The River Killers (5 page)

“What about Whoopi Goldberg?”

“Better than a whoopee cushion, which is what we've got now.”

“It's simple,” someone said. “What we need is a single entity that combines all the best qualities of the last few ministers in one package.”

“Only problem is,” I said, “the Ebola virus can't get a Canadian passport and the bubonic plague is past retirement age.”

“How about Saddam Hussein? I hear he's at loose ends, or soon might have a few loose ends.”

“Yeah, but he got bombed.”

“So did Fred whasisname. Regularly.”

“Attila the Hun.”

“Make that Attila the Hen. A bird in the hand is worth both of the Bushes.”

“Margaret Thatcher?”

“We already said Attila the Hen!”

I waved my credit card at the waiter while the bantering went on. When he took it, I told him the rest of the evening was on me. Hadn't done that since a big fishing week. When I had my next drink safely in my hand, I interrupted.

“Jesus Christ! No, I didn't spill my drink. I'm nominating Jesus Christ. Instead of multiplying the fishes, he could divide the fishermen, which is what you need to do before you subtract them.”

“Right on! That would make life simpler. Get rid of the fishermen.”

This from a stubble-headed guy in the corner. He was flushed and his glasses were slightly askew. I didn't know if he was serious or not but that opinion was held by the majority in
DFO
. The “fishermen are the problem” premise underlay all of their recent policy.

I whispered to Bette, “Who is that guy?”

She rolled her eyes. “Reginald Sanderson. Fleming's protégé. Dedicated to wallowing in his master's murk. Handle with kid gloves: for sanitary reasons, if nothing else.”

“So, you don't really like the guy?” Another roll of the eyes, two in less than a minute. Extraordinary.

Last call. The waiters were scurrying around as everyone frantically ordered doubles. I glanced at Bette and saw her grinning at me. I felt a surge of bonhomie as I considered what a good friend she was.

Suddenly we were all leaving, and Bette and I found ourselves in a cab together.

“You should come visit me out West. I'll show you around. It's a different world out there.”

“Maybe I will. God knows I'm tired of this place.” Instinctively, I put my arm around her shoulder and indulged in an ambiguous snuggle. She shrugged it off. I looked wounded. “Danny, I need a boyfriend, not a straight man.” “Why?” I asked as the cab pulled over in front of her apartment. “I heard your last boyfriend wasn't straight enough, and that's why you dumped him.” She exited quickly and slammed the door without even inviting me up.

The next morning, April 13,
Air Canada flight 227 transported a very large headache from Ottawa to Vancouver. Unfortunately, the headache was mine. Some twit had given me a hangover, so I was coping with that rather than celebrating the fact that I was about to start a new life, or return to an old one, or start having one. Or something.

I spent a day moping around the huge
DFO
building where every phone number started with six six six. The apocalyptical significance of the prefix had been noted by every fisherman on the coast each time a new sacrifice was demanded. On that grey April day, I knew, I would swear, that the Beast was real and that I was trapped in its bowels. I prayed for release. If that meant being excreted, well, I felt like shit anyway.

But before relief, penance. I reported to regional director general Paul Desroche and was greeted with enthusiasm. “Danny, you're just in time to sit in on the Strategic Policy Working Group session. We're looking at licenses.”

“Mine's in my wallet.”

He stared at me for just a second. “I mean we're examining licensing policy. We may need to rationalize.”

Good luck
, I thought. Still, I'd never been present at the birth of an actual policy before, so I followed him with less of a lack of enthusiasm than was perhaps warranted.

We entered a small lecture room where about thirty people gazed rapturously at a man in a mismatched jacket and pants who was waving around a laser pointer. I was about to duck when Paul nudged me. “He's our economics guru.”

The word “oxymoron” flashed through my mind but my lips did not move. Years of discipline.

The man was in full flight. Capturing maximum rents and facilitating market corrections followed by freeing the exchange mechanism. Hallejuah! He finished with a rousing chorus of growth through deregulation and, glory be, the discipline of the marketplace. I expected a few Amens and Praise the Lords, but there was only applause, worshipful though it may have been.

