Fishing

[eyeball]

Fishermen are often prone to invoking the Sea God's, karma or other supernatural forces to explain the good or bad fortune they experience in their occupation. I've always tried to cleave as much away from this before but its been a funny topic of discussion amongst the group of skippers I'm working with who've seen many a skipper come and go who couldn't hack dogfishing. After three trips I have to say it is a very tough fishery on people, 24 hour stretches of hard, fast repetative work are not uncommon and they've been the norm so far. When you push through the wall at about 30 hours your third wind kicks in and its like being in another dimension.

Never start a trip on a Friday is the first supernatural rule of a fisherman's thumb and my first test of skepticism was after doing so and running fifty miles offshore and breaking a drum mount on the first set and running fifty miles back home to get it welded back in place. My first trip out after that false start was certainly productive enough and I seem to have survived the crew's test of a new skipper. They did that by snapping as many hooks onto the longline as fast as they could when they set it out so I'd be up to my eyeballs in hooks and snaps when I hauled it back. Needless to say we wound up pulling more fish on a single string then they'd ever seen in 7 years of being on the boat and I still had all my fingers, minus one close scrape that's just about healed up. The fact we'd dumped our gear onto a motherload of fish was just written off to dumb luck, which I guess is about as low on the scale of supernatural events as it gets.

The 2nd trip out, the group of boats I'd been fishing with was scratching around looking for fish where I'd been the day before and not finding much so I decided to try some other spot right out of the blue for no particular reason other than it seemed dumb to go back where yesterday's fish were. Well, dumb is as dumb does I suppose cause when we started pulling gear aboard there was a fish on every hook. Of course by the time everyone else had their gear up and run to my new spot, we were loaded to the gills and on our way back in. I recall hearing a little grumbling about the fish gods over the radio from a few of the other skippers and my crew was certainly not shy about thanking them for blessing us. I really didn't give it too much thought because I was too busy filling out all the freaking paperwork the bureacrats have cursed fishermen with.

The third trip out was pretty much a repeat of the second. We set our gear where nobody else had tried and started pulling jumbo dogfish aboard one and even two at a time to a hook. One skipper, a close friend I've had many a long discussion with at sea about whether the gods exist or not just came right out and said it, "the gods are with you", all I could say was that maybe there was simply a lot of need around the boat. The family and owner, who can't fish now due to a stroke certainly need the income from the boat, and my crew's families and my own could all certainly use a nice shot of cash right now, I also think of all the people who will be employed unloading, proccessing and shipping our catch. Needless to say it was at this point that I probably should have kept my mouth shut.

I recalled my friend recounting his first dogfish trips that yielded less in a two whole trips then I'd just pulled on a single string and I made some quip about never imagining dogfishing being so easy. Like I said I should have just kept my mouth shut.

I went to haul my next line and one crewman immediately took a fish spine through the hand and the other had a chunk bitten off the end of his finger by another dogfish, they are sharks after all and I got off track and tangled the line up in the rudder and we had to screw around with that for a few hours. The next line we pulled parted off at one end shortly after we pulled its anchor aboard and then the same thing happened at the other end and we had to spend several more fruitless hours trying to retrieve it by dragging a grapple back and forth across the bottom with no luck unfortunately and at the cost of couple of thousand bucks worth of gear not to mention the fish and time lost.

I guess at some point in the dark and the gloomy mood that seemed to have gathered even more thickly around us than the fog I must have frustratingly muttered or pleaded something to someone or something about how handy a break would be. As luck or need would have it, the fog lifted the sun rose and we managed to fill the boat with the gear and fingers we had left. Speaking of fingers my friends had a pretty good chuckle about how God's suddenly and seemingly came down out of sky and struck our boat in the wake of my careless quip about fishing being so easy. It really isn't and I suspect skepticism might take a little more effort to maintain after this too. Both can be just as hard on the head as the body.

The fishing really has been hot and heavy just when our little boat and the people who depend on it the most need it to be and its difficult to explain, all I know is I feel thankful and a even little humble on the side. Needless to say my back is a little stiff too.

[bill_barilko]

Having been fishing for over 50 years I doubt the author of the tome as posted has ever fished in his long verbose and ever-dull life.

Nonsense piled on bee ess on top of very little.

BTW-It's sailors who believe they should never leave port on a Friday not fishermen-if it was fishermen then no one would ever go on a weekend trip would they?

Note I was fishing around said volcano two years ago-no sea of stone just a little pumice.

[eyeball]

Having been fishing for over 50 years I doubt the author of the tome as posted has ever fished in his long verbose and ever-dull life.

Nonsense piled on bee ess on top of very little.

BTW-It's sailors who believe they should never leave port on a Friday not fishermen-if it was fishermen then no one would ever go on a weekend trip would they?

Note I was fishing around said volcano two years ago-no sea of stone just a little pumice.

You're a sporty, right?

