The Fisher Queen (18 page)

The whole bay was buzzing with anticipation of the opening in two days that people desperately hoped would compensate for the miserable spring and sockeye season. Weather reports predicted good weather for July 1 and we were swept up in a flurry of preparations for a 10-day trip in our new neighbourhood. While Paul tied miles of red gear I ran back and forth between the laundry room and our cranked-up stove, preparing pots of stew, chili and spaghetti sauce and putting them down in the ice in plastic containers so I could focus on pulling gear and dressing fish on the grounds.

As much as I loved the familyness of Bull Harbour, I loved the energy of Winter Harbour and had even spotted a few girls my age—we'd smiled and waved happily. During a laundry jaunt I met one of the girls I'd seen on a big steel troller, and within minutes Cheryl and I became best friends. As we sat on our washers, then the dryers, we poured out our life stories, and we soon toured each other's boats, met each other's skippers and planned a communal dinner for that night with four other boats.

She and Craig were just pals, and as much as she loved fishing and was a fantastic deckhand, the rough west coast waters were cooking up a level of seasick she'd never experienced, and she refused to give in to it. There was a genuine camaraderie and respect between them, and Craig shared with us that night that a top-notch female deckhand was worth more than any transgression, no matter how lonely or hormone-driven he might be. He had a girlfriend at home and was out there to make money, not mess around.

The same could not be said for all the fishermen with female deckhands, especially Dirty Ol' Frank, who had a reputation as long as the fishing rod he liked to brag about and had offered to every girl who trod his deck. Some ran screaming or crying or angry from the old codger, but at age 74 he had met his match.

One of the four boats invited to dinner was Frank's, and though he deferred to the young folks, his deckhand, the buxom, blond Danni, happily accepted. We had met briefly at the beginning of the season in Port Hardy, and when Paul had recovered from gawking, he told me that she was in for it with the old bugger. Two months later she was still with him, more strapping than ever, and as soon as was decent, Cheryl and I took her out to the stern of Craig's boat.

“So, Danni, we were wondering how things are going,” I said, taking a sip of my beer and reaching up to light her cigarette. “Everything okay?”

“Us girls have to stick together,” Cheryl said, opening Danni a beer. “We just want to make sure Frank isn't giving you a hard time . . . you know. You can tell us.”

“I'm just fine, don't worry,” Danni said and flashed her Colgate smile. “For the first few weeks he was good as gold, talking about how he was getting older and that I was totally safe with him and he thought of me as a daughter. That part was fine, but what was really starting to bug me was that we hardly ever went fishing. One excuse after another and I needed money for school and I just wanted to get the hell on with it and not be on a holiday.”

“Well, people have been rolling their guts out for the last two months for nothing, so you haven't been missing anything,” I said.

“So did he try anything?” Cheryl said, frowning.

“One morning, after staying tied up for three days, Frank came up from the fo'c'sle completely dressed, including gumboots, but minus his pants and gaunch and says, ‘How about you come join me down in my bunk?'”

“Oh my God, naked?” I snickered.

“Yup, with his little-old-man dick hanging down below his flannel shirt.”

“What did you do?” Cheryl asked.

“I said, ‘Frank, get back down there and put your pants on right now or I'll beat the shit out of you,' and he just stands there with his mouth open, staring, then shuffles downstairs and comes back up, pants on, and asks me what I'd like for breakfast. I said, ‘I'd like to catch some fucking fish or I'm off this boat.' So he says, ‘We'll go out after breakfast,' and we've been out there ever since.”

Cheryl and I burst out laughing and damn near choked on our beer. We kept laughing harder and harder 'til the three of us were hanging off each other and staggering around the deck. It must have been an inspiring sight, because several older fishermen watched, enraptured, from their decks and the float.

Danni could have broken him in half over her knee. After the incident he was as meek as a lamb as she worked him relentlessly and wouldn't let him take harbour days unless the weather was life threatening. He followed her with puppy-love eyes and treated her like a queen, gave her an extra bonus after each trip and upped her share to 15 percent. And when eyebrows were raised at that well-known signal, he tut-tutted and said there was none of that business and she had earned it fair and square and then some—that she ran a tight ship and had made him into an honest man.

His cabin was spotless, she wouldn't allow drinking on board, cooked only healthy food and made him cut way down on his smoking. He even cleaned up his language and no longer made lewd comments about every female within eyeshot—when he had, she'd given him one of her thunderbolt looks and a lecture on respect and equality. She had overheard him once say that if only he had met a woman like that when he was younger, he would have walked the straight and narrow and been a major highliner.

After we collected ourselves enough to join the others, we shared the best we had to create a royal feast of fish and crab and mussels fresh from the sea, wine and special coffees—every lovely little treat we had secreted away on our boats. We toasted life and love and loads of coho and laughed and talked and sang the night away, weaving back to our boats with the birds. We had a whole day to recover and anchored in a quiet clutch behind the last island before The Gut, ready to fling ourselves into the morning.

Calm out there may have been like rough in Bull Harbour, but we were catching fish! Hallelujah, we were catching fish: 30 or 40 coho a day and a couple of springs, which made the rodeo-ride through The Gut every morning worth it. Hell, up at the Yankee Spot we had been banging around just about as bad and going broke for the privilege of it. I got used to my feet leaving the ground with every wave just outside the channel, but by the time we were 10 miles offshore, trolling up to Sea Otter Cove and back, it was usually sunnier and calmer. For a couple of days, just long, slow swells came down from the north, which meant they must have had a mother of a storm up there the day before.

