Salmon trolling

Helen D with salmon trolling gear trailing out behind.

Wild rides make good stories, but most of the time the boat rolls along in the sea quite comfortably.


In an earlier  post I wrote about traveling in an old wood fish boat on the way out to the grounds at the beginning of a trip.  Wild rides make good stories, but most of the time the boat rolls along in the sea quite comfortably. During fishing operation the engine is set to quarter speed, heavy stabilizers slice deep through the water at each side with troll gear suspended from the outer ends of the poles combine to  dampen the movement of the boat considerably.

Kirk Wallen working his salmon gear

The Helen D was ice boat.  Worked sex to eight days at a time, keeping the catch refrigerated in beds of flaked ice in the fish hold.  At the start of each trip two or three tons of ice are squirted into an insulated room that occupies most of the hull behind the wheel house.  As fish come aboard, each one is dressed and washed, then packed in fresh ice in bins along each side of the hold. 

In the seventies, fish companies would purchase fish refrigerated in this way up to ten days old.  By the nineties, when I worked in southeast for a fish buyer, the maximum holding times for fish on the boats had been significantly reduced over quality considerations.

These days many boats in this class have installed freezers in the holds, keeping fish at peak quality for extended periods at temperatures well below zero.

A typical fishing trip out of Lapush in those days started with a grocery run to Forks, pick up a few things at the gear store, slip down the river, jocking the boat in the river current under the ice chute.  The hatches closed and sealed, then down the short stretch of river and around the wash rock at the foot of James Island. I always got a Calvinist attitude, sick feeling in the stomach as the boat dives into the first green roller past the rock is just reward for the previous evenings debauch.

Radios crackle with the positions of partner boats, catch levels and locations reported via codes.  My cousin Jon, who had a gill net boat fishing in the sound at that time, could not believe that two fishermen would ever share straight information with one another, code or no.  Probably right, but in a code group each individual is motivated to base their reports on actual catch numbers in exchange for information from others in the group.

Four or five hour run out from town to bring up the fleet, then set gear out for a while before dark.  Next day starts early. Kettle simmering on the oil fired galley range, boat coffee first thing. Then crank her up and get into position to set the gear out by first light.

Along the beach, forty fathoms or shallower, one spends the night at anchor.  Boats will cluster along the twenty fathom line, several targets easier for freighters rattling along the coast at night to spot.    Further off shore boats will run away from each other at the end of the day, then shut down and drift over night.

Hook and line fishing.  No bulky nets or heavy pots, just a single deck hand and light gear.  Sixteenth inch stainless steel main lines, three to a side with thirty five to fifty pound lead weights at the bottom.  Each line works independently of the others, poles and floats maintain distance to prevent snarls.  Each line supports a dozed or more individual lures.  Troller spends days working through each line in its turn, picking fish that hit the gear and clearing hooks and replacing worn leaders.

I often recalled the summer of 1959, when my dad landed a job as pastor of church in a tiny eastern Washington town.  Our house hardly more than a ten minute walk from a ice cold rushing river, loaded with delicious rainbow trout.  Using the cane poles my grandady cut from a grove behind his Savanah Georga house on our vacation earlier that summer, my brother brought home his limit every day.  Mom rolled them in cornmeal and fried them hot in Crysco.  Good eating.

I failed to catch a single fish that summer, now here I am standing in the cockpit of a troller trying to get a hundred coho a day.

Photo credit, Richard Crow