The Fisher Queen (7 page)

I heard my mother's sobs and her burbled “Let me talk, Laimon.” My calm resolve started to melt away. My eyes filled with tears at my father's voice and my mother's sobs and I swallowed over and over to keep my voice steady. My little sister was a mummy again and my throat ached with nostalgia. I was an auntie again and I had missed my niece coming into the world. I remembered the boundless joy of holding Jenny, Gay's firstborn, in my arms just two years before, still bloody and slippery from the womb. Tears escaped. That world and that life already seemed surreal, like that was the movie and this was real life.

“Sweetheart, it's Mum. I've been so worried about you; are you alright?” she sobbed. “Just before you called I was sitting in the living room and thinking of you and when I was pregnant with you in England. I just found out and was so happy and Daddy was so worried because he wanted to wait until we went to Canada to have a baby. But I wanted you so badly,
mia cara
, and there I was on Mother's Day, knitting you a little pink sweater,
piccola bella bambina
, because I just knew you would be a beautiful little girl. Born in January, my birthday present. And there you are now, grown up and so far away and doing something so dangerous. Are you okay? Tell me the truth. When am I supposed to say over?” Mum dissolved again in sobs, and with that came my own tears.

I didn't know radio telephones broadcasted to every single person dialled into that frequency, which in this case was every person in the fleet, plus anyone anywhere near the external speakers at the fish house. The manager and his wife had discreetly moved to the next room. It wasn't until Paul came into the office and signalled that it was time to end the call and we were walking down the long outside wooden stairway to the dock that he told me the reason people were snickering all along the way to our boat. I wasn't even remotely mortified, having grown up with an emotive mum, but laughed so hard I teared-up and could hardly climb onto the boat. Paul, a tad embarrassed, said people would be chuckling about the incident for days. I said I thought it was often safer to laugh over something than to cry, especially in this world where we had to keep a tight rein on our emotions.

I would come to understand how that became a survival mechanism for most people living dangerous lives.

We went to bed early, thinking that would give us the good night's sleep we would need for our first day of fishing. But sleep would elude us as we lay in our separate bunks, mine from excitement, his from worry.

My psychic requisition for our first day
of fishing must have gotten mixed up with someone else's, because instead of a beautiful calm day filled with spring salmon flying over the stern and into the checkers, we got someone's request for a day in hell. There is an old Yiddish proverb that says:
If you want to make God laugh, make a plan.
God was having a real knee-slapper.

We tiptoed out of Bull Harbour at 5:30 a.m. with a few other brave souls who decided to tough out the reports of rising wind and seas coming down from the north. Hitting Goletas Channel after the sheltered calm of the bay was like being grabbed off the sidewalk and thrown onto a roller coaster. Massive rolling waves shoved their way down the narrow channel from the open seas beyond, angered by the sudden shallows of Nahwitti Bar at its mouth.

“Jesus, it's gonna be a rough ride out to the grounds. Hang on. You okay?” Paul quickly glanced over to see me already positioned like a sumo wrestler in the wheelhouse, feet apart and knees flexed, arms spread, hands clutching the dashboard. I knew all about keeping my balance and protecting my joints: stay loose, flexed, stable, and keep breathing, deep and slow. “I'm okay.”

“It'll get better once we're over this fucking bar. We'll go straight out a couple of miles to where the shelf drops off at 50 fathoms, that's where feed gathers, and we'll turn west and start trolling along the edge. It's called the Yankee Spot and runs all along the top end of the Island. There's another fishing grounds about 12 miles offshore. Hey, did you take the coffee pot off the stove and put it in the sink? Okay, good. Anyway, that one is called the Steamer Grounds. The weather gets pretty wild out there and it's a long run in.”

“So what can I do today?” I was relieved that at least there wasn't big wind along with the big waves, but the lowering gunmetal sky seemed to be preparing for some kind of assault.

“If the pilot holds out, you can come out to the stern and help lay out the gear in the cockpit, but I just want you to watch while I set out the gear and pull it in. You've got to know what you're doing back there or you can get into a hell of a mess and the gear is a fortune. One box of a dozen flashers is 57 bucks, and we can use 60 or 70 at a time.”

“I've seen the bills. We've already spent almost $2,000 on gear. I'll be careful, I promise.”

“When we get near the edge in a few minutes, I'm going to slow down to quarter-speed for trolling, about two or two and a half knots, depending on waves and current. You're going to keep the bow straight into the waves so we can be as stable as possible while I drop the poles. In heavy seas like this it can be very tricky, so we have to do this quick. When the stabies are in the water it'll be safe to turn the boat broadside to the waves. I'll come back in and set the pilot and hope the bloody thing works, and you can come out the stern and help me set gear. Okay . . . here we go. You ready? Get up on the seat here and take the wheel.”

Heart pounding, I focused on riding straight into the looming swells.
I can do this. I can do this.
I would do my part to keep us safe while he did his.

It was very unusual to run with stabilizers unless it was deadly rough, as they slowed the boat down and ate up fuel with their heavy drag through the water. When trolling they were mandatory and settled down the boat considerably, not only with the 40-pound stabilizer boards in the water dragging on chains, but with the two 40-foot stabilizer poles, which were tied by ropes attached to cleats on the mast; they dropped the weight and centre of gravity down to about 45 degrees.

We had to let the stabilizers and their complex system of ropes and pulleys up and down by hand. They were so heavy I could let them out only by inching out the rope still wrapped once around the cleat, but I couldn't bring them up from the flattened position. If the rope got away from us, especially in rough waters, and if the pole dropped to the end of its ropes, we could tear up rigging and bust the bolts fixing it to the deck. We had to let them out smoothly and quickly, one after the other with just one of us or simultaneously if there were two of us, because just having the one side down destabilized the boat—especially dangerous in rough seas. If one set of ropes broke or tangled, we had to balance out with the other pole in the same position.

