Ready to head home

A few days later Kodiak Island lay in our wake like a thin black line under a pale blue sky broken with piles of clouds shining very white in patches of sunshine.

  A moderate westerly sea carried us along, seas lining up off the stern quarter  like kids pushing and shoving outside the school lunchroom door, waiting to lift the old boat, rolling her to port in a long slow drive before the peak of the swell finished scratching the keel allowing the less dramatic roll to windward, down the back side of the wave, then raising on the next sea in a steady, smooth dance with her natural partner.  Sunshine and westerly winds at our back felt good.  Damned good, like piling all the Friday afternoons of the year into one glorious day, each crank of the shaft inching us along the way home.  Home.  Home seems ever so much more delightful from the deck of an old boat creaking and rolling along at sea.  From here the most trivial, mundane town pleasures appear like the pilgrim’s vision of paradise, so many miles yet to travel through the darkness before emerging into the brilliant light once again.  I have often wondered if the grandfather’s generation, sailing out in square rigged ships, often away for years on end with little or no domestic life ashore between trips, looked forward to a few hours in shanghai whiskey dins and bad smelling whores with a similar elation in the heart as a voyage begun to wind down, port of call in the offing.  Maybe these feelings are individual, each person with their own private level of anticipation or dread, but one thing is certain, intensity of feeling on a day like this, heading home after a long season in the north country evokes feelings that folks who spend their lives in ordinary occupations never experience.

     We were about on schedule with the original plan Phil suggested on the telephone three weeks earlier.  Not only that, after a good ten days of truly awful weather his prediction of  mild conditions in the gulf was turning out to be true as well.  The first six hundred miles out from Kodiak is in the open ocean, heading almost dew east across the northern edge of the Gulf of Alaska.  Westerly breezes driving low, even seas under the boat from behind is the ideal traveling condition for this leg of the trip.  I almost chided myself for privately calling bull shit when Phil has suggested on the telephone that “everyone knows the beginning of March is the best time of the year to cross the gulf.”  Maybe he knew a thing or two about this country after all.  Both he and Tom had shown themselves to be vastly more knowledgeable and competent at running the boat and handling the fishing gear than I  figured before coming out on this trip. The lovable teddy bear character shuffling around the Vitamilk shop, frequently spinning yarns painting himself as a reluctant fisherman, always half sea sick only going in the boat as a  favor to the old man turned out to be an incomplete picture of the guy.  Now that he had gotten his chance to be skipper in his own right  there was no questioning his competence and creativeness, hard work and drive to succeed.  In many ways, the best skipper I ever shipped out with during my years in the trade.

     Tom surprised me a bit as well.  I half way expected that he would return to university after getting out of the service, studying for a career in education or the law.  When we were all growing up our families never lived close enough together for us to really know each other very well, but I didn’t recall him ever expressing interest in the fishing business.  Unlike Jon and I, who spend hours on end fantasizing about owning a boat together, when we were visiting Tom nothing like that ever came up in the conversations.  But, he had taken a notion somewhere along the line to go fishing.  Came out to Seattle sometime in the early seventies to work for one of Simon’s brothers dragging for bottom fish.  I wasn’t sure if he had spend a season or two on the Commander before that, when the boat had contracts with the University of Washington fisheries department, traveling out west with a large crew and an oversize purse sein net, catching and tagging salmon as a part of research into the life cycle patterns of salmon.  In any event, he learned the craft very well, from maintaining and running things in the engine room to handling the wench and machinery on deck to navigation in the wheel house, Tom was as much in his element as anyone with whom I had worked during my years in the trade as well.  Not only good at his job, but always with the same rambunctious enthusiasm that characterized the fun we all had together as kids popping off fireworks on the fourth of July, or later racing around town in his old man’s three speed Ford.  Working with both of these guys was turning out to be as much fun as I thought it would be at the start of the trip.

     Jon turned out to be a bit more like I would have expected, but then we had grown up more like brothers than cousins and I knew him better than the other two.  His reaction to  work in the boat probably more closely resembled my own.  Attracted to the idea of fishing, “it’s like there are little gold coins spread out over open fields and all you have to do is go around and pick them up, what could be better than that?” he once quipped, yet often somewhat reticent about facing the wind and sea.   We always agreed on the beauty of various boats, loving the curve of sheer line, proportion of top house to hull area, the cut of the stern.  Boats, after all are much like women in the eyes of a young man.  An almost infinite variety of subtle variation is shape and size, some almost irresistibly delicious, at a single glance filling a guys imagination with ten thousand possibilities, while others that may function on a practical level about the same, not so much.  Growing up we had both loved the old Commander, more like an elderly aunt than the visceral potential girl friend feeling we felt over on the dock where the halibut schooners outfitted for their fishing seasons.  Now here we were together, along with his brother and our best cousin, prowling along through the land of our boyhood dreams, and even the less than pleasant parts of the trip were very fun for both of us.

