Older generation's salmon fishing stories

“Think I was run over by a bus; give me some of that coffee.”

Jon raised his eyebrows quizzically over the ladle full of pancake batter he was spooning into the large cast iron pan in the middle of the radar range, “What happened to you last night?”  

“Think I was run over by a bus; give me some of that coffee.” 

Dull winter light, grey sky hanging low cutting into the hills behind the town had given over to a light rain, washing the traces of the snow out of the nooks and crannies in the boat’s rigging.  Bacon sizzled in a pan behind the partly open oven door, eggs were cracked into another pan as the hotcakes bubbled and steamed.  Grabbing my mug I retired to my place at the table to wait for my turn for a plate of Jon’s good cooking.  

“Ran into a guy from the old Kayak days in the bar last night.  He was with us in sixty eight I think it was, you only went that one year, right?” 

Jon looked up from his plate and nodded.  The pancakes and eggs were acting along with the coffee to pull me out of the morning stupor.

 “He poured me full of strong drink, then dragged me around to the topless bar.  Geeze what a hell hole.”

“Stay of there,” reaching for his Ovaltine jar Tom tossed the advice my way, “we have heard of guys waking up the next morning with their wallet missing, not knowing what hit them.”

“Looked to me like the guys who go in there were just giving their money away freely, no need to hit anyone on the head.  Odd kind of place really, everything made up to look so exotic, then when the girls start talking it is like down home reunion with old friends and family.”

The conversation quickly slipped in other directions before getting into the issue of whether or not any of them had frequented the place, or just heard rumors from the safety of the higher class bar where we had started the evening.    

“Fred from the Jay said he poked his nose out yesterday afternoon and the weather was still savage, but it may be coming down tomorrow,” Phil looked up from reading the morning papers, “we better get out on deck this morning and have a look at the net.”

Tom added, “I saw a couple places in the wings that tore up during the last couple sets, and we also need to fix the lashings on some of the splitter line rings.”

Still regretting Cal’s whiskey I put my plate in the sink and stepped out into the hallway to pull on my boots and rain gear while Tom climbed down the engine room ladder and cranked up the main engine and set the hydraulic system rattling through the hull as a few air bubbles purged themselves from the pipes and hoses.

By the time I got outside Jon had taken the single block line and attached it to the corners of the net so it could be pulled up and forward, then lowered to deck level where we could spread the webbing out for inspection and repairs.   

Two tools are essential for net repair.  First is the fisherman’s best friend, a very sharp pocket knife.  I always carried a single locking blade jack knife that was made very flat for comfort in my pocket.  Sheath knives never appealed to me because I hated to have anything hanging from my belt, seemed always get in the way by catching on something.  The other tool a one uses is the net needle.  Unlike the needles in mom’s sewing basket, the net needle is made from plastic and is built in a way that allows for a long length of hanging twine to be wrapped around the middle, with two sides that come together in a point at the front, with enough flexibility to allow the string to be fed out from the spool in the middle as needed.  As the lashing string is wound around a rope, or made into knots to repair reps on the web, the needle also acts as a handle with which you can pull the string tight to secure the lashings.

I never learned to do more than lash the ropes together, hang web on the lead and float lines, and do a quick and dirty web repair that we called “koozing”, zig-zag of twine through a tear that held the the net together as a temporary fix.  A practiced hand can remove the frayed ends of rips and sew new meshes in place, to effect a total repair of the damaged area.  But with the prospect of maybe one quick trip out before we loaded the net in the fish hold and headed for home, no one was about to take the time to do any real repairs in the net this morning.  By lunch time, with the sky darkening again, the light mist of rain that dampened things all morning beginning to give way to a wind driven down pour, the quick fixes had been completed and the entire net rolled back on the drum, lines fixed in place ready for the next set, and we beat a hasty retreat back to the warmth of the galley for a light lunch and relaxing afternoon.

“You know Jon,” Phil begun after clearing the last of the Campbell’s chicken noodle soup from his bowl with the end of his bologna sandwich, “our great uncle Captain Weeding was the first guy to ship fresh halibut by rail in ice cars from Seattle back to Chicago.  Really opened up the fish markets all up and down the coast.”

“The old man never said anything about that, when was this?”

“I don’t know, around the turn of the century, maybe a little before.  When Burger was dying we went over to see him and there was a photograph of a bunch of guys on deck of the boat, and he showed me granddad Edwards and three of the older boys who were in the crew.  In those days they carried dories that were rowed out away from the ship where the fish were pulled on hand lines.  Must have been brutal work.”

