The River Killers

This book is intended as a salute to all the people who venture onto the ocean to try and make a living, and an extended middle digit to the people who try and prevent them from doing so.

To the hardworking, dedicated people at
DFO
who do not deserve the disparagement expressed in this book, both of you have my deepest sympathy.

The Maple Leaf C making the turn on its big set.
ILLUSTRATION BY REBEKAH PARLEE

Four seine boats surged out
of the narrow pass like killer whales on the hunt. There had been no salmon in Double Bay, so now the boats were on the move, hungry for prey. The three aluminum boats, sleek and fast, turned south and headed down Johnstone Strait. The old wooden boat, lower and slower in the water, wallowed heavily across the strait toward the Blinkhorn light.

That was us then, the old
Maple Leaf C
and her crew of five hard-working but still poor fishermen. Flash forward to now: imprisoned in an Ottawa office, I surrendered to the flood of memories, the feel of the sun hot on my neck, the glare that dazzled across the water and the five of us on the bridge of the old
Maple Leaf
. We were desperately looking for fish in hope of making some money before the end of salmon season. It had been a tough year for us, relatively fishless but definitely not painless. More breakdowns than fish and more times in the wrong spot than the hot spot. However, hope springs eternal for fishermen as well as Leafs fans, and we were blessed in addition with the mindless optimism of the young.

Who am I? Daniel Edward “Danny” Swanson. My clan inhabits coastal
BC
like ubiquitous hobbits, humanoid but genetically distinct enough to form our own subspecies. We mostly log, some of us fish, mine a little, but always in a symbiotic relationship with the big machines that are the other dominant species in our habitat. We work with them, we work on them, and, some would say, work for them.

The females of our clan, as well as the males, could go on at length about the relative merits of hoe-chuckers versus grapple yarders. Our young could identify D-8 cats and articulated skidders before they learned Mother Goose. The relationship was intimate, although it had not yet led to actual interbreeding, even if we did wonder about Uncle Zeke.

When one of my young nephews asked why Daddy's loader wasn't eating supper with us, it was pointed out that the machine wouldn't fit through the door. And my aunt muttered that that was the only damn reason.

So there I was, one of the five humans who functioned as replaceable components in the complex hunting machine that is a West Coast seine boat. It was a mid-August afternoon, 1996. The whole crew was operating on caffeine consciousness after fishing for thirty straight hours, fighting to remain alert, straining tired eyes and burnt out synapses in the effort to spot a sockeye jumping.

As we approached Blinkhorn light we could see seven boats already there, so we turned slightly, looking for open water where we could make a set. Skipper Mark spotted the jumper, the distinctive anxious lunge of a sockeye close in to the beach. “Get ready, guys! Beach set.”

Fergie and I scrambled into the skiff, which was being towed bow up off the stern of the
Maple Leaf C
. Billy and Christine took up their stations by the drum and the winch. Mark guided the big boat dangerously close to the cliff that rose almost vertically from the water. We scanned the rock face intently, looking first for a place where we could land the skiff, and then something to tie to. Mark yelled and pointed from the bridge and we could see the spot, a narrow shelf of rock just above the waterline, a crevice scarring the clean rock face, and thirty feet above, a finger of rock that could serve as a natural bollard. He swung the boat hard over and we circled for another pass. This time we'd be going for the tie-up and my stomach knotted hard. The tide was running like a river and I knew it would be tricky. There were lots of ways to screw up, but only one acceptable result: get the goddamn end of the net tied to the goddamn beach. Fergie and I might not have been the best skiff crew on the coast, but we'd never missed a tie-up and sometimes we were too proud of that. Occasionally we'd taken chances that other guys hadn't gotten away with. There were enough ways to get hurt doing this job without pushing your luck. No time now to ponder risk factors and safety rules. Just pretend that neither existed.