     As kids, walking the docks we often came across boats that were for sale, or appeared to be neglected and available for enterprising young guys with a will to work.  Jon always discounted the cost of the investment, sure that it was a guarantee that we could surely pay for the boat the first season, then it would be gravy from there on out.  After trying to juggle the finances for my own little salmon trolling operation, hardly able to make basic expenses, I wasn’t so sure about his prediction.    

After our first summer out of school Jon had not shown any particular interest in the fish business, landing in a job on the beach up in Everett somewhere as I recall, before going into the service and doing a couple of tours in Vietnam.  He never said much about his experiences during that time,  but he not only made it home in safely, but came back with a delightful partner and was married in the family church over behind the Dicks Drive In on forty fifth street and settled into a happy domestic life in town.  For me it was an interesting lesson in how our political and social beliefs are always being trumped by real life situations.  Vehemently against that war, I can’t help but admit that the marriage of Jon and Whey, and their two kids are a very good outcome.  Without a doubt their story is just one scenario out of tens of thousands, where good things came out of a situation that may not have been in the overall long term best interest of either country.  Just goes to show that nothing is ever as simple as we paint it all out when arguing for our limited points of view.

    Not nearly as forthcoming with his thoughts and opinions as Tom and Phil,  I can’t say that I had any idea how he felt about religion or politics.  With all the time we used to spend together there was never any talk along those lines.  We used to talk a lot about boats and cars, girls and motorcycles, just the usual young men stuff.  He went to church with his family as a kid, we often attended high school youth group events together and had a lot of fun, but never discussed spirituality either at the events or later.  He had been there the evening of the big blow up over the war with Tom, back in our little Eastlake apartment, but said little one way or the other.  When his number came up he put on the uniform and went.  Came home without much public comment and resumed his life, going into business with Phil in the boat deal after a couple jobs on the beach.  After spending so much time as kids fantasizing about trips like this it was really great to finally be doing it together, even if it was only a onetime thing for me; almost a vacation from the life I was leading at the time.

     I never did talk with Phil or Jon about the business end of the operation.  It was a relief for me not to be worrying about paying the fuel bill, or forking out the cash for groceries and boat maintenance; Norm and Simon once advised me to avoid the temptation of moving from a small boat into the big leagues because the worry of high expenses wasn’t worth it.  The crew is paid for this kind of work on a share basis, each person getting a percentage of the catch.  Fuel and ice taken off the top, then a large chunk of the gross stock is allocated to the general overhead expenses of maintaining the boat, with the remainder divided among the members of the crew, usually about fifty percent for the boat, then fuel and groceries deducted and the remainder divided up between the crew. My understanding was that the cost of flying out to meet the boat was going to be covered with a few extra dollars compensation, depending on our luck fishing the last couple trips was coming my way, added to all the good food I could eat for a couple weeks and the companionship of my favorite cousins seemed more than reasonable.  Then there was the hundred dollars we got from crab bait that paid for a few nights of high life in town as a bonus.  Now days people pay tens of thousands of dollars to see this country, warm and comfortable in floating hotels, plastic and glass cruise ships with well stocked bars, delicious dining rooms and crisp, clean sheeted beds every night.  For all the actual contact these tourists have with this wild, rugged country the scenery may as well be electronically projected on screens surrounding the enclosed capsule of their artificial world.  But then time and distance jade a guy’s perception. Slogging along in a stinky little fishing boat, hanging on with white knuckles as each sea seemed determined to turn her keel wrong side up, and seen the lights of some large ship off in the distance, imagining how nice it would be, seated at a linen clothed table along with the other well fed tourists, warm and dry without the worry of making the next point before the tide turns and really whips things up for the poor fisherman inching his way down the coast. 