We all knew about the Grand Banks fisheries, Captain’s Courageous having been a staple of high school reading for guys like us with imaginations usually far out at sea during English and Literature classes.  But that was the first time anyone had mentioned that fishing for bottom fish out of dories, twenty foot flat bottomed row boats, had also been a part of the history of the history in our neck of the woods.  True, I had heard the story about a couple guys who sailed their open dories from Alaska down to San Francisco for the Panama-Pacific Exposition, but didn’t make the connection to halibut fishing with dories and hand lines. 

The conversation stirred up a vivid memory of a dream I had a few years before in which Jon and I were crew members in a sailing ship, fishing off the southeast Alaskan coast.  The dream took place in the larger ship, not the dories, and for some reason seemed to be centered around Jon and I rummaging around in a storage locker that opened from the side of the deck house, looking for the correct bits of line to use for some job to which we had been assigned.

Realizing that hearing a pointless story about a dream is mind numbingly boring, I ventured the question, “what ever happened to this Captain Weeding anyway?”

“Kind of a funny story,” Phil went on, clearly in the mood to entertain us with some interesting family history, “it seems that when the early cars begun appearing on the streets down town in Seattle the Captain used to play a game in which he stood very still in the street as a car came down the hill, pretending to be waiting for it to pass.  Then just as the car was beside him he hooked his arm around the end of the windshield and swung himself into the passenger seat next to the driver.” (The old man actually told me that part of the story many years later.)

Possibly for emphasis, maybe just to clear his pallet after the soup and sandwiches Phil stopped the story long enough to forage through the cellophane wrapper over a fresh tray of bear claws before continuing.

“Used to get big laughs from everyone hanging out at the corner waiting for the next street car, but then one day something went wrong.  He slipped and went under the wheels of the car, killed stone dead right there in the middle of first avenue. Threw half of the community of Cove out of work.  That’s when our family got into the trolling business.”

Tom chimed in, “not trolling!  I never thought any of the Edwards boys would go out in one of those little spider trap boats.”

He always called trolling boats spider traps because small boats that spent a good deal of the time, sometimes years on end without ever leaving the dock, or even being maintained by their owners were prime habitat for spiders, webs cress crossing every available space.  Simon had told us kids that the trollers were a bunch of crazies, going way out on the ocean in flimsy little boats without adding the information that he knew what it was like from personal experience.  

“Not only that,” Phil was getting into gear now, “it was Burger who invented power trolling, before he came along the old square heads rowed skiffs around towing a few hand lines.”

  .   .   .   .  . 

An artisan of the oral tradition, Phil relied on shared experience to fill in most of the background details of the story.  Trolling, as a method of fishing is very different from the trawling we were doing with the Commander, despite the similarities in the sound of the two words.  Rather than using a heavy net to capture or ensnare fish, the troller uses a series of hooks and lures similar to sport fishing tackle, except that each boat may tow a hundred baited hooks at a time and the gear is significantly stronger.  With a few exceptions, trollers limit their efforts to chasing after the more valuable species of salmon, king and Coho.  When carefully handled, gutted and washed and layered into flake ice in the fish hold, these fish fetch a premium price at market that, when coupled with the lower overhead from a smaller boat and minimal crew makes trolling potentially lucrative, providing the skipper puts maximum effort into his operation.

The name ‘troller’ refers to the mythical creature, with much more Folketro history than just living under bridges scaring Billy goats.  The connection probably goes only as far as the almost mystical relationship the troller has with his prey, having to coax the elusive salmon into biting a bated hook, rather than encircle the fish with a large net.  It may also to some degree refer to the way troll fishermen[1] look after spending weeks on end in tiny boats, working in wind and salt spray from dawn to dusk, then come into town with clothing stiff with salt, hear and beard matted, shirts torn and smelling of bad fish.

One friend of mine told a story about listening to a talk radio program in Juneau back in the mid nineteen sixties.  Hippies had been filtering into down, shuffling up the dock from the ferries reeking of pot and patchouli oil, mixed with the pungent aromas of the unwashed.  The topic under discussion had been a general complaint about these new comers and what an affront they were to the general good order of the community.  The call that my troller friend especially enjoyed came from a woman who reminded the other listeners that these kind of folks had always been a part of the town, “what’s the difference between a hippy and a troller.”  Not sure if she was suggesting acceptance of the hippy, or broadening the condemnation of the motley outsiders to include the trolling community, but my friend who was in the generation ahead of me certainly got a good laugh from the comparison.  Many of us, my older friend included, did indeed consider ourselves a breed apart, very different kind of operation carried out in very different boats.  The reality may have been that the similarities with other kinds of fishing outweigh the differences, but everyone likes to have a bit of individuality, even if it is only a matter of self perception.

