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Fishing for Rockfish

Contrary to popular belief, it isn’t cheap to live in the wilderness. We needed money. That winter we asked everyone in the inlet if they needed any help or had any jobs that we could do for them. Ray Reese was a commercial fisherman who lived in Finn Bay, right across from neighbours Ken Moore and Gus Erickson. He came over to Sunshine Bay one day to discuss getting our help to commercially fish for rockfish. It was January though and not the best time to be going out on the high seas in his pint-sized green wooden boat but George thought it was a good idea, mainly because we could really use any money that we could make. I figured that Ray, at fifty-eight years of age, knew quite a lot about the weather and waves and what his boat, the Janet, was capable of handling, or he wouldn’t still be around. We decided to become temporary commercial fishermen.

We started working with Ray at his place in Finn Bay the afternoon before we would go out on the fishboat. There were a lot of details that needed to be organized ahead of a fishing trip. We had to get all the hooks and lines out and coil them carefully into buckets, then prepare small chunks of frozen squid and herring by the bucketful, ready to be hooked onto the lines as bait. We made sure our rain gear was all there and ready to be jumped into. Rain jacket, bib rain pants, knee-high gumboots and a big black sou’wester. We fuelled the Janet with diesel and put a jug of drinking water on board, made sure all knives were sharp and the gaff was hanging within reach. These preparations took several hours and we headed home by 3 PM so we wouldn’t have to travel back to Sunshine Bay in the dark.

When we got back to our house, I raced in to get the stove heated so I could make supper. I contemplated making out my will. It wouldn’t take long. I started cooking brown rice by Braille while George worked on lighting the lamps as the darkness filled the cabin. I was not feeling confident with the fishing plan. Ray wanted to have a large tank on board that he would fill with salt water as we travelled. He wanted to keep the rockfish alive because they would be worth more. His plan was to travel to Port Hardy as soon as the tank was full of fish. We were really relying on his expertise here and thought he knew what he was doing. We ate our dinner of rice and canned fish and went to bed early. We would have to travel in the dark to Ray’s place so we could leave there by 5 AM for the fishing grounds.

There are two things that I dislike more than travelling in a small boat and that is travelling in a small boat in:

1 freezing weather

2 the dark

Ray’s float was tied up in Finn Bay about four miles from ours, a long cold trip in the dark. George was driving our small skiff very slowly in case there were any logs or rocks in our way. Even when it is pitch dark, you can still make out the shape of the shoreline and we followed the shore as much as possible, but at times that was even scarier because we knew there were reefs of rocks in several places between our house and Ray’s. I actually felt a little relief when we finally stepped onto the larger Janet and chugged out of Finn Bay toward Fitz Hugh Sound.

The Janet was a very slow, roly-poly boat and with the swell that was working its way into Fitz Hugh Sound from the open water, we were dipping and rolling and dipping and rolling all the way out. The cabin of the Janet was designed for one person, with a small bunk in an area that was ahead of the steering wheel and down a couple of steps. Tools, batteries and emergency cans of food were stored under and above the bunk. Ray had his little oil stove going, and with the heat and the rolling and the horizon disappearing I didn’t last very long inside the warm cabin. Holding on to anything I could grab, I made my way up the back steps and out onto the deck. This wasn’t much better because diesel fumes would envelop me and make me gag. Occasionally, a gust of fresh air would swirl around me and I would gulp it down as fast as I could.

Diesel fumes remind me of all the times that I took the bus in Winnipeg after we moved there when I had just turned thirteen and had to lunge at the back door to get off before I threw up. I would walk a mile, breathing the fresh air and then catch the next bus that came along. Sometimes it took three buses to get home. Sadly, there was no getting off this bus—we just kept chugging along toward Calvert Island. I don’t think I need to remind you about how cold it was sitting on the back deck. It was January and the salty spray that blew up from the boat’s wash froze onto the windshield, the fishing gear and me.

