Earthquake recalled / Phil gets fishing drag locations

No one knew that at that hour the gates of hell were about to be unleashed all along the coast, Anchorage in ruin, and within hours communities from Kodiak to Crescent City, Oregon devastated by tsunami,

While Phil and Tom tied up a few loose ends for the trip aboard the boat, Jon and I were sent up to the store to pick up a few groceries.  The pantry in the galley was already well stocked with what our mothers used to call the staples, canned goods, rice and pasta, condiments and spices; all the things that last forever on the shelf.  In addition the freezer was stuffed with packages of meat and ice cream, so our list wasn’t extensive, fresh produce for salad, ten pounds of potatoes and a bag of apples, a few rolls of paper towels, that kind of thing.  

Nearly all the ice had been salted off the concrete top of the floats as we made our way along the rows of boats pulling gently at their mooring lines in the still afternoon.  After the hilarity of the lunch stories in the galley, we walked along in silence toward the head of the docks.  The heavy rubble pile break water a hundred fifty feet to our left seemed so solid and tall that it was hard to imagine the night the tsunami rushed into town, sending some of the heavy boats up over into the streets, others careening off into the woods on a nearby island.  The quake itself scrambled things up pretty good over in Anchorage, and even in Seattle sixteen hundred miles south the earth moved, albeit imperceptibly.    

Good Friday, and the music director in the working class neighborhood church where my father was associate pastor took a notion to place the combined adult and youth choirs up in the balcony behind the congregation, our angelic voices calling out to the supplicants as if the very gates of heaven had cracked open for a quick preview.     No one knew that at that hour the gates of hell were about to be unleashed all along the coast, Anchorage in ruin, and within hours communities from Kodiak to Crescent City, Oregon devastated by tsunami, or tidal wave as it was still being called in those days.  Midway through evenings performance in our church, at a time when there was some sleepy droning sound of preacher’s voice coming from the chancel area I almost imagined that the heavy lights, hanging on black chains from bent wood beams high over the heads of the congregation were beginning to slowly sway in exact unison.  For a long half minute I thought it was my imagination. Years of subtle tortures, pinches and pokes and silent threats of ass paddling later had taught me to sit still in church, instantly entering a delightful fantasy land with the first word of prayer or sermon from the pulpit.  By teenage years a couple of the girls over in the alto section usually played a roll in these little trips, although on the night of the quake I had actually been staring at the lights trying to get them to move by mental energy alone.  It was a game that started at basket ball games, where I  tried mental experiments in which I was not sure whether or not my will could either sink the ball in the basket or cause it to rattle around the rim and bounce out.  Just as I decided that the lights were really swinging, proof at last that I did indeed have the power of mental kinesis, a slight movement to the left drew my gaze away from the lamps.  It was my brother, Justin sitting with the tenors further along the front row of the balcony to my left, looking especially ecclesiastical in the deep crimson choir robes on his knees in front of his seat, miming prayer and supplication to the Most High, mocking the apparent first movements of the long awaited end of time. 

A couple minutes had seemed like an hour, until Justin broke the tension and everyone snapped out of the belief that they were the only one to see the movement, and while no one said anything to interrupt the old boy on the platform in front of the congregation, droning out his sermon, a palpable sigh of relief went through the balcony as everyone realized that it was a mild quake, not their own personal vision.  After church folks gathered around open car doors listening to radio news of the devastation in Anchorage, and it was probably the next day when news of the tsunami began to filter in reporting the damage that occurred all along the coast.* 

Later that summer Jon had his first chance to go out with the men in the boat, flying out to Kodiak where he saw the devastation at first hand.  We were fascinated with his snapshots taken around town, a heavy fishing boat still laying over at an angle in the remains of a street, surrounded by remnants of the village that was in the process of being cleared.  By the next summer when he and I were there along the crew off the cannery boat a sort of strip mall down town had been completed, horse shoe of single story buildings around a parking lot, housing the essential businesses, two or three bars and a couple restaurants, probably clothing and hardware as well.  The grocery store was just across the far side of these buildings, hardly more than the length of a city block from the ramp that lead up from the floats,  and as we navigated our way past the piles of crusted dirty snow plowed up at the ends of the parking rows I came out of my private reverie and asked Jon about fishing.

“Isn’t this the first season you guys have been fishing for shrimp around here, how did Phil figure out where to find the fish?  Seems like it would be easy to drag the net up over a rock pile and loose the whole thing and I wouldn’t put it past some of the locals to deliberately set their net just under the surface and draw a new comer in to the snags.”

