Tide and Current

Times and Tides: Revisiting the Old Fishing Grounds

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In October 2001 I went briefly back to the grounds where I seined salmon from 1960 to 1973. I fished with my old skipper’s sons as I had in the old days on a boat that was built before any of us were born. In the years since I last fished with this family, I have been aboard boats from Alaska’s Bristol Bay to Louisiana’s bayous and from Thailand to Spain, but these three days taught me about the current reality of commercial fishing in ways that are unique to my own time and place. The experience was at once exhilarating and sobering.

For a fisherman, his knowledge of the waters and their currents are vital. Where the layman will see a flat surface, the fisherman will read the faint tide lines and glassy surface over upwellings to know the depths beneath and from that the behaviour of the fish. I recently sat on the aging boards of the sala or deck in front of a fisherman’s hut on a beach along the Gulf of Thailand. The man’s immaculate 24-foot open boat was pulled up in the sandy cove below a Buddhist shrine on a rocky point. The fisherman, of an age akin to my own and with a charging tiger tattooed large on his bare chest, sat toasting the sea with a glass of whiskey as he waved a big hand at her. “I have lived here all my life,” he said, . “All I have seen is the sea and the sky.”

I let my eyes wander up above his head and above the low roof of his house. The sky was nearly filled with the 20-odd stories of a five-star hotel that had recently been built nearby to cater to the thousands of tourists who flock to this shore. But this man chose to see only “the sea and the sky.”. Nothing else was relevant. Yet, in this statement of stubborn pride lies a great sadness for fishermen who have staked lives and livelihoods on their sea knowledge. While the sea and its tides remain unchanging, all else is shifting. Big efficient boats reduce the reliance on the ability to read wind and tide. Shore-side industry and tourism drive the cost of living out of reach of fishermen.

Technology has been a blessing and a curse to fishermen. While it makes life easier, it costs money that once supported families. Paying for the technology drives the demand for more fish to stay ahead of the competition. For fishermen on my old grounds in British Columbia’s Johnstone Straits, wheelhouse electronics may mark rocks more clearly but they don’t make them any softer. Electronic tide charts give highly accurate readings, but don’t remove the threat of torn and lost gear. Hydraulics may make the work of handling a net easier but the net can still tangle in the propeller. And a leg wrapped in a line and pulled into a snatch block will shatter just as surely today as it did thirty and forty years ago.

In 1973 the chum salmon, (called dogs by fishermen,) openings were typically two days long and often stretched to three or even four days. In 2001, the first dog salmon opening was announced for Monday October 1 and it would last only 12 hours, from 07:00 to 19:00. Mark Assu, at 34 the youngest son of my old skipper the late Herb Assu, left the dock at Campbell River Saturday night a full 36 hours before the opening. With his brother Daryl on board, along with his sister Judy and two other deckhands, we passed through Seymour Narrows with a fair tide lending speed and rolling the 60-foot 1940-built classic wood seiner Splendour in a comforting embrace. In the early 1970s Mark’s dad would have left the dock on a Sunday morning for an opening that invariably came at 18:00 on a Sunday. Now most of the fleet would spend the Sunday scouting for fish and then picking a spot and holding position a good 24 hours ahead of the Monday morning opening.

Once we were through the Narrows a heavy fog settled over Johnstone Straits, leaving a bold harvest moon showing over the mast but severely limiting low-level visibility. In the wheelhouse, Mark and Daryl, whose own boat no longer had a salmon license, told stories of losing the radar in such conditions and navigating by following the five-fathom contour on their sounder. Two hours after passing through the Narrows, Mark dropped anchor just off Johnstone Straits in Blind Channel, a good spot to fish dog salmon bound for the mainland inlets. Up again at the late-fall daybreak, Mark and Daryl watched for any sign of finning dog salmon, with out success. The only salmon in the channel were a few thousand Atlantics in a fish farm anchored just outside the fishing boundary and blocking one of Mark’s father’s favourite spots for setting his net. The cedar tree that I once tied the beach end of the net to now had a net cage mooring line running to one of its neighbours.

