The Fisher Queen Read online

  Exploring the dense woods that rimmed the beach, we found tumbledown old cabins, some still used as shelters by campers. Lovely wildflowers, maybe the descendants of gardens, grew everywhere: cobalt lupines, lavender columbines, bright-faced daisies. We followed another small wood sign on to the Hanson Lagoon trail, some of it on a raised wooden boardwalk that led for 10 miles through the forest to Hanson’s Lagoon, farther down the coast where the settlers lived and farmed as well. We walked a couple of miles on the trail, mostly in silent single file, relieved to be away from the confines of boat life and enjoying the free swinging movement of our bodies. I felt drawn to know more about the settlers, what had brought them to this incredibly wild and remote place and what drove them away.

  Since there wasn’t another human in sight and it had been blowing for two days, we had a chance of finding a glass ball amid the satiny bleached logs that ringed the fine, hard-packed sand. Excited as a kid on an Easter egg hunt, I found five little beauties the size of large oranges, tinted in delicate shades of aquamarine and fern green. They fit in the front-zipped pocket of my anorak.

  By the time we wandered back to our skiff in the opposite bay, the breakers were three feet high and curling into the beach from the powerful incoming tide. We studiously timed the skiff shove-off and counted the waves for the second time that day. Careful to not get our sneakers wet in the surf, we rejected wave after wave, until we were certain we had our break, pushed hard and leapt in with precision technique, ready to start rowing like mad. The wave had other ideas, and an instant later we were hit by surf that sent me flying off the bow and Paul off the stern into the chuck. We staggered back to shore laughing our guts out and very refreshed by the icy sea water. Since we were already soaked to the skin we just waded past the surf, clambered aboard the skiff and rowed to the boat. Luckily, the glass balls were tied around my waist in my anorak and made it through the adventure.

  Thankful for the afternoon sun, we stripped on deck and hung our clothes on the boom and fell into each other’s arms, still laughing until our lips met in a sudden flurry of kisses that flung us to the deck.

  At sunset, as I sat on the hatch cover reading The Three Ways of Asian Wisdom, our old friend the humpback rolled past us on his way to dinner. I thought of the Danish settlers and their moss-covered dreams, Buddhism’s eternal now, of Sisiutl rising from the waters to test our courage and authenticity, of the song that says all we are is dust in the wind. And as the Milky Way blazed its way across the night, I knew for certain one thing: there were no atheists at sea.

  Winter Harbour

  As much as a 20-ton fishboat can tiptoe, that’s what we did, in the pre-dawn run to Winter Harbour. The restless greys of wind, waves and cloud were a perfect backdrop to the inside of our cabin and my psyche. The taste of death still sharp on our tongues, we went about the business of thwarting the Grim Reaper with a carefully calculated approach to navigating Scott Channel, working out the tides, depths and winds to tip the odds more in our favour. Pale and silent, we stood in the wheelhouse, hyper-alert and vigilant, as the outgoing low tide swept us through the channel and revealed the obstacle course of rocks we had to skim by as we hugged the close shore.

  I may have been the picture of stoic calm, but I was in pitched battle with every part of me that fought not to be in this place again. I had to beat the flashes and fears back, or I would never be able to go on. Beat them back as I had done during that fateful canoe trip through the Fraser Canyon. Three hours after I had been trapped under the canoe, I had to get back in it, cross the river to find safety for the night and then paddle another two days down the river to get home. I had seen others bested by the terrors and never venture out on the water again.

  The gift of our glorious afternoon in Guise Bay had been replaced by a sinister little Jack-in-the-Box as we rounded the point and met the west coast waves full on. These weren’t the horrifying mountains of yesterday, but a dirty slop that bucked and rolled us as we ground our way to Winter Harbour. Every once in a while a thought would dart in to let me know I really should consider being afraid, to which I would inwardly snort and remind myself that we had already experienced the worst and still lived to tell the tale, and this? This was just annoying. We had savvied up quick about Cape Scott, and after the heart-pounding approach the previous afternoon we knew the nature of this beast and how to appease it.

