The Fisher Queen (5 page)

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 forgotten. “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.

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.

“Holy shit, Paul, it's Mother's Day! I can't believe we've only been gone five days. It feels like five months. Look, it's May 18th. I've got to get hold of Mum and Dad to let them know I'm okay. She will be freaking. Is there a phone at the camp I could use and reverse charges?”

“We'll have to see when we get there. The camp is barged in every year by tugs and things can change. Depends on who's managing and if they have a decent connection after that storm. Maybe you can ask the manager if you can use his phone real quick. He might be sympathetic to a cute girl who wants to call her mum on Mother's Day,” he said with a grin.

We did have some capacity for long-distance calls on our radio telephone, but it was incredibly expensive, especially to Clinton, in the Cariboo region of BC's interior where my parents had retired. It was only for extreme emergencies because the call would have to go through the Coast Guard and be patched into BC Tel. I had told my mum that if they ever received a patched call it would be very serious, which had reduced her to heartbreaking tears. There were other phones that could be patched straight into the telephone system, but they were a fortune and, needless to say, we couldn't afford one—or the calls.

My mother, who had suffered through countless sleepless nights over my adventures, had been completely beside herself when I told her and Dad that I was going commercial fishing with Paul up north. Whitewater canoeing for a weekend was one thing, but a boat in the middle of nowhere, where every imaginable (and she had a great imagination) thing could maim or kill you in an instant? That was more than she could bear. She had already seen and experienced unimaginable suffering and destruction growing up in northern Italy during the Second World War and knew all too well what could happen to a human being. And I was her baby, the first-born, her only link to my father when they were separated for long periods and distances in their early years together. She had already endured the loneliness and isolation as a beautiful young woman coming to Canada and living alone with a child in Edmonton, then fledgling Vancouver, while my father toiled in constant danger in remote lumber camps in northern Alberta, then northern Vancouver Island, before forming a successful construction company.