If the skippers and deck hands are a bit scruffy, a trolling boat at sea with the gear streaming out behind is a thing of beauty.  Boats built, or rigged for trolling come in a variety of sizes and shapes, usually much smaller boats than the bulldozers employed on other fisheries, they all have two tall poles, extending well above the height of the mast when pulled upright in the harbor, extended out at a forty five degree angle while fishing.  Individual fishing lines can be suspended from the tips of these poles, allowing for quite a web of gear trailing through the water. Working along edges of banks and shoals where currents tend to drive bait fish, which are in tern preyed upon by the ravenous salmon, fattening themselves for their return to fresh water streams all along the coast, the troller spends the long summer days tending the lines, dressing and icing fish which can be held in ice for several days before delivery to a fish tender or brought to the cold storage plant back in town. 

The most important bit of gear the troller makes use of is the gurdy, the reels that lower and retrieve the main fishing lines.  I used visualized the origin of the gurdy as being named for the woman sitting at the shadowy end of the bar along Ballard Avenue.  A woman the machinists at Kolstrands who developed the troller’s reels enjoyed on a Saturday evening, but never brought home to meet Momma Sunday afternoon.  Much more likely that the name comes from the ancient hand cranked instrument the hardy-gurdy because of the similarity between cranking the lines in and out of the boat, and the hand crank on the hurdy-gurdy that creates the sound.  In the trollers hand cranked gurdies largely gave way to reels that were mechanically powered sometime in the nineteen thirties, although an active branch of the fishery still utilizes the old arm strong method, there even being a separate class of permit for those fishers working the hand crank reels.

Phil went on with his story about his grandfather and oldest uncle.  Sometime in the early years of the century, probably prompted by Captain Weeding's unexpectedly retirement, they went over to Seattle and bought a surplus lifeboat from a steamer and rowed it back to Vashon.  Heavily built to carry a large number of people in the event of a disaster at sea, the lifeboat probably measured close to thirty feet in length and eight or nine feet wide.  Spending a few months getting ready for the trip to Alaska, they installed a small,  single cylinder gasoline engine, decked over the entire length of the boat, with a cabin of some kind that  occupied most of the forward part of the hull.  In those days the larger boat functioned as a base of operation, with the actual fishing being done from a row boat that was towed along with them as they traveled from the Puget Sound country north, then back and forth from town to the fishing grounds.  

The nine hundred mile trip from Vashon Island to southeast Alaska in a thirty foot double end life boat, pushed along with a ten horsepower gas engine must have been an adventure in itself.  Everyone thinks of the inside passage as such a serenely beautiful protected stretch of coast, but the combination of very strong currents, thick fogs, and sudden gales of wind can really take a small boat for some unexpected turns.  The same places that look so inviting on an August afternoon out the windows of an air conditioned cruise ship observation deck can be total hell in early March in a very small, slow motor boat.

“Sometimes they didn’t make quite enough money for the trip home, or it got too late in the fall to venture south,” Phil’s voice brought me back from imagining traveling in a converted life boat, “wintered over in Petersburg.  Stayed with a Norwegian family, mayor of the town but also a bad, mean drunk.  All the time getting sauced up and flying into the worst fits of rage, had everyone in the house terrified half the time.  Then one night, in the middle of one of his drunken tirades he slipped on the stairs and broke his neck.”

Not wanting to interrupt the flow of the story I didn’t mention that our side of the family, great grandfather back in the old country was said to have met his end the same way.  Could be that the two stories had gotten confused somewhere along the way, or that bad tempered Norwegians should stay off the stairs when they have been drinking. 

In any event I added to the conversation at hand with my own question, “didn’t the cannery tenders tow the trollers around between town and the grounds a lot back in those days?”

“Sure they did, the old man is always talking about hitching rides with the tenders from the fox farm into town, and I’ve seen pictures of tenders pulling a long string of trollers around too.  A guy probably could hitch a ride all the way from Bellingham to Ketchikan without turning the engine on at all, of course you would still have to be on the wheel all the time.”

In those days there was quite a population of people who spent half the year camped out, sometimes in boats as well as makeshift communities, often with what must have been well established cabins in various protected hidey holes all along the coast.  I have dug around in some of these old camps myself and found evidence of habitation going back well into the nineteenth century and before.  One place we explored contained overgrown trash piles with cans and bottles that dated to the nineteen sixties or later in close proximity to artifacts that dated to the era when the Edwards boys fished that part of the coast, fifty feet away from exposed strands of sediment at the high water mark containing glass trade beads dating to the day when Russians used the beads to buy furs from the natives.  The place probably supported seasonal habitation for ten thousand years or more before the sound of little gas engines and an occasional larger fish tender puttered in and dropped anchor, in pursuit of the same fish stocks.

 One can imaging these little communities, smoke from cooking fires wafting up through the trees, dogs barking and kids shouting with the sons and fathers pulling the silent row boats along the tide rips and kelp patches a mile or two up and down the beach.  Every other day the whistle of the steam tender could be heard for five miles, as she hissed into the bight to pick up the freshly caught fish for market.

