The Fisher Queen (10 page)

We were going into Bull Harbour for the night because we were worn out from tossing at anchor all night—even the bays were rough with harsh weather—and needed a decent sleep. And though I would never have asked to go in, I was relieved. As we ran down the channel from Nahwitti Bar I relaxed into the thought of a quiet night and peeled potatoes at the sink, watching for the harbour entry in the dense green shoreline. Suddenly the temperature gauge nearly blew off the dashboard and a horrible whine came up through the floor as we began losing power.

“Jesus Christ! Get up here and keep us steering straight. The tide is running in hard and will run us aground if we go broadside.”

I leaped to the wheel, heart pounding. Paul ripped up the carpet and floor cover and threw them on the day bunk. Choking steam belched up as the emergency lights and alarm turned the engine room into a scene from Dante's inferno.

“God, Paul, be careful,” I shouted above the din and my adrenaline.

“Turn off the engine and turn on the radio telephone to the Bull Harbour frequency. If I can't get restarted we're going to need help.” He grabbed an extra extinguisher from the cabin wall and jumped down into the engine room.

As I wrestled with the wheel to keep our rudder straight, I said my first prayer of the season through trembling lips and willed us away from the rocky shorelines that loomed on either side of this treacherous little channel. I gripped the wheel so hard my hands turned white. I flashed back to all the whitewater canoeing accidents I'd survived and reasoned that at least I was still in a boat and not in the icy water.

For once I was relieved to hear Paul banging and swearing because I knew he was still alive down there, and I stopped myself from calling out to him, gauging our danger level by the intensity of the tirade.
Come on, Paul, you can do it, you can do it
, I murmured over and over. Suddenly he was in the wheelhouse, pouring sweat and gunk, and as he pulled me off the seat, he grabbed the wheel and turned the key on the dashboard. Click. Click. Click. Click. Then the most beautiful sound in the world: the roar of a diesel. I threw my arms around his waist and hugged him as he pulled the boat around to head back up the channel to harbour.

“Hey, take it easy, you'll get this crap all over yourself,” he said, and put his arm around my shoulders for a quick squeeze and a crooked smile. He was cavalier but I could see his pulse still pounding in his throat. “You did good. It's that fucking alternator again. I'm gonna kill that guy in Hardy. He guaranteed it was fixed. But I think it's okay now. I'll work on it more when we get in, then we'll get a shower.”

Back in Bull Harbour, the camp manager watched me pull that flat little scrap of a fish out of the checkers and throw it on the scale and discreetly eyed my grease-covered clothes. He quietly marked it on my fish slip and paid me the few bucks it wasn't really worth as if I had hauled out a whale. I wouldn't have been surprised if it went to crab bait, as he hadn't the heart to refuse it in front of my flat little scrap of a self.

After a bit more banging and swearing in the engine room and a lot of commiserating with the Bull Harbour Boys, Dan appeared with a used alternator he kept as a spare that was compatible with our engine. He waved away the last few dollars from our money jar and said it was just a loan and he would catch us later for it. “We can't have you and your sweetheart losing any more fishing time than you have to,” Dan said, in his soft drawl and kind smile. And it was his kindness that broke through my resolve and brought the tears that were never shed in danger.

We sold our few fish that afternoon—$194 for four gruelling days—and topped up our fuel and ice to establish our right to use the camp's laundry room and showers. In the cramped metal shower stall, under the steaming powerful jets, we made love like wildcats, oblivious to the rhythmic metallic banging that carried out over the camp through the open window. We were alive and proving it.

But hell hath no fury like a fisherwoman skunked.

And skunked we were the next day, as we bashed it out on the tacks 'til dinnertime and limped into Fisherman Bay to anchor for the night. The marine report said it would blow southeast the following day, so the north end would be somewhat sheltered and we could just troll back across the Yankee Spot to Bull Harbour. For now it was quiet, the hissy fit appeased. That was typical for a nor'wester: quiet mornings and nights, but screaming all day. Brilliant sun but icy-cold wind, like a glacier exhaling on you.

We'd managed to pull in a couple of rats, what the salty dogs called skinny, barely regulation-length salmon, and a glorious red snapper that we wolfed down for dinner. And puttered around the cabin, cleared and cleaned and relished the silence.

It doesn't register how irritating the droning grind of the engine is until it shuts off and then you realize how much energy you use to ignore something, especially something as penetrating and enormous as boat machinery and weather noise. I guess our brains have to numb to it or we'd go berserk. Some people replace it with blasting music or radio telephone talk, but for us, then, silence was a mercy.

As Paul dozed on the day bunk, I filled the tiny sink and dishpan with water heated on the oil stove and performed the art of dishwashing in less water than it took to run a cold glass of water at home—and that included rinsing. As I started the process, as careful and precise as a Japanese tea ceremony, my eyes lifted to the tiny window. I often wished the windows in the old tub were bigger; I also knew that showy windows were deadly when a freak wave slammed into your side. They popped out like contact lenses and the cabin filled up like a bucket.

So I had to be satisfied with this sturdy little peephole. It was an odd view, slowly swinging in an arc, sweeping back and forth as the powerful tides swung the boat at the end of its tether. It was like seeing the world through a camera lens. I fancied that the gentle movement was Gaia herself, dozing and calm for once in the amber light of sunset. Sweep to the right—luminous sandy crescent trimmed in dense furry green. Sweep to the left—silvery mirror reflecting the pearls and violets of an abalone shell.

Breathing in, breathing out, there was nowhere and nothing more than this. Breathing in, breathing out, water lapped and gurgled at our hull. Breathing in, breathing out, my hands moved like skilful fish in the soapy warm sea. There was nothing and nowhere more than this.

