Five Thousand Pounds of King Salmon

We got into a bunch of big King Salmon on the forty mile bank, pulled five thousand pounds in three days.

Simon's brother's boat the Anna would have looked very much like this double end troller the Pyx

  By the time we were done both my hands were cut from here to here, bones gleaming white in the sunshine.”  Holding a gnarled right hand out palm up, Simon traced lines where trolling wire had sliced into the flesh with his left forefinger.  “White bones glistening,” he repeated in a somewhat quieter tone obviously reflecting the shadows of the shocking scene of seeing the bones of one’s hand laid bare.

Two or three years before the Kodiak trip Uncle Simon came along the wharf at Fisherman’s Terminal one afternoon to have a look see at little old troller I had recently purchased and was outfitting for the fishing grounds.  Testing her weight with a foot on the bow stem before stepping aboard, peeking into the hatch, and looking down the companion way into the galley he seemed to more or less approve. 

“Just enough boat to get out on the grounds for a few weeks during the good weather and get it out of your system.  Don’t try to go out on that coast in the winter though, I’ve been there when it was so tough you couldn’t live.” he warned.  “And stay out in the deep water.  Some of these guys sneak in behind the rock piles out there, totally crazy.  Your anchor line could part and you will be in the breakers before you know it, never have a chance.”

Knowing the dangers of those places myself, I didn’t admit to having spent the odd night in a couple of those marginal hidey holes.  Sometimes it was a matter of weighing risks.  Usually a fleet of boats clustered along the twenty fathom line at night, presenting a larger target for freighters rumbling up and down the coast to avoid.  But sometimes dusk began to fall and there wasn’t another trollers light to be seen anywhere on the horizon, but I could see a little city of twinkling mast lights back behind Jagged Island or up on Skagway, and be drawn in to the company.  These were hardly comforting places, Jagged especially so, just a bare bird shit covered rock about the size of a medium sized freighter standing more or less alone in about five fathoms of water a couple miles off the beach, in northwesterly weather a fair sized patch of water to the leeward of the rock pile had a sandy bottom and marginal protection from the ocean swells. 

The previous fall I had spent a few days tacking up and down the thirty fathom line southwest of the Columbia river bar picking the odd fat Coho, then ducking into a place used as an anchorage under the lea of the long jetty on the south side of the river.    Getting nervous about the possibilities of stormy weather making it hard for me to get back up the coast to the cape and home, I took off before the other boats with whom I had been traveling, so I missed the trouble, but one guy in our group was lost on the rocks.  A freak set of huge waves rolled in from the southwest, breaking in four fathoms of water, turning the south jetty anchorage into a death trap.  Everyone managed to crank up their engines, pull anchors in a hurry and blast their way into the safety of deeper water.  That is almost everyone.  When daylight finally came, one boat didn’t seem to be with the group.  Scanning the area with the glasses a chill went through the fleet, there it was, the smashed hulk of what had been one of the most beautiful, tough built double end trollers in the area up on the rocks of the jetty, bodies of two friends lost, apparently swept out to sea with the tide.  Possibly embellished for emphasis by my buddy Gary who told me the story over a few Canadian hard ciders later that fall, “they never found those guys bodies.”

Gary also added another dimension to the story that I had not heard even though there had been more than one occasion throughout the season when I hung out with the now lost comrade.  Apparently the guy’s outfit got caught in an ambush over in Vietnam and he ended up as the sole survivor.  Things generally went well for him during the day, but when darkness closed in every night he tended to drink heavily to keep the demons at bay.  Most of the fellows who knew him well considered the loss on the jetty as the final shot in that fire fight. 

“Back then we didn’t have these power gurdies,” Simon’s voice pulled me back from the river bar jetty, the entire scene having played out in my mind in less time than it took him to take a breath between sentences, “overhauled the lines by hand in those days.  Piano wires on Oregon leader with eighth inch main lines.  We had cut old inner tubes to wrap around our hands to keep the leaders from cutting us so bad, but it cut through anyway.  Those were some really huge fish, mostly whites.”