  I knew Paul wasn’t being reckless this time; we wouldn’t be running and fishing in bad conditions if we weren’t so desperate. In spite of all the uncertainties and terrors, I loved this life and was smitten by its power to strip us humans of our uppityness and constantly remind us of our place: a grain of sand, a drop of water in an endless sea.

  To distract ourselves from the relentless pounding, we invented a music game we called Stump the Lump. We were both music lovers, and since the boat stereo had been stolen from Paul’s VW Jetta earlier that spring along with the Blaupunkt car stereo, and since the insurance wouldn’t cover the boat stereo and we didn’t have the money to replace it before we left, we had learned to live without it. The Jetta was a reminder of how lucrative fishing had been until just two years ago—as were travel, art school, good restaurants, designer clothes and other fineries.

  As I gripped the dashboard to keep upright, I would sing a melody. Paul had to guess the song title and artist, and if correct, he would then play a melody on his harmonica while I steered and guessed. This amused us for several hours until we started to get worn out by the rough ride, which worsened the closer we got to the point at the northern opening to Quatsino Sound that would eventually lead to Winter Harbour.

  Our choice was either to ride farther south into the open roiling waters past the rocks and islets of the sound and then double back to run to the inlet that wound its way inland to harbour, or cut the trip shorter and risk the narrow channel of huge crashing waves and rocks between the point and Kains Island lighthouse and run straight into the inlet. Longer and awful, or shorter and hellish.

  After my eyes popped out of my sockets at the sight of the channel, Paul asked me if I was scared. I decided on “a little” considering the nightmare we’d been through just 24 hours ago and how worn out we were from the trip down. I was pissed that he was even considering the channel option, as he didn’t know it very well. He seemed almost relieved that one of us had admitted to being afraid and rounded the islands to surf our way to the back of the Sound and through the five miles of twisting, lowland inlets freckled with humpbacked islands covered to the glassy water’s edge by dense evergreens and salal shrubs. I never got over the dramatic shift from chaos to calm, freezing to furnace, once we were out of the wind and into sheltered waters. One minute I was shivering in layers of wool and rubber, and the next, tearing my clothes off as the mercury shot up. Today was a miracle of peaceful warmth.

  Until we rounded a corner and the clamour of two fish camps and hundreds of boats came at us across the water like a gale. Paul was right. Half the fleet must have been jammed into the bay of this miniscule hamlet, a haven for ships since the 1800s. Winter Harbour had the only fish camps for almost another hundred miles down the west coast, offering fishermen the options of selling to BC Packers, the Fisherman’s Co-op or the occasional cash buyer who hung around just outside the harbour and sold for higher prices but supplied no fuel or ice. In those cases, fishermen could buy ice from the camps, if it was available; preference was always given to fishermen who sold to the camps too. Cash buyers were a good option for day catches, or if you were leaving the grounds for a while, but you never wanted to push your loyalty luck with BC Packers.

  With a population of 20, Winter Harbour was connected by a network of publicly accessible logging roads that serviced the northern end of Vancouver Island, linking frontier communities like Coal Harbour, Port Alice and Holberg, which traditionally relied on logging and fishing but were already beginning the shift to eco-tourism and sport fishing. An ancient network of trails by First Nations, then the Scandinavian s
ettlers, criss-crossed the region, and recovery was already underway to reopen many of them.

  As in many coastal towns and villages I’d seen, the homes and sheds were jumbled close together along the waterfront, many on stilts, and were joined by a boardwalk that ran the length of the village over the mud flats and water. As we motored toward the BC Packers camp to tie up and check in for ice, fuel and water, I knew that boardwalk would be my sanity in the weeks to come.

  I was struck by the realization that these were the round piney hills my father had logged 25 years earlier out of Holberg, the largest floating lumber camp in the world, and cringed to think he had been part of the destruction of the old-growth forests that had covered most of northern Vancouver Island. I was indeed my father’s daughter, here participating in the destruction of the salmon industry. I shook away the irony and prepared to drop the bumpers and tie up to the fourth troller out from the finger float.