***

Preparations for the run south started with the usual scrubbing of hold, bin boards and deck, followed by moving the heavy net from the reel on the stern into a neatly folded pile along the slaughter alley, center section down in the fish hold. Transferring the weight of the net from a few feet above the level of the working deck into the belly of the hold would help with stability while running at sea without the added weight from a few tons of ice.  Spaces under the floor boards in the hold and engine room were filled with concrete to maintain trim when running empty, but she did a lot better carrying something extra below the water line. In the days of the research charters, the boat didn't pack ice, so several concrete slabs, weighing hundreds of pounds each, were placed floor in the slaughter alley. I vividly remember helping with the rigging on the boom, Jon and I stationed at either side of the deck manning lines that controlled the swing of the boom as the old man handled wire cable on the capstan head, smoking and sparking as the huge slab came up over the hatch combings, swinging in an almost controlled arc toward a pallet on the forks of a jitney positioned along the edge of the dock. Suspended from single steel rods set in the cement, one could only wonder at the damage to the boat one of those slabs would have done had it parted.  Newer generations of boats are stabilized by filling the holds with sea water that can be super cooled to refrigerate the product during fishing operations.

    
     Net in the hold, drag doors chained to the inside of the bulwarks for traveling, Phil took the boat back over the the fish plant to load a few things out of his storage locker in the upper level of the wear house.  The smell of the place took me back to the days when Jon and I used to poke around in the lockers the boat rented down at Fisherman’s terminal in Seattle.  High and dark, two loft spaces accessible with greasy ladders, these places were like the Old Man’s storage room at the Brooklyn Street house multiplied by a hundred.  Filled with an endless array of stuff and junk, we were especially in awe of an old army foot locket filled with grimy boxes of  armor piercing thirty-caliber ammunition.  “See that red stuff on the front,” Jon held one up to the dim light, “its tracers used in machine guns back in the war.”  We wanted to try it out in Jon’s hunting rifle in the worst way; still remember vividly imagining the pleasure of shooting junk with sizzling tracer shell.  Jon said that Phil had blasted a few of them off and said it was lucky his gun didn’t blow up.  Fire and smoke belched everywhere and the kink was as bad as an Arkansas mule.  The story may have been embellished to discourage us from snagging a few and loading them up in Jon’s .30-06, but it only whetted our appetite to see the spectacle; of course we knew that there was no chance of the old man not finding out and skinning us alive, so we always left them alone.

     Nothing quite so exotic here though.  A pallet of parts and pieces that could come in handy on the trip, or in the refit back in town swung over the face of the dock and lashed securely on top of the net in the fish hold.  Dogging the canvas cover over the hatch and doubling the lines holding the hatches in place for the trip,  the sound of a big fork lift overhead presented an unwelcome sight.   A huge steel seine skiff .  I never knew for sure if it was left over from the old U. W. charter days, or if Phil had stumbled on a deal he couldn’t refuse and brought it back to town to sell at a profit, but it had to be lashed onto the back deck, athwartship as my old boss Sandy used to say meaning sideways, bow facing the port side between the front of the drag reel and the break, five or six feet aft of the hatch.

     I wasn’t especially glad to see that heavy old skiff.  The extra weight on deck certainly didn’t help our trim for the trip, but since the boat had been built as a tuna seiner the original design did take the weight of net and skiff on deck into account, and the boat had traveled between Seattle and Attu Island, half way to Japan with the thing lashed to the back deck gosh knows how many times.  Wonder if it is the same skiff that old Uncle Olie put me to painting grey marine enamel back in the day; floor boards, seat and engine cover.  He had a fit when he spotted the half inch deep pool of paint in the bottom of the ply wood battery box.  The bucket got tipped and spilled and I was trying to use the pool to recharge my brush to coat nearby junk; the old boy thought I was trying to layer the paint on that thick, and lectured me on how it will never dry that way.  I kept mum about the spill, figuring the lecture about being more careful with the paint bucket amounted to about the same thing as the paint technique tongue lashing, so why bother getting both in one session.  Still, I spent the rest of the morning wondering if the extra thick coating of paint under the battery could prove to outlast the rest of the paint job; persevering on year after year like the plastic coatings on the tops of the skis we had in those days.