“It was kind of cleaver,” Jon started into a story that went something like this.  Each year, before the start of the shrimp season, Fish and Game  let out a contract for a boat to do test fishing throughout the area so that they could get some data on fish stocks in order to set the quota for this year’s allowable catch. Knowing that the biologists were going to need samples from the best fishing drags in the area, Phil put in a very low bid and got the contract.  The boat may lose money that week, but the experience was going to pay off later.

Now, a fishing skipper’s log is the notebook in which a careful record is kept of each drag, location and depth, currents at different tides as well as the amount of the catch along with the date.  One place may be good on a flood tide, but suck on the ebb, or not so good early in the season, but come on strong later.  Location of rocks and snags are also valuable information to know when you are dragging several thousand dollars worth of gear along the bottom fifty fathoms under the keel of the boat.  Valuable business property that is not freely shared with the competition, especially a new boat coming into a particular fishery.

The test fishing contract put a twist into things.  The biologist need to know where to look for the local shrimp stocks, so they went around to the top producing boats asking for the information from their logs.  They were over a barrel.  On the one hand the best fishing drags are considered secret information.  Sometimes a very small variation in location can mean thousands of dollars at the end of the week.  The place may be small, with a bonanza for a single boat or two, but would quickly be diluted down to nothing if the whole fleet were to pull their nets across the enclave of juicy jumbo shrimp, and it would be crazy to tell a competitor where to find the best fishing holes.  But on the other hand, if they only gave the biologist the coordinates for poor and mediocre drags,  they would come up with a lower quota for the fleet to catch that winter, costing everyone income that was much needed during the bleak times between salmon seasons.

Of course, in the process those closely guarded secrets instantly found their way into Phil’s newly compiled log book, and the boys had been bringing in loads of shrimp that were competitive with the top boats in the fleet.  Needless to say there were elements in the community who resented this strategy.  But business is business and with a family to feed at home and the expenses of running the old boat to consider, a guy had to do whatever he could to make a living.

Evening was quickly closing in the short mid winter day, re-freezing the crunchy snow in the less traveled edges of the walkway, and putting a glaze on the piles of dirty snow, sentinels to the snow plow that had been working these waters all winter.  Back in the Jack Moust finishing school days we had stopped in at a few of the smaller Alaskan villages where local grocery stores were like a trip back to my Grand Father’s day of tiny general merchandise establishments.  It was a nice surprise to come around the corner and find myself entering a large well stocked, brightly lit IGA.  Prices were higher than at home, but not by the margin that I would have expected.  We filled the shopping cart with a few perishable things for the trip, including a few quarts of ice-cream to replenish the stock in the freezer, and were quickly on our way back to the boat, two grocery bags each, where we found the main engine was already warmed up, deck lights blazing, everything ready to back away from the dock and begin the trip out to the grounds.

As the last guy hired into the crew, I had come with the expectation that they would show me the galley and apron, telling me when to have supper ready.  A couple years before I had spent the summer salmon season cooking for the crew of a purse seiner, and didn’t really mind the chore, but was kind of relieved to find the boys on the Commander didn’t really designate a particular person as cook.  With a small crew the cook is not excused from full duties on deck during the fishing operation, running back into the galley to rustle up some grub during lulls in the work.  The cook also has to be the first one to roll out of the bunk in the morning to get the galley range cranked up and have coffee and breakfast ready for the crew.  In the boat that I had worked on the tradition was that the cook did not have to climb down into the hold each evening to help unload the days catch. This was fair compensation for the extra work in the galley, even though I was kept busy the whole time dressing the Coho and King salmon that were mixed in with the catch, which we iced in the back crossing of the hold and sold for a higher price back in town at the end of the opening.

Cooking on the Commander  was a bit more informal.  Whoever took a notion would throw together a hot meal, skillfully managing pots and pans on the always hot radar range stove.  As we climbed over the side with the groceries the savory smell of roast beef wafted out the open port holes over the stove, announcing that dinner would be served as soon as we got under way.

*Another example of how ones best memories are incomplete.  A decade or so after I initially wrote this piece Tom started talking about the evening of the quake.  Until that moment I had no recollection that his family had been visiting town that weekend, and everyone including Norm and Simon had been at the church.  He remembered how us kids were skeptical of Simon's worry about Tsunami.  Goes to show how we live with the illusion that memory is similar to replaying a video tape, when it is anything but an exact recording.

Copyright 2012 - Paul Petersen

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