“You know your old man is a classic story teller, Jon.”  We had dragged our asses out of the bunks after a long afternoon of reading books and napping and were back up in the restaurant for a light dinner and a couple beers.  The light was out in Phil’s room so we decided go without waking him,  let him sleep, soon enough we would be back out to the grounds where he seemed to get the least rest of anyone. 

“I mean, what could be funnier than the picture of his having to hold himself in the back of the ambulance with one foot on either side of the open back doors as it grinds its way up the hill from the ferry dock to the hospital?  Appendicitis attack and he is almost dumped on the street when the car swerved around a corner too quick?”

Tom’s laugh filled our corner of the room where we had enjoyed deluxe burgers with fries at a booth back in the bar, “I never heard that one.” 

“Seems to me he told it to us when we were teenagers, one year at the family Christmas Eve party,”  my brother Justin loves to re tell it, uses the story as an example of the way a guy like Simon weaves a complicated picture together out of a few very simple words.  “Phil is just as good, maybe better in some ways, he is especially good mimicking voices and twisting everything with a funny angle.”

Tom went into the mock Norski accent, “Gosoline cost money.  Do you think that really happened?”

“Like my mom always says,” Jon added, “if it didn’t happen that way it should have.  She is always worried that my Dad is embarrassing himself with bull shit stories.”

“I think there is a difference between bull shit and an artful selection of details that paints a picture of something out of the ordinary that really happened, even if there is an occasional embellishment.

“Take the story he told me once about trolling with one of his brothers back in the nineteen twenties.  They got into a bunch of salmon off the Vancouver Island coast and pulled five thousand pounds of the buggers in three days.  He showed me his hands pointing out where every finger had been split to the bare bone at the end of the trip.  Packed them in lard all the way back to Seattle and they healed up just fine.”

“Cut to the bone, no way it would take a thousand stitches to put them back together after that.”  Tom declared.

“Maybe so, but in the context of standing in my troller with the power gurdies and stretchy mono filament leaders that we use these days making our lives much easier than in his day with piano wire leaders, pulling the main lines by hand, choking salted hearing on every spread, the image of white bone shining in the afternoon sun as they set out for town gives a picture of the intensity of that balls to the wall experience that adds more truth than is subtracted by the possibility that the badly cut hands may not have actually been showing bare bone from top to bottom all ten fingers.

“Same thing for when he told me about taking ice for their first trip.  Said that his brother climbed down in the fish hold to handle the ice chute, instructing Simon to watch the waterline, when the weight of the ice sunk the boat down until the well deck was awash signal the guys on the dock to cut it off.  I’m sure that boat had low deck, in fact there is a boat with that same name that still fishes the coast, probably the same one.  Double-ender about thirty six feet or so, may not be able to put the deck in the water if the hatch were filled clear to the top of the hatch combing.  Although the old style, where blocks of solid ice come out of the ice house and are ground into a snow cone consistency at the top of the ice chute lays heavier in the boat than the flake ice we get these days.

“But the point of that story wasn’t so much whether the deck was awash at the dock from the weight of the ice, those boats roll their decks under constantly when at sea anyway.  “The point that the bit of hyperbole drove home is how things had to be pushed to the limit and beyond in order to make a go of it in the fish business.  Not just back in the old man’s day either, but that is the way we need to be doing things now as well.  I tend to idolize the old times as if things were totally different then, more primitive to be sure but also that everyone was so much tougher then, able to do grand and wonderful things while we are just muddling through the motions in a kind of dim shadow of the real stuff that happened when the old man’s generation were young.  Of course, that isn’t true at all, we are out here doing the same things in pretty much the same ways.  Sure, we have the radar and depth sounders, maybe our boat engines are better although the old style, heavy block low rpm machines probably were more reliable than these modern diesels.  Probably won’t be very long before we are telling the grand kids stories that they will call bull on later when discussing the old man’s yarns with their friends.”