[bill_barilko]

You're a sporty, right?

You betcha!

[eyeball]

Having been fishing for over 50 years I doubt the author of the tome as posted has ever fished in his long verbose and ever-dull life.

A picture is worth a 1000 words, 3500 fish, $12000, whatever. It took us about 16 hours to fill the boat and then they really came on the bite so we filled the deck too. That took about another 4 hours.

Link

[bill_barilko]

A lot of work there and some fine eating for someone's pooch somewhere.

[eyeball]

Actually its been what Brits and Scots have been using for fish and chips for centuries. Its also known as rock salmon in much of Europe and some finds its way back to BC as a smoked delicacy called Schillerlocken. The fins go to Asia and so does the cartilage which is used as a folk remedy for treating or preventing cancer. I don't know if it actually does but why argue with a couple of billion people who might? The rest is turned into fertilizer. Nothing goes to waste.

Yes, it was a lot of work.

[bill_barilko]

I've eaten it as F&C here just as a curiosity it was OK nothing special we have so many better things to eat-Lucky Us!

[kimmy]

Bill Barilko ... fishing trip... I heard a song about this once...

-k

[bill_barilko]

Bill Barilko ... fishing trip... I heard a song about this once...

I grew up in the same part of the province, once on a car trip to the Chapleau area my Mother said "This is where they found Bill Barilko"

[eyeball]

I've eaten it as F&C here just as a curiosity it was OK nothing special we have so many better things to eat-Lucky Us!

Lucky for us we still have something to catch. Salmon and halibut quotas are down this year. I suspect the sporties around here are just as alarmed at the abundance of dogfish they'll have to face when trying to catch anything else. Usually they're not so fond of commercial fishermen but I imagine they'll be happy enough to see a few dogfish boats doing their best to fill up. Lucky for us we get to keep a few halibut too. They're like sprinkles on the icing. That's the price you pay I guess.

Yep, I recall the days when we used to hang sports gear in our trolling rigging like trophies of war.

I honestly thought my days of fishing might be behind me forever but I feel a strong second wind coming on and it feels like its at my back. I have a few other old friends hereabouts who've stuck and stayed who've also been finding their way back out to sea with a renewed sense of hope for a strong finish in one of their more beloved careers. Their wives probably couldn't be happier too.

The timing of a developing cold phase in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation also couldn't be better. I've certainly seen evidence of a greater abundance of krill and other sea life that is said to attend this phenomenon. Pilchards in particular which all but disappeared in the 30's and started showing up 15 years ago are really coming on strong now. The warm phase PDO that started in the 80's and persisted through the 90's and early years of this century as much as anything probably precipitated much of the problems that have plagued commercial fishing on BC's coast. Tourism was fun during the interim but my faith in it has always been muted. Now there's even talk that Oak Bay Marine Group might be pulling up stakes and moving out. As far as I'm concerned they can let the door hit them on the ass good and hard when they leave. Good riddance too I say.

Like an old prune barge that hasn't seen a good scraping in years, what goes around slowly but inexorably seems to be coming around. I've still got my health and I'm betting maybe eight or ten more years of capacity for hard work. I haven't felt this optimistic in a long time. Its a good feeling.

[bill_barilko]

...Now there's even talk that Oak Bay Marine Group might be pulling up stakes and moving out. As far as I'm concerned they can let the door hit them on the ass good and hard when they leave. Good riddance too I say.

This is news!!!!

From Ukee do you mean?

Or Campbell River?

I never liked their organisation it was always about numbers and bee ess.

Edited May 15, 2009 by bill_barilko

[eyeball]

This is news!!!!

From Ukee do you mean?

Or Campbell River?

I never liked their organisation it was always about numbers and bee ess.

Ukee according to rumour. Apparently they're moving some of their boats to other areas and perhaps this has contributed to the rumour mill grinding away. In any case I know the turnover rate amongst skippers is pretty high and moral has been going downhill for more than a few years now. They stopped opening up for whale-watching during the spring migration of gray whales a few years ago. Their corporate heart just doesn't seem to be into it any more.

I never liked their organization because of Bob Wright's appointment to the Pacific Salmon Commission, the rise of commercial sport fishing, the decline of commercial food fishing and the stench of corruption that hangs around just about everything and anything that DFO ever had to say about these. Numbers and bee ess have always been the order of the day. If Oak Bay Marine does pull out, it'll be worth recalling how often we were told - by people like Bob Wright, the PSC and DFO for example - that commercial fishing was a thing of the past and that our coastal economy needed to get with the program and change with the times.

Its worth noting just how productive the ocean looks right now. The abundance of feed and bird-life off the coast is nothing short of spectacular. The La Perouse bank is positively lousy with humpback whales feeding on krill. There are still obviously stocks of fish, like salmon, halibut, herring and Pacific Cod that are low but if there was ever an opportunity for things to turn around, its now.