The Fisher Queen (21 page)

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.

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 forming 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 hump
s

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.

On the fifth day, the weather went lousy and the fish thinned out and so did the boats. Our wash-down pump broke down from running 18 hours a day, so we dressed 60 fish with buckets of water hauled over the side. We heard on the radio that there was some kind of commotion in Bull Harbour and they were looking for new managers, but when the reception went scratchy we could only speculate on what had happened.

I woke up the next morning feeling as dark and jumpy as the weather. We'd lost the fish and were scratching around with a handful of other boats when the call came over the radio telephone. “
Central Isle, Central Isle
, do you read me?” Dan's warm voice sounded tight and strained. Paul went into the cabin to answer and came out a different man.

“Paul, Paul, what's wrong?” I vaulted out of the cockpit and ran to the cabin doorway where he stood trembling and glassy-eyed.

“God, Syl, I don't know how to tell you,” he said, passing a hand over his eyes.

“What happened?” I grabbed the bib straps of his Hellys and stared up into his face, my heart pounding. “Is it my parents? My sister? Brother? Who?” I shook his straps to get the thing out of him I didn't want to hear.

“That was Dan. He just came from Bull Harbour. Jesus, Syl, Bob was killed falling into the ice auger two days ago and their son-in-law, Dave, had his arm chewed up and broken real bad trying to rescue him. Christ Almighty, their first clue that something had happened was the red ice coming out of the auger and into someone's hold.”

I sagged against him, my head spinning. It wasn't our relatives, but people who had become our family out there. “Oh my God, Paul, we just saw them a week ago. We had drinks with them. They gave us smoked salmon. I can't believe it. Poor Pat. Oh my God. Dave and his wife just got married this spring and she just told me she was pregnant. I can't stand it. That was his father-in-law and his own arm is ruined? God help those poor people.”

We held each other tight, wept out our shock and horror. It was always so close, like a shadow creeping behind you. It made no sense. Dan had survived a killing storm for 14 hours; Bob had slipped and fallen; Dave had caught his sleeve. There was nothing left to do but pull in the gear, go in early and pick up the groceries in Winter Harbour that Gerry had radioed us to bring him in Sea Otter Cove. The next day we would go out again.

Most people thought beautiful fish-tailed women lured you into danger, but for us it was a know-it-all old fisherman with a barking German accent that set our teeth and egos on edge. To add to our melancholy over the ice-auger tragedy, the weather was even more miserable and the fish even fewer. So when Mr. Highliner insisted that we too could catch a fortune in fish if we had the balls to come out to
the deep
or
blue water
, Paul took the tantalizing bait and followed the guy's massive steel boat straight out to the distant, dark, almost indigo waters more than 20 miles offshore.

At 75 fathoms and rough seas, we threw out the gear again and caught nothing but Brown Bomber rock cod. Then snarled up our gear while we rolled around for another hour, listening to the old German inform us we must be stupid if we couldn't catch fish that were right under our noses.

We picked up again and kept running out to 100 fathoms while I sat on the hatch cover and watched land speed away from us. My worry-voice whispered—
We are too far from land; this is not safe or good
—as land became a smudgy pencil line and the wind shrieked through our rigging and the waves got jumpier. I tried by sheer force of will to turn the boat around, to override the autopilot. No such luck. Paul was convinced we'd score big if we just kept on the tail of the alleged highliner. But I was familiar with the usual outcomes of these grandiose and often spontaneous schemes.

I couldn't take my eyes off the thinning smudge and felt anxious as a child watching her parent walk away. Paul noticed and said we'd just try it a little while, then turn back. I'd heard that one before too. Now I was bereft and resigned and threw any delusions about long-distance sailing I may have had overboard.