We had been hitting it hard for nine days: running in every night to anchor either in Sea Otter or behind the channel island in Quatsino, usually around 10 p.m., doing a cleanup before falling into bed, then up at 4:30 a.m. for a morning bite. We were almost relieved when the weather started to really kick up and the fishing slowed down. We ran into Winter Harbour to sell our load and wait out the string of southeast storms they said was coming.

I had dressed every fish except the springs for most of the trip. My time was down to 45 seconds a fish—I was training myself for the hump opening coming up August 1, just three weeks away. We might pull in a couple of hundred fish a day; what the little humps lost in value, at just a couple of bucks apiece, they made up for in volume. My hands were small and I was fast as hell, and we'd already decided that when humps opened, Paul would pull and ice and I would dress and drop.

Waiting all day to unload would normally be an agony of frustration when the fish were running and the weather was good, but today for once the timing was perfect: it was blowing like hell on the outside and we needed a harbour day anyhow. Our tally had come in at just under $3,000, the best yet, but it would be just enough to cover the boat mortgage back payments (which couldn't be extended one more month), get the unreliable pilot fixed in Port Hardy so I could pull gear instead of steer, and pay for fuel and groceries at the outrageously inflated camp prices. How many times would we have to tell ourselves that next trip we would start getting ahead?

Over coffee and cigs with Craig and Cheryl at Shirley's Diner, we bitched about our pilot and how we would get it to Port Hardy, and in a flash Craig had the solution: he had to drop off Cheryl in Port Hardy and pick up his new deckhand, so he would take his boat to Coal Harbour, where he had left his truck, then drive all of us to Port Hardy. It was only 30 miles east and back again, an overnight stay on his boat and back the next day. We knew Craig well enough to know we were in for a wild and crazy couple of days. We were not disappointed.

Led Zeppelin blasting, we emerged from Winter Harbour's inlet to a full-on southeast gale blowing into the back of Quatsino Sound that we rocked and rolled and smoked our way across. Luckily, the pot in those days didn't paralyze you with paranoia, and it eased the crossing into Quatsino Inlet—along with the go-go dancing on the deck to Steppenwolf's “Born To Be Wild.” We were invincible as wave after wave came over the bow, and we sang harmony to the storm's roar, our blood howling in our veins. Winding through the inlet, we finally shot through the narrows and across to Coal Harbour as slack tide shifted and the whirlpools began to spin again, just like one of those old Jason and the Argonauts movies where gods and demons test them relentlessly.

We piled all four of us into the front seat of Craig's truck and drove the 30-mile neck of land between the west and east coasts of Vancouver Island and went to raise hell in Hardy. We ran into everyone we knew in the world, and drank too much, ate too much, danced too much and laughed too much for any mortal being. But since we were immortal, the rules of this world didn't apply to us, and after a final goodbye to the fantastic band from Seattle that we'd closed down every bar in town with, we wove our way back to Coal Harbour. After a brief nap, gallons of orange juice and a mountain of Aspirins, we motored back to Winter Harbour and our wee bunks, subdued and deeply satisfied.

And as we sat together after dinner on our boat with Craig and his new deckie, Alex, a brilliant flash of emerald green and ruby red streaked through our open window and fluttered its tiny humming self against the front window. I reached my cupped hands to the creature, and as it touched my palms, it suddenly lay still, and I was transfixed with the miracle of its exquisiteness. Moving slowly through the hush I stepped onto our deck and lifted my hands as the bird shot upward and spun itself toward the setting sun.

When it is only 4:30 in the
morning, and the wind keens and clangs through your rigging, it is a bad sign. When you are still tied to a wharf in a sheltered harbour, and your boat shifts and strains around you, it is a very bad sign.

My damp, chilly shelf of a bed was a thousand times preferable; bankruptcy, starvation, even homicide, were preferable to what I knew waited for us just around the corner—a howling Grey Beast with a taste for wood and bones raging down the inlet, flinging itself against the sheltering wooded walls of that tiny harbour. And who would be foolish enough to pit themselves against this monster? Fisherfolk . . . desperate with worry and exhaustion.

The gods and government had conspired to set a deadly stage: no fish, terrible weather, closures, strikes, cutbacks, rocketing interest rates and falling fish prices. People took bigger and bigger risks, hoping for the miracle that would pay their mortgage and feed their kids. Many would drown in debt, in liquor, in despair. Some would be eaten alive by the Great Grey Beast that waited for us all.

Paul said we couldn't afford to take another harbour day—we were flat broke, “not a goddamned nickel left,” even in the change jar. Ours was not the only tab discreetly kept in the camp accounts, but it might have been the longest. We were going out and that was final. So I was just to shut up and go below if I couldn't stand it. But of course I had to stand it; what else could I do but pray and go numb?

I was ashen before we even ran The Gut—a churning, rock-infested channel that spits you out into the inlet or open ocean, depending on which way you are going. It must be what the gates of hell look like. Everything was black and bilious, and I couldn't tell where the sky ended and the water began. I couldn't imagine it could get worse until the erratic sharp waves crested white and started crashing over our bow. First thing you learn about the west coast: it can always get worse.