Paul strode to the front of the room. “Thank you so much, Dr. Solomon. We're always fascinated to witness the power of economic thought unleashed on the problems of fisheries management. And now gentlemen—and ladies, welcome Rebecca—reasoning from the general to the particular, what can we say about abalone licenses?”

Not much
, I thought.
They're worthless pieces of paper because the fishery was managed into oblivion. The Minister giveth and the Minister taketh away.

Nevertheless, an earnest debate broke out, in a room full of highly educated people whose collective salary almost equalled Conrad Black's annual bonus, about a fishery that hadn't existed for ten years. There was a policy void, and out of the void must come, what? Enlightenment? I don't know. But it was fascinating to watch.

Three overhead projectors were in play and transparencies were being flashed onto every available surface. The focusing knobs, as per
DFO
rules, were fused into fuzziness, so tables and lecterns were being screeched backwards and forwards in the quest for focus. Vague curves were superimposed over text that just might have been readable if the transparency had been the right way up. Numbers were flashing on Dr. Solomon's back as he waved at the
X
axis of a Laffer curve. It wasn't even mildly amusing. A new graph showed up, undulating on his shiny once-fashionable jacket. The curve started high and then plunged off his right hip. I leaned over to Paul. “Got a plane to catch. But this has been great. Keep me posted.”

“It's all on the Web page. You can follow the whole debate and even post your comments. You don't have to be a member of the group.”

“Super. I'll follow it closely. See ya.”

Sometimes prayers are answered. At three that afternoon, a kind woman handed me a plane ticket to Shearwater. Somewhat off the beaten path, in fact so far off as to escape even minor bruising, Shearwater was my waypoint to joining the mighty
James Sinclair
, flagship of Western Command and floating
HQ
for the herring fishery.

The
Jimmy Sinc
, one hundred and thirty seven feet of recycled pop cans, was anchored in Shearwater Bay. One of the boat's inflatable runabouts, a Zodiac, picked me up and zipped me out to the mother ship. Standing on deck to greet me was Peter Van Allen. Pete had been attached to the herring fishery for almost fifteen years and knew just about everything there was to know about the fish, the fishermen, and the fishery. So naturally he was not in charge; I was. As I shook his hand I said, “I'm here pretty much as an observer and just another pretty face.”

“You can have it if you want it,” he said. “My stomach is way too old for this stuff.”

Ah yes, the herring fishery. The biggest, fastest, wealthiest fishery in the world. The entire fleet lived on its nerves. The tension was such that fishermen and fishery managers alike gobbled antacid pills like candy.

Here's how the crapshoot works. Herring are fished for the roe, the eggs, of the females. When the fish school up for their massive spawning events during March and April, the roe content matures rapidly. The roe sacs are measured as a percentage of body weight. Starting at about five percent, the roe content will grow over a two- or three-week period to as high as twenty percent. The idea is to wait as long as possible to allow the roe sacs to get as big as possible. But if you wait too long, the fish spawn and then everything is lost. Or you might wait until the optimum moment to open the fishery, and then a storm will blow in, making it impossible to fish for two or three days. When the storm is over, the fish have spawned and the fishery is lost. And it's not just the lost revenue from the price of the roe. The fishermen have rented licenses worth millions of dollars. If the fishery is blown, they have to eat those costs.

The pressure on the manager to get it right is enormous. But the pressure on the fishermen to perform is even greater. The seine boats participating in the fishery are the biggest and fastest with the most aggressive skippers. Different company fleets have their own spotter planes to perform aerial surveillance. Subsea surveillance is undertaken by sophisticated sonars and sounders that would be the envy of many navies. Messages are transmitted from boat to boat using verbal codes or electronically scrambled ciphers.