     A boat the size of the Commander never could have engaged in the seine fishery in Alaska except under the special circumstance of the university research charters.  Fisheries management regulations set size limits on boats and nets in several different areas of the state, southeast seiners restricted to a fifty five foot keel length, Kodiak area boats have to be smaller, net length and depth also limited.  A year or two before coming out on this trip I spend the summer working on a seiner, fishing Southeast during July and August, then making a quick run back home to catch the fall runs that thread their way up through the San Juan Islands in Washington.  The first day we were back, before having time to sew the extra strips of web into the net to get the same depth as the local law allowed Johnny, our skipper set on a huge bunch of fish in Presidents channel, west side of Orcas Island.  The boats that had set ahead of us on the spot were brailing great bundles of shining pinks into their holds; we came up with a skunk.  The water is deep in these fishing holes, and the balls of fish we had watched  boiling along into the open front of the net simply dove down under the bottom of the net and continued on up the line.  There was much discussion as to the difference between the fish in the two places.  It wasn’t just that the fishing holes in Alaska were all in shallower water, where the fish couldn’t squeeze under the fence so to speak, and get out of the garden like Peter Rabbit escaping from farmer McGregor’s garden.  For some strange reason the Alaskan fish were just too dumb to think of diving down, while their southern cousins always looked for a way under.  I can’t remember how much deeper the Washington regulation net was, certainly didn’t extend all the way to the bottom most of the places we set, so the capacity of these fish to go under had its limit.

     I wasn’t there, so details of the research charters only came to me through bits and pieces of the stories we heard as kids from the older guys in the crew.  Thirty-five millimeter slides shown at winter family gatherings included pictures taken on deck at sea, biologists measuring and weighing and returning the fish to the sea with a tag of some kind inserted in the fish.  I used to imagine a pair of plastic disks attached together with fine wire pushed through the thick meaty part of the fish just behind the head.  Contact information directed the fisherman who found that particular fish to send it in to the university for some kind of reward.  I used to wonder how the fish survived with that quarter sized things attached to its body, but the biologists must know what they are doing.  Years later when I was fishing on my own, half way wondering why I never saw one of these big tags on any of my catch, I found out how the things really worked.  The tags are very small lengths of non reactive metal, color coded in strips or bands, injected carefully into the cartilaginous material in the fish’s head where it does not interfere with the animal in any way.  A very small fin on the back of the fish, just forward of the tail that serves no known function is then snipped off to marked the tagged fish so that they can be separated from their cousins on the sorting tables in the fish houses where commercial boats sell their catch.  After weighing and measuring the specimens coming off the boats a representative of the fisheries department then removes just the portion of  the head where the tag is located, returning the rest of the carcass to the piles of fish on their way out to market.

     Most, if not all of the tagged fish I saw in fish houses along the Washington coast in the early seventies came out of hatcheries maintained by the western states, the data compiled as a part of monitoring the effectiveness of this operation.  At that time the general belief being that fish production out of these artificial reproduction facilities could augment the resource, not only to replace lost habitat upstream, but also to maintain a viable community in the fish business.  Same thing as subsidizing farmers, support the production of food as a part of reasonable public policy.  Somehow things didn’t work out that way, natural stocks plummeted and the hatchery system may have contributed to the decline; allegations of corruption circulated, rumors of individuals in the fisheries management circles enriching themselves by selling breeding stock out of the country while proclaiming that not enough fish returned to maintain our local stocks, and the commercial salmon fishery south of British Columbia and Alaska withered away to nothing by the last decade of the century.

     The research carried on from boats like the Commander focused on the adult phase of salmon’s three part life cycle.  Keeping track of the fish in the rivers and streams where they hatch and grow, then return two or three years later to spawn and die, casting their offspring out into the world and giving their spent bodies back to nature as feed for birds and bears is easier than finding out where they are in the ocean during their adult years.  Each country in which salmon stocks originate claim ownership over the resource, so it is important to know something about this stage in their lives.  The American and Canadian fishing fleets worked the coast lines close enough to rivers of origin that management schemes and boarder disputes could be relatively clear cut.  The Japanese on the other hand were fishing for salmon on the high seas with floating long line, light baited hooks threaded together in vast strings with mono filament line, and it was important to find out just whose fish they were catching.  I’m sure that Uncle Olie saw the opportunity and went out to find a boat that could do the job.

     Alaska limit seiners were much too small to carry the crew and biologists out west, and the generation of bulky steel bulldozers built to blast their way through the ragged northern seas chasing king crab had not come on the scene yet in the late fifties, so he went to California to find a boat designed for seine fishing in the open ocean and found the Commander.  In almost every respect she mirrored the modern crabbers one may have seen in an extreme experience TV program, only constructed in the traditional wood plank on oak frame style.  Same broad working deck aft, flat stern rounded at the corners with crew accommodations under the forepeak and a wheel house above.  Possibly not quite as pretty as some of her granddaughters in the cut of the sheer line and overall proportions, but esthetics aside fishing boats are working platforms from which business has to be transacted, and in her day there was none better on the entire coast.