  The whole bay was buzzing with anticipation of the opening in two days that people desperately hoped would compensate for the miserable spring and sockeye season. Weather reports predicted good weather for July 1 and we were swept up in a flurry of preparations for a 10-day trip in our new neighbourhood. While Paul tied miles of red gear I ran back and forth between the laundry room and our cranked-up stove, preparing pots of stew, chili and spaghetti sauce and putting them down in the ice in plastic containers so I could focus on pulling gear and dressing fish on the grounds.

  As much as I loved the familyness of Bull Harbour, I loved the energy of Winter Harbour and had even spotted a few girls my age—we’d smiled and waved happily. During a laundry jaunt I met one of the girls I’d seen on a big steel troller, and within minutes Cheryl and I became best friends. As we sat on our washers, then the dryers, we poured out our life stories, and we soon toured each other’s boats, met each other’s skippers and planned a communal dinner for that night with four other boats.

  She and Craig were just pals, and as much as she loved fishing and was a fantastic deckhand, the rough west coast waters were cooking up a level of seasick she’d never experienced, and she refused to give in to it. There was a genuine camaraderie and respect between them, and Craig shared with us that night that a top-notch female deckhand was worth more than any transgression, no matter how lonely or hormone-driven he might be. He had a girlfriend at home and was out there to make money, not mess around.

  The same could not be said for all the fishermen with female deckhands, especially Dirty Ol’ Frank, who had a reputation as long as the fishing rod he liked to brag about and had offered to every girl who trod his deck. Some ran screaming or crying or angry from the old codger, but at age 74 he had met his match.

  One of the four boats invited to dinner was Frank’s, and though he deferred to the young folks, his deckhand, the buxom, blond Danni, happily accepted. We had met briefly at the beginning of the season in Port Hardy, and when Paul had recovered from gawking, he told me that she was in for it with the old bugger. Two months later she was still with him, more strapping than ever, and as soon as was decent, Cheryl and I took her out to the stern of Craig’s boat.

  “So, Danni, we were wondering how things are going,” I said, taking a sip of my beer and reaching up to light her cigarette. “Everything okay?”

  “Us girls have to stick together,” Cheryl said, opening Danni a beer. “We just want to make sure Frank isn’t giving you a hard time . . . you know. You can tell us.”

  “I’m just fine, don’t worry,” Danni said and flashed her Colgate smile. “For the first few weeks he was good as gold, talking about how he was getting older and that I was totally safe with him and he thought of me as a daughter. That part was fine, but what was really starting to bug me was that we hardly ever went fishing. One excuse after another and I needed money for school and I just wanted to get the hell on with it and not be on a holiday.”

  “Well, people have been rolling their guts out for the last two months for nothing, so you haven’t been missing anything,” I said.

  “So did he try anything?” Cheryl said, frowning.

  “One morning, after staying tied up for three days, Frank came up from the fo’c’sle completely dressed, including gumboots, but minus his pants and gaunch and says, ‘How about you come join me down in my bunk?’”

  “Oh my God, naked?” I snickered.

  “Yup, with his little-old-man dick hanging down below his flannel shirt.”

  “What did you do?” Cheryl asked.

  “I said, ‘Frank, get back down there and put your pants on right now or I’ll beat the shit out of you,’ and he just stands there with his mouth open, staring, then shuffles downstairs and comes back up, pants on, and asks me what I’d like for breakfast. I said, ‘I’d like to catch some fucking fish or I’m off this boat.’ So he says, ‘We’ll go out after breakfast,’ and we’ve been out there ever since.”

  Cheryl and I burst out laughing and damn near choked on our beer. We kept laughing harder and harder ’til the three of us were hanging off each other and staggering around the deck. It must have been an inspiring sight, because several older fishermen watched, enraptured, from their decks and the float.

  Danni could have broken him in half over her knee. After the incident he was as meek as a lamb as she worked him relentlessly and wouldn’t let him take harbour days unless the weather was life threatening. He followed her with puppy-love eyes and treated her like a queen, gave her an extra bonus after each trip and upped her share to 15 percent. And when eyebrows were raised at that well-known signal, he tut-tutted and said there was none of that business and she had earned it fair and square and then some—that she ran a tight ship and had made him into an honest man.