“Yah, probably so, I’m not sure we should believe half of what you say even now.” Tommy added with a wide grin.  “Hay Jon, didn’t the story about your granddad fishing out of a skiff remind you of that silly little boat you guys called the egg shell out at the folks place on the lake?”

 “Well, we used to paddle this boat all over our end of the lake towing a fishing line with some kind of lure at the end, all the while totally dreamed out in fantasies about being in the Commander or the old Meldon, crashing our way through wild and wicked seas, never once imagining that a real fish could actually bite the line trailing out behind out little boat.” 

“Jon always said that we would pay for the boat the first season, then after that it would be all profit.”

“Not sure that isn’t true.  At least it is possible to have a gross stock in a year that matches the value of the boat, but expenses seem to take almost everything we manage to catch with this rig we are running now.”

“Why did you call the skiff the egg shell?” Tom asked.  “I don’t remember it, that must have been in the days when I was still working on the farm during the summer.”

“Well, Simon must have found it at the surplus or salvage yard for a very cheap deal.  It was fiberglass, just a very thin layer with no lining and nothing to add rigidity around the gunwales.  It was as floppy as a fat woman’s tits with a broken bra strap.  I don’t know why the darned thing didn’t crack in half on us the way we fooled around with it, and it would have sunk like a rock if it filled with water, yet we went all over the lake without live vests, or did we sit on a couple of soggy life jackets, Jon?”

“Yah, I think so, not sure.  How about the time those two tough kids took our BB guns away?  All we did was point the guns in their direction after they sprayed water all over us with the wake of their speed boat.  Came back with some big bull story about reporting us to the police.”  

“I sure do.  Weren’t we with that fat kid Jason?  The one who used to sing a silly little ditty about his cat; ‘Oudy Waddy had a furry body…..and padded feet.’  Wonder why that has stuck in my mind all these years.”

Lowering his voice in a way that chilled our mood Jon added, “You know, he took a shotgun to his wife not long ago, sent him up to the nut house for a good long stretch.”

I had heard that he went into the service and been an MP over in the war zone.  Seemed like an unlikely assignment for the quiet, mild mannered and somewhat immature fellow we used to know.  But you know what they say, join the army to become a man or some such thing.  Poor fellow must have seen things that made him snap once he got back home.

“So, tell me how you lost Simon’s fishing tackle.”

“Oh, well we were just paddling along one afternoon, hardly moving, just sitting in the bottom of that boat.  It didn’t have an seats did we mention?  Then all of a sudden the pole began to bounce across the bottom of the boat and before we could react at all  it had gone over the transom and disappeared into the water behind us.  Some sockeye must have taken the hook and headed for the Sammamish slough towing the whole shitteree.”

Tom had a good laugh at this, mimicking our frantic gestures and facial expressions as Simon’s good fishing gear bounced through our clumsy hands and was lost.  “So what did you tell your Dad, Jon?”

“We didn’t say anything at all.  On the way back to the dock we hatched a plan to get jobs and save the money to buy a replacement pole and reel, then just put them in the shed in place of the lost equipment.  With any luck we could have it all together before Dad ever looked for his gear.  Since we moved out to the lake and stopped taking the Susie out on trips he never bothered with the fishing stuff.”

“We walked all the way back to my place up on Roosevelt and one twenty third, stopping at what seemed like a huge number of stores along the way asking for jobs.  No one took us seriously, probably way too young for them to heir us anyway, but we tried.”

“In the end we managed to scrape up the money to replace the lost stuff, but by then Christmas had rolled around and Jon wrapped it up and put it under the tree for his Dad to open.  We were busted for losing the gear in the first place, and also for trying to lie our way out of it by hiding the evidence.”

Making an early evening of it, we sauntered back to the boat feeling the change in the weather, our spirits lifted at the prospect of getting back out of town tomorrow.  It is a funny thing how wonderful it feels to lash the boat to the boards after a good trip or being blown in on a raging storm, but then a very short while later the same place seems oppressive in the extreme and one is chafing at the bit to be back out in the open chasing after another load of fish.

Copyright 2012 - Paul Petersen

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