As a late-fall sunrise burned the mist off the low peaks on East and West Thurlow islands, Mark took the Splendour back out into Johnstone Straits. Dwarfed by the mountains, other seiners were holding position along the Vancouver Island shore. Like his dad, Mark ran past them a few miles to the “Slide”, a mile below Harry Moon’s Point. Harry Moon was a well-know fisherman who fished at what the marine charts call Camp Point, so consistently that among the fishing fleet the point bore his name. The Slide might similarly have been known as Herb Assu’s Slide, as Herb was one of the few who understood how to set a deep 220-fathom-long net in the quick-shifting tides that characterize that spot.

Herb’s brothers-in-law also learned these tides and now, as Mark anchored at the Slide, his maternal uncles, Tony (Western King), Aubrey (Royal City) and Jerry (Westisle) Roberts, all held positions nearby as did Mark’s cousin Teddy Assu (Sandy Anne), who learned the tides from his father Ronnie. This locale is known, sometimes grudgingly, on the coast as a family-controlled spot and this day there were no exceptions. In practice the family territory extends down along the Vancouver Island shore to Humpback Bay, just past Mitzi’s Bay, a little anchorage named for Mark’s mother, whose baking, done in the tiny galley of the family seiner Departure Bay No.3 while anchored in that bay to wait for tide, was the envy of the family fleet.

In the 1960s this two or three miles of Vancouver Island coastline became my university campus. With the perspective of several decades, the importance of this steep shore with its kelp-lined beaches, its barnacled inter-tidal zone, sea urchin-decorated depths and constantly moving tides is not so much about the technical learning of nets and lines that I accrued there, but it is the place where my deeper self was allowed to grow beyond the river confines of my childhood. A greenhorn or beginning seine fisherman starts out rowing the skiff to the beach. Then he helps the tie-up man, if needed, before going out to the end of the net to recover the sea anchor and “plunge”, which involves throwing a short piece of pipe tied to a small line into the water to make bubbles to prevent the salmon from coming out around the end of the net.

I later graduated to tie-up man, which requires a wonderful spurt of energy to struggle up over the rock face to put wraps or a special quick-releasing knot around a tree or stump to anchor the shore end of the net against the force of the tide. This is the good part. A barely moving body of water may seem like a gentle breeze relative to the hurricane of river rapids or tidal bore, but when one tries to harness it to the shore, the sea is quick to demonstrate its power. In the earliest days of my fishing career, we used heavy manila beach lines. Then various forms of polypropylene lines were tested. In those days we typically wrapped a bight of line around a tree trunk several times or, if we had a tree stump or piece of drift log crammed into a crack in the rocks, we could avoid using the bight. An inexperienced or unlucky tie-up man could make the wraps in such a way that when the skipper waved to release the end the line would pinch. Then the only solution was to take out a knife and cut the line. With several tons of tidal pull on the line, this manner of release was a frightening thing. At other times, the tide and the seine boat towing on the other end would exert such force that the line would begin breaking. On one early braided plastic line that I liked for its light weight, I could hear the individual fibres breaking with little ping ping sounds. This would continue until the line was stretched like a rubber band. If the line broke near the net end, a one-pound steel shackle would come lashing back on the end of this rubber band to clear a swath through the salal bushes, if it wasn’t stopped by the tie-up man’s head. Of course, for a young man these potential dangers only added to the mystic and thrill of the job. But that singing tight line with the water being wrung from it as the tide pulled with silent force also taught humility in the face of nature’s forces. When a pod of killer whales would come down along the beach and pass effortlessly under our net, we were assured of an empty net, but their beauty and their harmony with the tides re-enforced the very tenuous presence that human kind had in our tidal flirtations.

By 09:30 the Splendour was at anchor in the kelp beds off the Slide. As their father did when he anchored at this spot, brothers Mark and Daryl sat up on the flying bridge with the crew and watched the tides for sign of salmon. “They usually show before and after low water,” said Mark. As he predicted, at 10:30 a school of chum salmon began finning, rolling their backs out of the water, just outside the boat along a line where the flood had started on the beach and pushed against the last of the ebb. Just off shore this created a rip tide that seemed to stimulate the fish or simply gave the promise of a fair tide to carry them along southward towards their home rivers. As we did back in the 1960s, the crew lamented that the opening was not until the next day. “Looks like a couple of thousand in that school,” observed Daryl. “I hope there are more this time tomorrow.”