  His cabin was spotless, she wouldn’t allow drinking on board, cooked only healthy food and made him cut way down on his smoking. He even cleaned up his language and no longer made lewd comments about every female within eyeshot—when he had, she’d given him one of her thunderbolt looks and a lecture on respect and equality. She had overheard him once say that if only he had met a woman like that when he was younger, he would have walked the straight and narrow and been a major highliner.

  After we collected ourselves enough to join the others, we shared the best we had to create a royal feast of fish and crab and mussels fresh from the sea, wine and special coffees—every lovely little treat we had secreted away on our boats. We toasted life and love and loads of coho and laughed and talked and sang the night away, weaving back to our boats with the birds. We had a whole day to recover and anchored in a quiet clutch behind the last island before The Gut, ready to fling ourselves into the morning.

  Calm out there may have been like rough in Bull Harbour, but we were catching fish! Hallelujah, we were catching fish: 30 or 40 coho a day and a couple of springs, which made the rodeo-ride through The Gut every morning worth it. Hell, up at the Yankee Spot we had been banging around just about as bad and going broke for the privilege of it. I got used to my feet leaving the ground with every wave just outside the channel, but by the time we were 10 miles offshore, trolling up to Sea Otter Cove and back, it was usually sunnier and calmer. For a couple of days, just long, slow swells came down from the north, which meant they must have had a mother of a storm up there the day before.

  We had been hitting it hard for nine days: running in every night to anchor either in Sea Otter or behind the channel island in Quatsino, usually around 10 p.m., doing a cleanup before falling into bed, then up at 4:30 a.m. for a morning bite. We were almost relieved when the weather started to really kick up and the fishing slowed down. We ran into Winter Harbour to sell our load and wait out the string of southeast storms they said was coming.

  I had dressed every fish except the springs for most of the trip. My time was down to 45 seconds a fish—I was training myself for the hump opening coming up August 1, just three weeks away. We might pull in a couple of hundred fish a day; what the little humps lost in value, at just a couple of bucks apiece, they ma
de up for in volume. My hands were small and I was fast as hell, and we’d already decided that when humps opened, Paul would pull and ice and I would dress and drop.

  Waiting all day to unload would normally be an agony of frustration when the fish were running and the weather was good, but today for once the timing was perfect: it was blowing like hell on the outside and we needed a harbour day anyhow. Our tally had come in at just under $3,000, the best yet, but it would be just enough to cover the boat mortgage back payments (which couldn’t be extended one more month), get the unreliable pilot fixed in Port Hardy so I could pull gear instead of steer, and pay for fuel and groceries at the outrageously inflated camp prices. How many times would we have to tell ourselves that next trip we would start getting ahead?

  Over coffee and cigs with Craig and Cheryl at Shirley’s Diner, we bitched about our pilot and how we would get it to Port Hardy, and in a flash Craig had the solution: he had to drop off Cheryl in Port Hardy and pick up his new deckhand, so he would take his boat to Coal Harbour, where he had left his truck, then drive all of us to Port Hardy. It was only 30 miles east and back again, an overnight stay on his boat and back the next day. We knew Craig well enough to know we were in for a wild and crazy couple of days. We were not disappointed.

  Led Zeppelin blasting, we emerged from Winter Harbour’s inlet to a full-on southeast gale blowing into the back of Quatsino Sound that we rocked and rolled and smoked our way across. Luckily, the pot in those days didn’t paralyze you with paranoia, and it eased the crossing into Quatsino Inlet—along with the go-go dancing on the deck to Steppenwolf’s “Born To Be Wild.” We were invincible as wave after wave came over the bow, and we sang harmony to the storm’s roar, our blood howling in our veins. Winding through the inlet, we finally shot through the narrows and across to Coal Harbour as slack tide shifted and the whirlpools began to spin again, just like one of those old Jason and the Argonauts movies where gods and demons test them relentlessly.