A powerful whoosh filled the air and I wondered if Gaia was snorting in her sleep. Nothing seemed too outlandish anymore. We swung to the left and I saw tiny concentric rings moving outward from a circular depression in the water. Then all was still again. I wondered if I had just imagined it. We swung to the right and again the mighty whoosh. It was such a benign sound but somehow immense and mighty at the same time. I had nothing to compare it to and my curiosity demanded an explanation, no matter how odd or even frightening.

I glided out onto the deck just in time to see a towering V-shape slide vertically back into the water, not more than 20 feet from me. My mind leapt to explain this stunning sight and came up with one option: whale. From the size of his flukes he must have been unimaginably huge, and I was acutely aware of how tiny and isolated we were. I flailed through my memory file for reports of whale attacks and found nothing. I prayed that the benign tales of these gentle giants were true.

There was an odd bulging in the water, as if there just wasn't enough room down there for whatever it was and the water too. The bulge became a dark grey mound rolling on and on just above the surface. Suddenly, a rubbery hole, like a giant belly button, appeared, dilated and sent up a fountain of fine spray. It may not have been Gaia exhaling, but it was something just as miraculous.

The whale must have been preparing to dive, because miles later his tail slowly lifted from the water and paused before sliding back down in perfect and graceful slow motion. It towered over us like Atlantis sinking, with hardly a ripple or sound to mark its path. I wondered if experiences like this were what helped to fuel that legend. He may have known that a few good swipes with that tail would shatter us. He may have chosen not to. He may have been too evolved to indulge in destruction just because he could.

Turned out this fellow was a regular fisherman too, coming into this bay with the incoming tide most nights to catch his supper. I was amused that the whale's cuisine was miniscule brine shrimp and krill when humans killed any old damn thing they could—the bigger the better. Made me wonder who the true monarch was, who really invented noblesse oblige. My bet was on the humpback. I filled myself up with the thrill of that rolling mountain and towering tail a few more times, wished him good fishing and then went back inside to finish the dishes.

Every time we were in this bay at sunset when the tide was moved in, I watched for him. I told him how beautiful and wonderful he was and apologized for all the awful things people have done to his relatives. I thanked him for his gentleness and asked him to be patient with us a while longer. We were still a foolish and juvenile species, I believed, though with lots of potential; he and his kind were the sighing grandparents who still loved us, no matter how naughty we were.

Maybe that's why the whales returned to the sea so many millennia ago. Maybe they just wanted to leave town before the kids moved in—kind of like retiring to Florida.

If the most beautiful sound in this
world is a dead diesel engine growling back to life while your boat is hurtling down a narrow channel in a ripping tide, then the most horrific sound is steel lines snapping and the whir of them whipping through the air. Things seem to sneak up on you out here, often when you least expect them, when you let your hyper-vigilance slip for just a moment. If you didn't start in this business with all six senses at full-on radar, you honed them quickly and efficiently, often the hard way. Those who didn't slipped away.

After three weeks, I had finally proved myself capable of setting and pulling gear on my own, gradually building up to several sets a day, and was powerfully proud to have claimed the starboard side of the cockpit as mine. My Viking heart sang as I worked silently alongside my mate in the wind and rain and rough seas, completely present, completely focused and aware—like in meditation, like in the Be Here Now mantra of the Eastern religions I read about at night or when I had to steer. Was it a coincidence I had found the
Three Ways of Asian Wisdom
in the Campbell River bookstore? Somehow I didn't think so. Sometimes anchored at night I would share the occasional line or paragraph while Paul puttered, and I'd get a rare glimpse into his kaleidoscopic inner world: his world travels, wickedly funny mimicry, fractured childhood, art school degree, two estranged children in California only a decade younger than me.

I was just thanking the sea gods for our first relatively calm but drizzly day when the boat suddenly heaved to starboard. My immediate thought was that a queer wave had shoved us over, but we continued to list and started to veer. I froze in the few seconds of silence before Paul's mighty “Fuuuuuck!” signalled the maelstrom.

“Jesus, Paul, what's happening?” I knew enough to slam my gurdy lever to the
OFF
position to stop the line I was setting from spooling out. I had no idea what to do and watched, horrified, as we heeled over further. The entire boat seemed to be straining and I felt like I'd been flung into a nightmare.

“Stay down in the cockpit. We're caught on something and I have to stop the engine or the lines will snap and we'll lose our gear.”

While he wrestled with the engine's stern controls, the steel lines snapped one after the other and whipped through the air from the tremendous force of their release underwater. We could do nothing but crouch in the cockpit until the devastation was over and the broken lines lay sprawled on the deck. Thank God we were still moving and Paul's side seemed to be okay; he was already striding around the deck beside himself.

“I've trolled over this area a million times and never had this happen. We've lost half our fucking gear. Maybe if you'd been in the wheelhouse steering instead of depending on this lousy pilot and watching the sonar this wouldn't have happened. Maybe we went off course.”

I strode into the cabin, trembling from shock and adrenaline and the growing realization of how much money we'd just lost, and checked the pilot and sonar.

“We're still on tack and there is nothing on the sonar. What do we do now?” I felt my resolve to be calm and supportive weaken as he flung a chart to the cabin floor and barked “Move” as he stormed back out to the deck. I took a couple of deep, trembly breaths to calm my pounding heart and followed him out. I was not a yeller and did not want to start now. I had to live with this man on this boat and knew if I let things slide, it could get intolerable, yet I wasn't going to give up. I still clung to my lifelong habit of going quiet or getting weepy in a fight. What would happen when I didn't? I had an incredibly long Nordic fuse, but under these surreal circumstances, one of these days it might just get lit, and that scared me just about as much as his tirades.