ALONG with the breathtaking beauty of the most natural of Earth’s environment, the accompanying exceptionally pristine qualities of the landscapes, the biodiversity of life forms within and the waters flowing all around them, there still remain the unpleasant aspects associated with the professional consumption, if not outright callous exploitation, of the said purity of nature.
Even during the best of salmon-run-return years can a commercial fisherman still experience some of the worst luck that the profession can serve.
My late father put to dry his rubber boots in retirement during the mid-1990s as a salmon set-gillnetter for almost half a century. Having served as his deckhand for a fifteen-year piece of that period, my overall experience as such left me to this day readily warning anyone against engaging in the often-grueling work, regardless of being seasonally limited to about seven months. I tell them I found it too frequently a miserable job in which one’s income and quality of travel weather are dependent on blind luck.
But even being so forewarned, many guys will still jump right into it — with full independence from boss-control being a large motivator, I’d observed — if they’re able to procure a vessel, fishing gear and commercial salmon license.
(Contrary to popular belief, salmon set-gillnetting is not comparable to the notoriously insidious gigantic deep-sea driftnets that catch virtually every fish and mammal of every size in its vastly sweeping path. Set gillnets are typically twelve hundred feet long and thirty-six feet deep and require, amongst other adjustments, frequent towing.)
Admittedly, although I’ll not again seek such employment with its apathetic yet subliminally determinate rough-of-the-wilds uncertainties, I had enjoyed the freshest of air and even the rare net-full of salmon, amongst few other aspects of the job environment. However, the notable negatives accompanying the profession, at least for me, definitely outweigh the few positives. Yes, there are uncertainties, both good and bad, in every profession, but the commercial fisherman’s experience is especially unpredictable, atypically greatly wanting in both monetary and physical security.
You’ve no way of knowing whether you’ll make a requisite twelve, twenty-four or forty-eight hour boat trip through treacherously rough waters and not catch enough fish to make your expenses, let alone any sort of living; whether you’ll travel arduous hours to one side of a large island only to pick up one empty set after another in tall, rolling swells before, to your utter disappointment, you hear over the radio that the guys who’d remained on the other side are loading up five hundred salmon per set in beautifully calm weather conditions; or whether you’ll make it safely through a powerful fifty-knot wind that’s blasting the reef-, freighter- and deadhead-filled waters through which you’re journeying back home to your loved ones. You simply never knew.
Compacted into one unforgettable weekend in August of 1982 was my own bitter discovery of how stunningly bad the luck can get with commercial fishing.
From home base Steveston Harbour situated along the lower Fraser River, Dad and I had bucked an intense Georgia Strait westerly wind and strong tide all night to make a Sabine Channel set-gillnet opening the following morning. The weather was bad enough to require pulling back on the throttle every few moments to avoid ramping off of large waves, with the vessel’s hull planks then reverberatingly slamming down onto the watery trough following each formidable crest.
But the entire effort, not to mention the extra fuel burned and engine wear-and-tear because of the head-on bad weather, was literally for nothing; regardless of having had the perfect first set (i.e. the right tide, net position, wind direction), we still didn’t catch a single fish. After an hour of serious deliberation, it was decided that we’d immediately race back to the Fraser River where we’d be about four hours late for the 8 a.m. opening set, typically the most valuable and therefore disorderly.
Yet even considering our lateness, my father still felt that fact didn’t excuse the meager fifteen-sockeye catch in our first set, which nevertheless should’ve been the most fruitful of the opening due to, again, just-right salmon-catching conditions. Rather, my father found that set’s unusually small catch to be another notable disappointment and worrisome indicator of a problematic lack of sockeye-return-run stock. It was a concern that largely dictated Dad’s decision to have us quickly change nets, then make the thirteen-hour boat run to Vancouver Island’s lower west coast in time for the twelve-hour opening there (precisely 6:30 p.m. to 6:30 a.m.).
There, after picking up the important “dark set,” which typically lasted about seven hours, we held a depressingly negligible six salmon (five pinks and a four-pound “jack spring”). It was yet a third bitter break that had my father again perceiving a no-fish-around scenario as we sat, rolling to and fro, listening at two in the morning to varied sources of hearsay as well as factual numerical data transmitted over different radio channels.
Had it not been for some static-laced thus likely misunderstood information about an alleged one-day extended opening back on the Fraser River — where catches had later significantly improved, although accompanied by very bad weather that night — we would’ve remained on the Island’s west coast, if only because of a complete want of reasonable alternatives.
The value of our weekend twenty-one fish cargo? A few cents short of $111. The corresponding expense in fuel, oil and wear and tear? Dad conservatively calculated it at $200.
Yet to indignantly exacerbate our already salted wounds, while travelling back to the River we would also learn (via DFO’s preliminary catch reports) that we had just barely missed significant catches at all three locations from which we’d just departed during that weekend. From Sabine Channel, then the Fraser River, and lastly the fruitful “morning set” hours (which can be as important, if not even more so, as the “dark set”) on the Island’s west coast following our exit for a phantom extended opening back on the River.
So as to not inadvertently besmirch Dad’s reputation as a (late) commercial fisherman, know that it wasn’t plain incompetence on his part that led us to such notable misfortune that weekend. He always made his fishing decisions based on his vast knowledge and experience: the directions and strengths of the tides and winds; essential lunar conditions; angle of set and net mesh size as well as its hue; uniquely sheltered and anomalous water-depth spots in which salmon prefer to remain thus accumulate in number; past successful and skunk-prone locations, all were primary factors upon which Dad based his fishing ‘moves.’ Simply put, we had experienced ‘the breaks’ at their worst, from what I’d witnessed as his deckhand for a decade and a half.
Yet even as a competent fisherman, sometimes it seemed that, having it in his core nature to work his hardest to procure a large catch, he’d end up trying too hard, to the point that he’d figuratively bang his head against the wall and get naught but, as with this example, a twenty-one fish-thus-net-loss weekend. Meanwhile, younger fishermen with maybe half Dad’s wit and putting in half the effort when it came to commercial salmon fishing would yield large catches, yet they’d take it easy by staying put in the same location. ...
HAVING exited Active Pass, we were about ten miles from the mouth of the Fraser River when my father confirmed via binoculars and radar that the alleged extended opening was indeed nonexistent. But he also confirmed that something else, and far more unique, was taking place in its stead; that in fact the most extreme form of a fisherman’s misfortune revealed itself to me for the first time.
A mile south of Sandheads Lighthouse were about a dozen gillnet vessels solemnly dragging the gulf floor for a body. Further on, we passed a tugboat slowly towing up the river to Steveston Harbour the capsized crushed hull of another gillnet vessel. We later learned that its missing old-timer skipper, who was well known to Dad, had been caught in the stormy weather while fishing the night before. Having rolled up the net onto the drum, the unfortunate though quite knowledgeable Japanese-Canadian fisherman, who was extensively familiar with The River’s ‘characteristics,’ futilely attempted to reach sheltered waters on The River.
Three days later, his life-jacket-laced lifeless form was happened upon drifting off of Gibsons. Of course, the life jacket, which was all he had the chance to retrieve during the crucial moment, did nothing to insulate him from the deathly cold of the open water.
Although we had no catch to count as any form of blessing, my father nonetheless reminded me that it could’ve been us who’d met that fisherman’s freezing, lonely demise. Nonetheless, as far as I was concerned, especially as a youngster with perhaps typically misplaced values, simply having survived our totally fruitless helter-skelter attempt at ‘making a living’ was no consolation in the least. We had travelled so much and tried so hard while wasting resources, yet we only managed an eighty-nine-dollar deficit to show for it all.