Typically you ran from your anchorage if you were pulled in for the night in sheltered waters or if you were tied up at a wharf. Usually you would go from anchorage straight out to the grounds, running with poles up, then slow down to trolling speed while still heading out, especially if you were nearing a whole grid pattern of boats trolling over a hot spot. If you had a good pilot, you would set it going straight out then lower your poles right away. If it was really rough, you slowed it down to half-speed because moving forward faster kept you more stable. If it was really, really rough, you always set the pilot straight into the waves, and if it was super rough, someone would have to steer into the waves—like now.

Paul quickly stepped aside as I flipped up the steering seat, braced myself against it and gripped the heavy wooden wheel. Never taking my eyes from the dark water crashing over our bow, I heard him grunt a final okay and the cabin door slam. Felt the whir and vibration of the rope running through the pulleys and knew Paul had started. I had done this before but not in such heavy seas, and when the boat lurched to one side as the pole and stabie went down, my heart kicked up a notch, waiting for the whir of the second rope. Any twist or knotting in the ropes would hang it up, and I knew enough to know that we would be in serious trouble. I rolled my shoulders and breathed deeper.

The clunk and splash and righting of the boat created an odd sensation of a slow-motion roller coaster and I thanked my genes again for my absence of nausea. Paul was back in the wheelhouse, pretty revved up.

“Okay, all done, you did great. Now get your rain gear on and go out to the stern and wait for me in the cockpit. Don't touch anything. It's pretty rolly, so be careful, especially getting into it—it's a long way down for you. I'm going to turn west onto the tack and set the pilot and keep an eye on it from the stern controls. There's hardly anybody out here to run into and we're pretty clear of pinnacles and reefs in this area. If the pilot fucks up you'll have to come back and steer.”

It was rough and cold and miserable, but I was excited as hell getting into my shiny orange Helly Hansens. I already had on four layers of cotton and wool and leotards under my jeans and to that I added two pairs of grey wool work socks and black heavy-soled gumboots. The small-size bib overalls cinched tight and the hooded jacket had already been adjusted as much as possible to fit my 5-foot-3-inch self, with the bib ending up at my neck and the sleeves folded up twice. For now the trailing waste strap would wrap around me once. As I melted away over the months, it would wrap twice. The red toque I had crocheted for the trip completed the ensemble.

A cautious crab-walk got me to the stern in the heavy side-roll, where I carefully knelt on the lidded checkers (we would undoubtedly fill them with fish today) and slid down into the starboard side of the cockpit that I had decided would be my side. By then Paul had swung us into our westward tack and I watched the sullen, low shore slip by. Offshore there was an odd, dark density that seemed too low for clouds and too close for horizon.

I was grateful it had been so lovely the day before but sincerely hoped this bipolar spring weather would settle down soon. I had yet to learn that the North Coast never settled down and was as quixotic as the people were courageous.

“Okay, let's hope the pilot holds out. Jesus, you're in no danger of falling out.” Paul laughed and took the lid off the wooden gearbox running along the back of the checkers. “You're up to your armpits in here. This is what you can do—get the gear ready for me. Remember how we stowed each rolled-up line of Perlon and lures and clipped it together with the snap? I want you to carefully unroll them by holding the snap and gently throwing the rest behind the boat to trail in the water, then snap it to the wire nailed across the cap rail. You have to make sure it's clipped on tight or you'll lose it and that's 5 or 10 bucks down the tubes. Line a few up and I'll start setting the gear.”

“If I watch you set your side, can I set mine?”

“No, not today. You're always in such a rush to do things. Take it easy.”

I knew it was pointless to insist. We worked together in concentrated silence as he explained how BC boats could drag six steel lines through the water, three on each side, weighted down with a lead cannonball weighing between 25 and 70 pounds. Ours were 40 pounds and stored in cup-shaped metal holders bolted to the side cap rail, a long reach from the cockpit when setting gear. Each 1/16-inch steel line of up to 150 fathoms (six feet to the fathom) was held on a hydraulic drum called a gurdy, three to a side, which played out one line to a system of bells and triggers spaced along the pole. The lines were submerged and set with gear one at a time, starting with the bowline, then the midline, then the pig line, so named because of the two-by-three-foot rectangular Styrofoam float attached at the line's midpoint, which caused it to swing out and keep the lines apart in the water.

As Paul slowly played out each steel line from the gurdy, its cannonball descended to a depth calculated by the number of sets of two metal beads fixed to the wire at one to three fathoms along the line. Each piece of gear was clipped between the two beads by its snap and gently trailed in the water, one after the other. When fully set, a troller resembled a butterfly above the water, while below, set 5 to 10 fathoms above bottom, it trailed scores of twirling lures that mimicked herring and the colourful, squidlike hoochies that were the spring salmon's dinner. The depth sounder in our cabin continuously flashed numbers that could mean bottom, fish, sunken wreck, reef, pinnacle or anything else its signal hit on the way down.

Bells on the stabilizer poles' rigging could signal a
smiley
, slang for a spring salmon over 12 pounds. But sometimes the bells didn't work and your fish got beat up by being dragged, or were eaten by seals, or if they weren't in season, died before you could shake them off. A good fisherman kept the gear moving up and down all day to simulate a school of feed, or feed ball moving in all directions, instead of just swimming in a straight line.