The planes circle overhead. The big steel boats circle over the fish, jockeying for position. It's a game of high-stakes, high-speed chess and the boat with the inside position wins. And then the opening announcement over
VHF
radio. “This is the
James Sinclair
. Roe herring fishing by purse seine net is now declared open in areas seven-dash-one-three and seven-dash-one-four.”

Before the message has even been completed, smoke belches from fifty smokestacks as fifty throttles are rammed forward. Nets start to peel off drums, not dragged off by the resistance of a sea anchor, but hauled off by power skiffs that pull in the opposite direction of the big boat. Many boats set on the same school of fish. Rammings are threatened and occasionally occur; guns are brandished and sometimes fired as the boats attempt to close their circles. It's a game of chicken won by the most aggressive. Diesel fuel and testosterone are the order of the day. It's big machines and big egos doing battle in a small arena for huge prizes. It's symbolic. It's excessive. It's exciting as hell. I was looking forward to it.

The first opening, in the Gulf of Georgia, had not gone well. Scattered fish and bad weather had meant the seine fishery was pretty much a bust, although the gillnetters had moved down to Yellow Point and gotten their quota. So now, here in the central area, there were lots of seine boats that were already half a million in the hole and looking to make up their losses. I prayed we could make it work for them.

Preliminary soundings showed some large bodies of fish in the area, although they would appear and disappear randomly. The roe content had gone from five percent to eight percent in a week. Things were looking not too bad. When the percentage got to about fifteen, and if there was sufficient fish in the area, we'd let 'er go. In the meantime, we would do constant sounding to keep tabs on how many fish was in the area, and two chartered seine boats would do test sets and sample the fish to measure the roe content. It meant twelve-hour days at a minimum but, by God, they would seem shorter than my usual Ottawa seven-hour shifts.

That evening, Pete and I convened in the wheelhouse at eight for the daily fleet update. We'd broadcast on
VHF
channel 78A to let the fleet know our latest findings, and listen to their concerns, and generally just have a gabfest. Sometimes it was a focused problem-solving sort of workshop and sometimes it was more of a bitch session. After the problems with the Gulf fishery, I was expecting more of the latter.

Pete led off. He gave the sounding reports, which showed a school estimated at two thousand tons in upper Spiller Channel, a couple of schools totaling maybe three thousand in lower Spiller, and scattered schools of around fifteen hundred tons even lower down in Seaforth Channel.

He then opened it up to the fleet for comments, and I was mildly surprised by the constructive nature of the dialogue. Guys were talking about trigger points and hail procedures and fallback plans as though they hadn't a care in the world. The only participants who hinted at aggressiveness were the processing representatives. These guys represented large companies that had to satisfy shareholders. To them, fish were nothing more than a commodity to be converted into shareholder dividends. In all the debates I'd heard over the years about how much to fish, where, and how, and who should catch them, the processors were predictably consistent in their voice: as much as possible, as soon as possible, for our fleet, as cheaply as possible. When fishermen expressed concerns about overfishing or sustainability, they were pressured to fish like hell this year and forget about next year. And they paid the price for that.

When the debate had been going on for twenty minutes or so, focused on arcane stuff like male/female/juvenile percentage, I was thrilled to hear a familiar voice. He followed the standard protocol of calling our boat name first, followed by his. “
James Sinclair
,
Coastal Provider
.” It was my old skipper, Mark, who had somehow managed to acquire a coveted herring command. “I was just wondering about our basic strategy here. Are we going to try and get the quota in one shot or have a short opening and then reassess the situation?”

It was a deceptively simple question. The answer would dictate every fisherman's strategy. Should he go for the one big set or be patient, knowing he'd get a least one more chance the next day? I motioned to Pete and he handed me the mike. “
Coastal Provider, James Sinclair
. Evening, skipper. Nothing's written in stone but we'd like to have a quick one, shut 'er down to get a good count, and then get the remainder of the quota possibly the next day.” I didn't know if he'd recognize my voice after eight years so I threw in a reference that only he would understand. “We'd like to pull this off so everyone gets their share without going over quota. Everyone's got mouths to feed and the biggest mouth is the banker's.”