Sunday evening, six o’clock the traditional opening time, passed quietly with the crew working on deck to ready some of the newly introduced technology. The brailer, which was largely replaced by a hydraulically operated ramp stern in the 1980s, made its return in the 90s to facilitate the release of non-targeted salmon species. The crew placed a sorting box on top of the hatch combing that allows the non-targeted salmon (this week that included coho, chinook, steelhead and sockeye) to be removed to the plastic recovery box for later return to the sea. The recovery box, about 3 by 4 by 2-feet, has an electric pump to circulate fresh seawater.

“Seems like the DFO sets the openings so that they don’t work with the tides,” the crew complained, and Monday morning proved the contention. When the radio announced that the fishery was open at 07:00, the Splendour stayed at anchor for three hours with the northbound ebb-tide backing up at two or three knots just off the beach. Mark had come out early to hold the position that he knew would give him an opportunity for the combination for which every tide fisherman lives – the even push of a beginning flood and a school of southbound salmon showing their dorsal fins as they travelled on the surface going into the net.

With the anchor finally up, he circled the boat in towards the beach, watching the effect of the tide along the shore as the rip that indicated the change moved offshore. Like the several generations that have fished the Slide before him, Mark read the surface tides and sensed the movement of water below them. He watched the trees along the shore to read the boat’s drift. He pictured the movement of the tides over the rocky bottom and imagined his net billowing like a huge square-rigger’s sail as the tide pushed and filled the meshed fabric stretched between the cork line and the lead line. Just before 11:00, when he saw and sensed that things were suitable for the fish to begin moving, Mark made his final pass at the shore and signalled for the skiff to be let go, so that the net could begin paying out from the drum. Brad Roberts, who once skippered his own seine boat, ran the skiff’s outboard while Tarzan Scow ran up the beach to tie the end of the net to the peg.

Further up the shore, the uncles Tony and Jerry were letting their nets go. With his net out, Mark towed easily, taking advantage of the last of the ebb holding the boat end of the net up against the first push of the flood along the beach. His older sister, Judy, who had come up from the galley to watch the first set, said, “Tarzan isn’t dancing a jig on the beach yet, so he must not see any jumpers going in.”

But Tarzan did see finners going in, even though on the boat we saw nothing in the rising chop of a 20-mile-per-hour westerly wind. Mark towed the end of the net against the emerging flood to a point where he could turn back to the beach. At his signal, Tarzan let the beach end go and rode the skiff back out to the boat to complete the circle. With the boat’s end of the net wound back onto the powered drum and the purse rings winched up to the bulwarks, it took only minutes to have all but the net’s last few fathoms drummed back aboard. The drying-up was quick and efficient, with the cork-line bar hooked in place and the brailer like a huge version of a sport fisherman’s net. On the single fall, the crew made short work of 16 brailers for nearly 1,000 13-pound dog salmon. A big man like his father, Mark moved around the deck with the same calm demeanour that instilled confidence in deckhands a generation ago. The same big hands and stubby fingers danced knots from lines and the powerful arms pulled reluctant lines, recalling the old deckhand’s adage “Pull hard – she come easy.”

With the fish and gear safely back aboard, Mark turned the boat to follow the tide’s progress down along the shore. With the tide well into the beginning of the flood, he ran down past Mitzi’s Bay and picked a tree with a well-worn trunk for Tarzan’s next tie-up spot. The skiff dropped from the stern of the speeding boat and Tarzan dropped the sea anchor into the water to start the net off the drum. In my fishing days, back in the 1960s and 70s, the skiffs were made of wood and were always rowed to the beach, with the skiff man standing to push on a pair of nine-foot oars. Now the aluminium skiffs were powered through the kelp and into the beach with an outboard motor. In the past 30 years, horsepower ratings on many of the seine boats have increased from the 100-to-300 HP range to well over 500 HP. With heavier gear this allows for towing against stronger tides. But Mark is still working with 245 HP nursed out of an aging two-cycle engine.