I am not sure when the last of these charters had been completed, before the boat had been converted to the shrimp business, but the seine skiff, left in a storage yard at the fish plant in Kodiak would be making the trip south one more time lashed to the table, between the net drum and the break aft of the main hatch.  In normal operation the skiff is pulled straight up over the stern, sliding between brackets welded to a heavy iron edging that protects the wood rail across the back of the boat.  The triple block system hooks to a stout belaying point at the bow of the skiff and with much strain and shaking of boom and rigging the boat can be hauled up to the top of the net pile, or for traveling with the net below it is let down onto the deck.  The underside of the skiff has three rails for resting, one on each side of the keel so that the wheel is well above the deck when lashed in place like this and the boat is resting more or less level.  Since we had the net drum occupying a third of the area that originally accommodated the skiff, it had to be put athwartship, making it a bit more difficult to lash in place as securely as we may have liked.

     After the skiff was secured the heavy boom that is kept at about a sixty degree angle to the mast when the boat is working was lowered until it rested on the side of the skiff, parallel with the deck.  Secured with extra lines to prevent its swinging side to side as the boat rolled this helped lower the center of gravity and increase stability in heavy going along the trip.  At one point in her history the boat had two heavy steel poles, similar to the lower half of trolling boat poles at each side, parallel to the mast.  Chains attached to the end of each pole that when lowered to a forty five degree angle would hang several feet below the surface of the water.  Heavy metal airplane looking devices called stabilizers were suspended from these chains, which resisted the roll of the boat as they drug through the water.  On the much lighter trolling boats these stabilizers greatly reduce the angle and speed of the rolling motion, improving comfort levels for all on board.  On the much heavier boat the net effect was apparently much less noticeable, and the heavy chains and bulky stabilizers were a real pain in the ass to handle.  In referring to junking that system Phil quoted one of the long time crew members, Barton.  “I’d rather take a beating any day than fight those darned things.”

     The most important cargo we loaded for the trip of course were the groceries.  A huge shopping spree had been accomplished, filling the fridge and freezer with no end of delicious things to keep us happy along the way home.  The galley was dominated by the radar range, located in the middle of the room along the bulkhead separating the accommodation area from the working deck behind.  Working at the stove, facing the stern of the boat there were two port holes on either side, with the deep double sinks on your left.  Two rectangular windows that opened by dropping down into the wall below were over the deep double sinks.  Leather straps, like half a man’s belt were attached to the lower frame of this kind of window, with three or four notches cut in that could be hooked to a well worn brass screw head extending a quarter inch from the front of the sill.  In this way the window could be opened to the desired level, then held tight in place with a polished iron wood or oak wedge that also was attached to the frame with a short length of green braided twine called Oregon leader.

     The refrigerator and freezer were located in the wall that separated the cooking area from the mess room.  With the exhaust stack coming up from the engine room directly below through the deck above into a metal housing that extended above the top of the deck house, that wall was a couple feet or more thick, to allow for a ventilation shaft around the exhaust pipe.  The fridge was neatly tucked into this area, between this shaft and the cooks room.  The freezer was below a fridge that must not have been as big as the average kitchen model one finds in a home.  In the days when fifteen or twenty men were living and working in the boat this must have been on the small side.  Maybe there had been an extra freezer lashed on deck above somewhere.  The doors of the freezer and fridge were varnished wood with chromed hinges and external latches, like the antique ice chests in great grandmother’s kitchen in the day when the ice man delivered blocks of ice from a horse drawn cart.

     On the first morning out, I crawled into my bunk for a couple hours rest, after the final preparations for the run were completed on deck.  When my little red travel alarm rang at eleven thirty I pulled on my blue jeans and found Tom and Phil enjoying coffee and gooey Danish pastries, store package torn open on the table between them.  Now that we were traveling stories had turned to recollections of other trips and times.  Phil was spinning a yarn about taking some kind of old tug boat from Portland to Seattle, with only one other guy aboard.  I didn’t pick up if it was with our cousin Dave, or another character that occasionally helped Phil out on his adventures, a semi retired codger named Gene Mason.  In any event, things went great coming down the river, but when they got onto the Columbia river bar, in the ocean swell the old boat began tossing salt water over the top, and the dried deck planks leaked like a sieve.  The water then ran into all the electrical conduit and boxes, creating short circuits and even small fires.  While his partner manned the wheel, Phil had been kept busy for a long time running around putting out the fires and trying to keep things dry so they would not loose power in a tight spot.