We bore down on the tie-up spot. Mark blew the horn and lots of different things started to happen all at once. Billy hit the pelican hook with a hammer, causing it to release the skiff line. The bow of the skiff dropped sharply. Maintaining my balance, I threw the sea anchor into the boiling wake and started feeding slack from the coiled beach line into the water. The sea anchor dug into the water and started to pull the net off the drum. I prayed it would come off clean and not backlash as the drum turned faster and faster. I knew Billy would be peering around the corner of the drum stand, watching the net intently for embryonic screwups while dodging bights of heavy lead line that threatened to break his neck. Fergie, standing in the stern of the skiff, was leaning hard on the oars, driving us toward the rock shelf where we would land. I continued to feed slack into the water, just enough so that the skiff was free to move forward but not enough to loop back and tangle Fergie's oars. The bow of the skiff hit the rock and I jumped, beach line in hand and strap over my shoulder.

Now came the hard part. I had to shimmy up the crevice, dragging the inch-and-seven-eighths beach line and heavy strap with me. I had to get up to the rock finger and tie the beach line to it, and do it quickly. Grunting and cursing, I started the climb. The skin on my knees and back was not standing up at all well to the abrasive rock. But urgency trumped pain. The net, with one end of the beach line attached to it, was drifting downstream with the fast-moving tide. The beach line was only twenty fathoms long and in about one minute it would start to pull away from me.

Adrenaline is a very good painkiller, so I ignored the skin I was shedding and dragged the beach line upwards. Sweat threatened to blind me as I gasped for breath. The net was almost all off the drum, the corks forming a long “C” in the water, a full quarter mile from end to end. Our end of the net, which had been upstream of the tie-up spot, had drifted down to a spot directly below and was starting to pull away from me. I was running out of time.

I reached the top of the crevice, level with the rock finger. I threw the rope strap over it like tossing a hoop over a peg. It settled down to the base of the finger with just enough slack that I could tie the beach line to it. With the last of my strength, I pulled on the beach line, getting out all the slack. I started tying the beach knot, quickly, like a cowboy wrapping the legs of a roped calf. Taking a bight of beach line, I passed it under and around the strap. The tide was running hard, so I did a wrap and a half, then two wraps back around the beach line itself. I'd calculated the length of the bight perfectly so that there was just enough of a loop left to pull a bight of slack through it and begin the chain. The beach line was coming tight now as the tide applied tons of force to the net. That force was transferred to the beach line and along it to the knot that I was attempting to tie. As the line tightened up, the knot would slip, so I had to make sure my hand wasn't caught in a loop as I pulled through the last bights of the chain.

And then it was done. The line strained tightly from the end of the net to the strap around the rock. Water dripped from the line, wrung out as the rope stretched and shrank under the strain. With a sudden shock, the knot slipped and scrunched up tight, smoking from the friction. I cringed momentarily before remembering how brave I was. Fergie was standing in the skiff, lounging over his oars. He shook his head. “Couldn't have done it better myself.”

“You couldn't have done it, period,” I gasped. “This was a job for a highly tuned physical machine. Got a light?”

Fergie laughed and threw me his lighter, then turned and rowed out to the end of the net to untie the sea anchor. I carefully coiled the bitter end of the beach line on the upstream side of the rock. There was a bit of a ledge I could stand on when the time came to release the knot.

My breathing was almost back to normal, so I lit a cigarette. I leaned back against the cliff, enjoying once again the feeling of having done it, pulled off a tough one. The set looked good. Our end of the net had pulled out of the water a little as the beach line tightened up. I followed the line of white corks as they traced a shallow arc through the green waters of Johnstone Strait. Almost a quarter mile away, the
Maple Leaf C
held the other end of the net against the tide so the fish would be pushed into it. That was the advantage of a beach set as opposed to an open set, where the net just drifted in the water.

From my vantage point on the cliff, I saw them first: schools of sockeye, heading right for the middle of the net. I yelled and pointed. “Going in! Going in!”

Mark saw them too. Black smoke belched from the stack of the
Maple Leaf C
as Mark pushed the throttle ahead. He wasn't just holding the end of the net now, but pulling it upstream to a point where he could turn and tow it back toward the beach. As the boat pulled on the outside end of the net the strain was transferred to our end. The beach line creaked and stretched even more. It had shrunk under the strain to less than half of its normal diameter. I cowered away expecting it to snap. “Look out, Fergie. She's gettin' tight.”