This was a relatively small tide, but Mark still set his net in a J-shape out from the beach so that the boat began to tow well up from the beach end of the net. Like his dad, he picked a couple of marker trees up on the steep hillside above the tie-up and watched as his boat, at full throttle, was pushed back along the shore by the strengthening flood tide. At the last possible moment, he made the turn into the beach-end and, with the boat listing to port, he signalled Tarzan to let the end go. With the freshening wind, now at 25 miles per hour, the skiff bounced back to the boat as the winch began to haul the end of the net in to close the circle.

As the tide carried the Splendour down past Humpback Bay, a rocky point that juts out and into the stream there threatened to impale the boat broadside. Mark was at the top controls using another modern addition, the bow thruster. This allowed him to swing the bow and so keep the stern of the boat pointing in the direction from which the net was being recovered. But the wind was pushing the boat faster than the tide, and web that had billowed under the boat’s keel was sucked into the bow thruster. With typically calm practicality, Mark climbed down into the skiff and fired up the 20 HP outboard, which he left running with the skiff tied to the side of the boat. It is just enough power to move the boat with the flow of the tide out to clear the point. Mark’s dad had neither a bow thruster nor an outboard-powered skiff, but by directing us to pull corks and waiting until his propeller was clear, he could usually kick the boat around the same point. Only when all else fails will a proud skipper ask for a little tow from a cousin or a brother fishing nearby. That doesn’t change.

The second set of the day yielded a couple of brailers of dogs. Minutes after the last fish was aboard, Mark had cranked the Jimmy up to full revs and was headed back against the flood tide and a 35-mile-per-hour westerly that was now white-capping the blue waters. But fishing is about competition and one of Mark’s uncles with a bigger, more powerful boat passed him and got ahead of him in the line to set at Humpback Bay. Meanwhile, another uncle was getting towed off the point by a cousin while still another cousin’s boat lay at anchor in the tight confines of Humpback Bay with web wrapped in his wheel. This is a tough spot to fish at the best of times and when you are working the tides in strong winds with a crew that has had only three days of fishing all season, trouble is always nearby. And that is the great difference between 2001 and my fishing days. We had regular two- and three-day fishing weeks with occasional four-day weeks. We had enough fishing time to attract and hold a crew that learned to work together as a team. In 2001 the southern seiners had five days of fishing – one in August for sockeye, another for pinks and this one on the first of October for chum. A couple of more chum days would follow later in October and November.

By the time the gear was back aboard from the third set it was nearly 16:00. Mark and Daryl decided to try one more set back over in Blind Channel where they had started the day. After that windy set with almost no fish, there wasn’t time to make another set before the 19:00 closing and there certainly weren’t enough fish to risk the fish cops wrath. The tide had turned to ebb, so we wouldn’t get through Seymour Narrows until much later. Mark ran the boat the few miles up against the ebb and on into Blind Channel store. When I knew Blind Channel, on West Thurlow Island, in the 1960s and 70s, it was a store and post office serving commercial fishermen and loggers. The foundations of a Japanese-Canadian owned dog salmon saltery bore testament to the Canadian World War two internment. But now, with the logging and fishing reduced, it thrived as a tourism destination with a classy restaurant and finger slips for yachts. A fish-dressing station on the dock gave evidence of the growth in the business of sport fishing. Moored at the up market dock, the Splendour looked a little out of place in the grand surroundings.