Ray finally slowed the boat down and came out on deck to get the gear going. No one had come out to make sure I was still there. I’m sure they knew that I would be holding on for dear life. Or they were very deep into a good story. Ray was full of them. At one time Ray was a heavy drinker. He was one of the old-timers who helped his neighbour and friend Gus Erickson (more about him later) drink large crocks of homemade beer. He didn’t have far to go at the end of the night so he had always made it home safely. One night, Ray was very drunk and very annoyed with his other neighbour, Ken Moore, who was running his generator for lights. The rumble of the engine was loud and clear, coming across the bay. Ray finally ran out of patience and shot out Ken’s living room light bulbs from his own float, one hundred yards away. Ray had been a sniper in World War II. He had wanted to be a paratrooper, but he had a bit of a heart murmur so they made him stay on the ground. It wasn’t long after shooting out Ken’s light bulbs that Ray decided he should quit drinking. Thankfully he wasn’t drinking when we were fishing with him.

George was steering and Ray started hooking small bits of bait onto the longline before he dropped the line overboard. I pulled big rubber gloves on and sat hooking up the bait as fast as I could to keep ahead of him. There was a Scotchman, or big bright coloured buoy, that went over with the end of the longline and floated on the surface so we could find the line later. We kept loading hooks and dropping them for several hours, and then Ray told George to switch with me so I could steer. Sitting in the captain’s seat and watching the horizon kept me from feeling ill, and I was able to steer for the rest of the short afternoon while George and Ray hauled in the lines using the net drum on the back of the boat.

We didn’t catch very many fish that whole day. Most of the fish that they brought in were dead. Rockfish do not do very well when they are brought up quickly from deep water. Their air bladder expands, sometimes right out of their mouth, and it doesn’t deflate. This did not bode well for Ray’s live tank. We headed back to Finn Bay and decided we might as well eat some of the fish since it had just been caught. Together we cooked up a delicious feast of deep-fried rockfish and chips that could not have tasted better or been fresher. Unfortunately, we ate most of what we caught, so we didn’t even cover the cost of fuel for the trip.

I was just about falling down I was so tired, but Ray wanted to show us how he was training his Brittany spaniel hunting dog to not be afraid of his gun. He sat at one end of his cabin and held the dog between his legs. Then he blasted away at the far wall while he held the dog down and we held our ears. He figured he had to do it until the dog didn’t flinch any more. The only way that was going to happen was when the poor dog went deaf from the noise or dropped dead from the fear.

Ray went on to become the oldest person at the time to become a helicopter pilot in Canada. He had always wanted to fly a helicopter and after a gold rush–type fishing season, in which he made boatloads of money, he bought one and enrolled in flight school. Living along the coast all his life and travelling exclusively by boat, he had never even had a driver’s licence. He had to have someone drive him to his classes. He passed all his tests and, after years of practice, was able to fly on his own. He built a new float that stuck out from his house float so that he could land his helicopter right in front of his home, which was still tied up in Finn Bay. At this time, commercial fishermen had a guaranteed income from what was then called unemployment insurance, so after fishing ten two-day openings throughout the summer they would be eligible for government cheques. He may have been the only person who regularly flew a helicopter to the post office to pick up his unemployment cheque. A few years later, Ray crashed the helicopter beside a mountain lake and was rescued a day later by John Buck, who flew his own float plane and landed on the lake. That was the end of Ray’s helicopter adventures.

As for us, it was the end of our fishing adventures. We went fishing for two more days and finally gave in to the sorry fact that we were not going to make any money at it. We helped Ray clean his gear and put it all away on the third afternoon and said goodbye to our Commercial Rockfish Caper. George and I could go out into sheltered water in our skiff and in an hour we could catch more fish than we caught in our three days of commercial fishing. We didn’t have refrigeration so we didn’t keep too many fish, just enough for a couple of meals plus a few pounds to salt for later use. We ate a lot of fish that we easily caught, and with the dry goods and tinned foods that we brought in on the freight boat, we never went hungry. We had enough money saved to buy oil for the stove and gas for the skiff, but we were looking forward to making money again when the steelhead season started and we would work for the fishing resort again.