     There was no rest to be had during that trip, except for the over stuffed easy chair that was set up in the engine room.  A guy could go below to check things and catch a quick nap in the warmth close to the roaring engine in that chair.  “That’s the time I found out why there are handles on a ships wheel,” Phil ended his story coming back from the stove with a fresh steaming cup of mud, “by the time we got back to town I had two black eyes.  Every time I fell asleep on watch my head came forward and bumped a handle on the wheel, waking me up.”

     Tom added his memories of traveling north in the Commander with a full crew, in the U.W. charter days.  Two old timers were on watch when Tom had come into the wheel house just in time to see that the old boys were steering a course directly toward the wring side of a small island that would have put the boat on rocks, probably loosing everything.  In the radar the island and a couple of smaller rocks beyond looked like a tugboat and barges coming down the channel, but if the fellows on watch had been keeping track of where they were by following the lights and chart they would never had made that mistake.  It was a clear night, and the lights of the tug would also have been visible from miles down the line as well.

     The rules of the road on the water when two vessels approach each other is to “give each other the red light” meaning to pass port to port.  When the approaching vessel was in fact a small island, and the space on its port side that appears to be open water in the radar set is really only five feet deep with rocks and crags just below the surface, the result would not be pleasant.  This is why it is never safe to just cruise along relying on radar only, no matter how pretty the picture may seem.  After a few minutes of coastal navigation instruction, Tom climbed back down the ladder.  As he neared the bottom one of the old farts turned to his partner and asked, “What ever happened to that tug, Barton?”

     Of course this story was accompanies with gales of laughter, as the Norwegian accents of the pair of gaffers were mimicked,  and other incidents in which the older generation had seemed to be thick headed and slow.  Phil frequently advanced the opinion that the reason the old timers always did things the hard way was that they had just been too dumb to figure out how to do things right.  Of course history reflects a steady and quick advancement as the technology to do things easier became available, but sometimes actual history and oral tradition tell things from slightly different angles.  Both are true in their own way, neither gives a complete picture of the way things really were at any particular time in the past.

Tom and I had taken the twelve to six watch, meaning that for twelve hours each day the two of us ran the boat while Phil and Jon got their rest, then they took over while we went below to our bunks.  This way the boat can run around the clock, each guy getting a few hours of sleep twice a day.  Back in the cannery boat days, when there were three of us younger guys to stand watch the skipper and mate took the six on and six off schedule, letting us kids do a four on, eight off routine.  There is more time to just relax and watch the scenery, better rested after a single sleep, but it can get boring as well.  These boats are far from cruise ships, there isn’t really anything to do, no windows or observation decks from which to watch the scenery, and after one has eaten and slept the entertainment options run this quickly.

     The twelve six watch always was my favorite.  Coming into the galley at about the time one normally is getting ready for the days work, having a scrumptious breakfast then off to bed always gave me that snow day at school feeling of illicit comfort in the folds of the sleeping bag.  I usually got my best sleep from then up to noon, then had another shorter deep nap during the second half of the six to midnight watch below.

After Phil’s initial call asking me to come along for the trip, when he mentioned a good price for shrimp, I was not aware of the business end of the operation.  My attitude was that I had come along for the experience, spending a few weeks in the boat that had always been an important part of my boyhood dreams, and if I got air fair in addition to the heaps of great food the crew always enjoys on trips like this it would be more than enough.  I am sure the big load of shrimp we delivered the first trip out must have had some considerable value.  The little scratching we snuck home with on the second trip, when we were beat up so bad in the northeaster probably didn’t pay for the diesel that ran through the Dutz.

     Crew pay in this kind of operation is based on a percentage of the gross stock brought in by the boat.  The seine boat I worked for a couple years earlier had taken forty percent off the top to cover expenses of boat and net maintenance.  In that day, especially with the old pile of semi-rotten boards that passed for a fishing boat out of which we were fishing, the net had a value that exceeded the boat by some significant degree.  The sixty percent remaining bought all the food and fuel, then the remainder was divided equally among the six of us on the boat.  The skipper also owned the boat, so in addition to his regular crew share, he may have been able to make a bit of personal profit out of the money the boat and net made.  Of course expenses can run high, and I am sure there are times when the boys on deck go home with more than the owners.

          Running along on the fair westerly wind the afternoon of our first day out, all I could think of was home and the chores I planned to do on my own little boat before salmon season started in a couple of months.  The old Commander creaked and groaned out a comfortable ride, afternoon forecast crackling in over the radio suggesting the possibility of an easy slide across the gulf and down the line to Cape Spencer where the inside passage beckoned with promise of calm waters and quick sailing.

Copyright 2012 - Paul Petersen
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