Later, with dinner and gear stowed, we ran the three hours down through the Straits and through the Narrows under the huge Dog Salmon Returning Moon. Below the Narrows we tied up alongside a seiner at a small processing plant on the Quadra Island side that had agreed to buy Mark’s fish. Most of the other boats stopped on the way to deliver their fish to the only company packer in the area. These are the boats that fly the red and white Canadian Fishing Company (Canfisco) flag. This is another large change since my fishing days when three big companies, Nelson Brothers, B.C. Packers and Canfisco and several smaller companies, all had packers on the grounds. The other difference for Mark is his tenuous fishing rights. When his fishing contract was sold by BC Packers to Canfisco, he decided that the only way he could escape the corporate control was to sell his salmon license to the government- sponsored buyback programme and pay off his company debt. Daryl, who owns the seiner Adriatic Star, did the same. The result is that the two brothers now own two boats and no salmon license. As natives they have the opportunity to apply for the temporary use of a southern salmon seine license from their tribal council. Mark won this in a lottery-style selection for 2001, but the future remained uncertain. Daryl’s boat remained tied up during the salmon season.

It was 03:00 when we moored at the plant. At 06:00 their turn to deliver came up but the dock-man called down to Mark and Daryl, “I’ve got a farm fish boat coming in here to deliver at 07:00, so you have to go and drop your pick until he is finished and then we will take you.”

“We aren’t going to be bumped by any damn farm fish,” replied the independent brothers. They ran their boat over to Campbell River and called another buyer, who sent a truck to take their 18,000 pounds of 13-pound chums at 50 cents per pound. With the fish delivered and the boat scrubbed down, we retired to one of the family’s houses for a salmon dinner and fish talk with crews from other family boats. Around the table were assembled a couple of hundred years of combined fishing experience carried by a family with thousands of years of history in the coastal tides. The challenges of fish farm competition, the loss of licenses and the corporate control of so many others, the 12-hour fishing week and the restrictions of by-catch avoidance while the sports industry continued to grow were all fodder for discussion and anger. The tidal knowledge that had supported the family through so many generations had little opportunity for expression. It was left to Mitizi Assu, my old skipper’s wife and the matron of my tidal university, to sum up the current state of the fishery most clearly. “It’s just not fair,” she said.

Canadian fisheries management is a cause for shame for the nation and for sadness amongst our fishing families as it is for Mrs. Assu. As with so much in the world, capital is seen as a justification for concentration of ownership of the fish stocks. “Fleet rationalization schemes” take taxpayer dollars to remove the lowest producing and most sustainable fishermen while delivering their share of the catch to the corporate fishing companies. Lost income forces the people from their waterside homes to make way for resorts. These are things that I have seen everywhere that the “science” of western economics has had its play. It is as true in Thailand and Louisiana as it is in British Columbia and it is all equally sad.

In the tides and the continuing nature of the rainfall that takes water back to the mountain tops to flow down in never ending rivers, the optimist seeks hope that this earth will, in the long term, survive the destructive nature of its human load. Perhaps not in the short spans of human history, but in the longer tide-times of geological history the dammed lakes will silt up and the levies will break and the sea tides will triumph over the engineered sea walls and rip wrap. The sea and river people with whom I have travelled are humble in the face of the tides and currents even if the engineers and economists are not. And all of this must leave me reflecting on the river of my youth and the travels of my maturing years.

In my beginnings the river was everything. The 20-acre farm where I grew up served only as the margin to the magic of the river. The flowing water that came mysteriously but constantly was a living moving body of green magnitude that passed our home to join the sea. But it was a sea that was rock bound between islands and, in its way, a continuation of the river. It was a sea that, as I came of age, would take me up and down the 500 mile length of the BC coast and, with its deep glacial-cut inlets, into the very mountains whose peaks I had studied from my school room windows while failing the dull blackboard lessons.

In time, the river dream and saltwater wanderings took me to other rivers and other seas but always in places where the waters move in relation to the immovable land. And always with boat handlers whose skills took them and their craft safely through those passages in a state of intense harmony with the tides and currents and the rocks and sandbars that define them. In this book I have tried to take you there.

Perhaps as a result you will sit by a river or a reversing tidal bore somewhere in the world and meditate on the timeless power and beauty of moving water and its relation to land. Perhaps you will think of Tom Hudson from River Mouth Farm who when I was a boy told me to sit by the river and take ideas that come floating down, turn them and examine them in your mind and then let them go back into the currents.