sockeye.” Chef was revealing his greenhorn status as the newest member of the crew. To kill any parasites, salmon should be flash-frozen in an industrial freezer if it’s going to be served raw. He continued his food reverie, ignoring the background chatter. Maybe he woul
d make a ceviche—or tacos, with cabbage, cilantro, fish sauce, key lime, and finger chilies. He said he was getting good at filleting the fish. “I did it on the beach. I scaled it with my little cheese knife.”
“You scaled it?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“Whatever. I never scale it. And I always eat the skin.” Salmon is one type of fish that doesn’t require scaling. Besides, a layer of fat is lodged between the flesh and the skin, and scaling it exposes this deep flavor to direct, withering heat. But Chef had an answer for his critics.
“You can take the scales, boil them a little bit, dry them, and deep-fry them for a snack.”
“That’s some Willows bullshit!” cried Josh, and even though everyone had a good laugh at the new guy’s expense, the former cook pressed on, undeterred. The fact was, the crew enjoyed hearing his tales from the kitchen. They were in the artisanal-food business, after all.
“Take the collars,” Chef said. “Brine and smoke them. It’s like the Super Bowl. I’ve got this friend in Iceland—she makes kids’ toys out of cod skeletons. You can make all these crazy monsters with the cheekbones.”