The Edwards boys almost certainly would have settled into one of these communities, although with their home powered boat as the base of operation they would have had more flexibility to move up and down the coast looking for better fishing holes than a family with only a row boat or two working out of a camp on the beach.  As long as they were on the rout of the cannery tender, so that the perishable salmon could be off loaded for market every evening, they may well have been more on their own than many of the others working the same general area. 

“In those days everyone fished from row boats, trailing several hand lines baited with herring out behind.”  To which Phil added his characteristic editorial comment, “The old timers did things the hard way because they were too stupid to have thought of how to do it better.”

I tried to imagine hooking a huge King Salmon on a hand line, trying to belay the long ores without dropping one of them into the water, wrestling with the fish while drifting with the tide, in many cases close to rocks and kelp beds.  Landing some of those babies can be tricky enough from the stable platform of my trolling boat motoring along on automatic pilot, maintaining a steady course and speed so that full attention can be devoted to the fish.  Just rowing a boat all day without messing with the fishing tackle like a near impossible task.  Even in the protected areas between islands, out of the surge of ocean swell tidal currents run strong and the wind can suddenly spring up to a gale without warning. 

My guess is that they made as much use of the current as possible, setting out from the fish camp or anchored power boat early in the morning, working along  the beach going with the direction of the tidal currents, probably trying to be in a good fishing hole at the turn of the tide.  These brief periods in which the tidal current changes direction, and the water is still or slack as the change happens are frequently popular feeding times for the fish as well.  The follow working the row boat troller probably got a good portion of his daily catch on slack tide, then with the current having reversed direction he could coast back home all afternoon, using the ores to keep the boat in position and at the desired depth as much as for forward movement.   

If you have ever tried to row a fat little pram or other tiny skiff, it may seem impossible that those old timers were able to row a boat all day long, covering several miles of water while working fishing lines.  Those guys almost certainly would have been tougher than most of us are these days, but the real difference was in the design of the rowboats out of which they worked.  Kind of like comparing a kiddy tricycle with a light weight, state of the art multi speed bicycle that some rich guy effortlessly peddles along the Burke-Gilman on Sunday afternoon, a well designed row boat isn’t all that hard to propel through the water.  A long waterline with bow and stern sculpted to ease its way and just enough beam for stability without pushing too much water out of the way makes this kind of boat seem to effortlessly glide along between pulls on the long, light spruce ores.  Not without effort to be sure, but to the fit individual miles can melt away with a reasonable level of strain. 

While the old man, probably hardly into his thirties or even younger, the teen age Burger sat it out in the larger boat bored out of his mind.  One of them had to stay with the boat to make sure it did not drag anchor, and also to come looking for the old man, if he did not return with the evening tide.  Whiling away the hours, the kid couldn’t help but want to be in on the action of pulling fat King Salmon over the side of the boat.  The idea occurred to him that they could put along using the engine and probably catch fish all day long, not just at the turn of the tides.  For some time the kid argued his point with his dad, who adamantly refused to even consider. 

“Gasoline costs money!” Phil’s voice easily slipped into a harsh Norski accent, emphasizing the middle of gasoline with a lengthened ‘aw’ sound.  We all knew old timers who were only forty years over from Norway, who spoke with as heavy an accent as the day they landed in Seattle, so it was easy and very funny for us to imagine how the grandfather sounded.

“Anyway, one day Burger decided to give it a try to prove his point.  As soon as his dad was far enough out of sight in one direction up the beach so he couldn’t hear the motor or see the boat edging its way out of the cove in the other direction, he rigged the longer ores that served as backup power for the motor boat as outrigger poles to hold the lines out away from the boats spinning propeller, fired up the engine and set out to try his luck.  At the end of the day when the old man came back around the corner and found the kid dressing out a pile of fish he was livid at having his authority questioned.  Expensive gasoline had been wasted motoring around pulling fishing tackle.  But he had to change his mind when that Berger had caught twice as many fish as a very good day in the row boat.”

“They were the first ones on the coast to do it,” Phil assured us, as he poured a fresh cup of coffee, and broke off just a bit more bear claw from the now ravished package out of which we all had been keeping our energy up throughout the history lesson. 

Settling into my bunk for a long afternoon nap I wondered if they were really the first ones to think of towing the troll gear behind a power boat instead of rowing along in a skiff all day, or if they just happened to be part of a natural transition that occurred in many places up and down the coast at about the same time.  Who can really say, maybe those two, Jon and Phil’s grandfather and uncle were the very first.

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[1] Fisherman is a term that was changed to fisher some twenty odd years after the time in which this story is set.  There have always been women in the trade, but the notion of gender neutral language hadn’t yet developed, so I have opted to use the older form of the word.

Copyright 2012 - Paul Petersen

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