The Fisher Queen (2 page)

The months of preparation and fanfare behind us, Paul and I had padded back and forth piled high with the last of our baggage, the last of our fresh food and the last of our connections to this city. Anything could happen from May to October, and as it turned out, it mostly did. From the Fisheries parking lot to our old tub of a troller, along the sturdy wooden planks of the government commercial dock, up and down the steep, ribbed gangway connecting wharf to float.

By 7:20 a.m. we had our first spat, his brought on by the predictable onset of Skipper's Disease, mine by the surprising onset of apprehension. Surprising to no one but me, of course. I was going commercial salmon fishing on a wallowy old 40-foot wooden troller with a man I had known for exactly six and a half months, in some of the most dangerous waters in the world, known to modern meteorologists as The Cauldron and to centuries of boaters as the Graveyard of the Pacific.

Paul and I had been set up by a mutual friend just three days before I was leaving for a three-month trip through Europe and Egypt in the summer of 1980. Odd timing, but even odder was the fact that after my homecoming I saw him the very next day and almost every damn day after that, to the heartbreak of other hopefuls who had waited patiently for their gypsy girl to come to her senses. But Paul was a grand adventurer offering a grander adventure, and I was in love with this charming, dark-blooded man as sexy as the devil's own tail. Just into my mid-20s, I was enchanted as only a much younger woman can be, and we were gorgeous and wild as all get-out.

I decided to diffuse the earlier spat—by spat I mean he would bark at me and I would go silent then try to cheer him up—and the broody silence that followed with a quick kiss and a retreat to the deck to let that pungent sea wind blow through me. Soothing as sympathy, erotic as a lover's breath, it had worked itself into every cell of me.

I shouldered open the thick wooden door with its porthole window and remembered to latch the door closed. Along with everything being wet and moving, everything on an old wooden fishboat was constantly swelling and shrinking, jamming and sticking, and built to withstand a medieval battering ram. And even though this old tub was a bit of a slow pig, meaning she tended to wallow and react grudgingly to steering, she was a tough old girl.

In fairness, the
Central Isle
was already nearly 40 years old and had been built to run in inside waters as a camp tender, not a commercial salmon troller. The entire boat had been modified a few years before Paul bought her in 1979 for $90,000 including its 10-ton licence. She was no prize, but that hefty licence tonnage was the real value of the boat, and worth its weight in gold if the prices of boats and licences and fish stayed up, and the interest rates and diesel and gear prices stayed down.

I loved the old dame and was fiercely proud and protective of her, even if she did look like a pregnant whale up on the wyes in Steveston dry docks. I had spent countless hours in the last three months blowtorching and scraping and copper-painting her hull while she sat suspended. Had scrubbed the grime of the ages from every square inch of the 10-by-7-foot wooden cabin where we ate, slept, cooked, steered, laughed, tied gear, fought, pooped and made love. The cramped wheelhouse with its huge wooden steering wheel and tiny fold-down seats at each side was fronted with six narrow, heavy-framed, double-thick windows above the dashboard, racks jammed with charts, walls and ceiling with radar, depth sounder, loran and two communications radios. And right behind the seats and their half-walls, a bunk/couch on one side; cookstove, heater, sink, two narrow windows and all sizes and shapes of cupboards, drawers and bins on the other; the fold-down wood table on the back wall next to the three-inch-thick wood door with a tiny porthole. I'd corkscrewed my sturdy little self into every nook and cranny to paint everything a bright, hopeful white.

Paul insisted he re-fibreglass the hold, but I whitewashed with the heavy roller and goopy sealant 'til the injuries I tried to ignore shouted for my attention. I would prove that orthopaedic surgeon wrong: I would be as athletic and agile as before or die trying, damn it, I had told him to his face six months after the car accident that had nearly taken my life two years earlier. It was 1979, in my 24th summer. I was rear-ended in my Fiat at a red light one sunny day. I had lain in bed in a brace for months and crawled around to various therapists for a year. In the midst of the worst of it, my husband had met and bedded another woman and left to be with her. Left to escape what I'd become. A year later he begged to reconcile, when my incredible recovery revealed I was still me. I refused his offer and used part of my puny accident settlement for the tour through Europe and Egypt that helped bring me back to myself. I returned home in the fall of 1980 to a vicious divorce battle and the beginnings of a new relationship with a charming and intriguing artist-turned-fisherman. I prayed and fought and loved my way back to life out of almost unbearable loss and was going to keep my compass on true north no matter what it took.

I found a job doing in-home nursing care and took night-school courses through the winter and spring in preparation for going back to college in the coming fall of 1981 for a nursing and counselling degree. Going fishing with Paul in the spring was the perfect opportunity to earn money, have an adventure, be with him and create distance from the divorce battles at home in Vancouver. Fishing was in Paul's blood, learned at his uncle's knee in the northern BC waters near Prince Rupert. He had sold his gillnet boat for a troller just the year before. He felt gillnetting was getting too rough and competitive, and trolling seemed to be a more reasonable and humane way to make a lucrative living.

Emerging into the slowly clearing morning, I straightened my new orange Helly Hansen rain gear hanging next to Paul's beat-up ol' black ones bungeed to the cabin wall under the roof eaves. I fussed with the bin of fresh fruit and vegetables, eggs, meat and milk jammed between the four-storey, 14-inch-thick aluminum mast and the three-foot-high fibreglass hatch that opened into the cavernous hold. I strode to the end of the sloping deck and stood on the shallow wooden checker bins that would fill with fish a hundred times a day, to gaze down at the deep cockpit in the stern where I would pull in thousands of salmon and never lose one or snarl the lines and lures. The gurdy motors on either side of the cockpit that let out the steel gear lines would never jam and would always spool on and off the drums without a hitch.

Looking out at the gently rolling Strait of Georgia that would be renamed Salish Sea in honour of the First Nations peoples who had plied it for thousands of years, I asked whatever deity who would listen to keep us safe and bring us bounty. But for now, I had to ready my house.

Humming through my repertoire of Fleetwood Mac hits, I dragged the 30-pound, four-foot-square cover off the fibreglass hatch on the back deck. After gingerly lowering the bin of fresh food by rope six feet to the floor of our hold, I followed it with a ladder, then me. I could only do this because we were running through unusually calm waters. Paul would not be pleased if he knew I had clambered down here on my own while running. There are a million ways to get hurt on a boat, and every little task and action we do unthinkingly in our daily lives on land has to be recalibrated at sea, or even tied up to a wharf. No matter what it is or what you're doing, it will be wet and moving, and that includes you.

Everything on a fishboat needs to be heavy or latched down or both. I'd already seen what a heavy roll and high winds could do during a few test runs around this crazy coast and luckily, I was too naïve to know how much danger we'd really been in. In fact, the first time I'd been on the boat was when we'd first gotten together. Paul had asked me to come along with him to bring the boat home from Ucluelet harbour on the west coast of Vancouver Island. The November gales were in full force. To everyone's horror on the commercial dock, he announced we'd “just run out a bit and check it out.”

Once we cleared the breakwater, the first wave heeled us over hard enough to fling open all the latched cupboards; the second knocked the pot of spaghetti off the crotchety oil stove and sent it skidding up the lino floor to the wheelhouse. By this time I was crouched on the floor like a cat, and when the third wave sent the pot skidding back, I sprang up and pinned it to the floor. Thinking the thump was some other catastrophe, Paul turned his pale, sweaty face to see me hunched over the pot, wedged against the back door. I replied to his frantic “Are you okay?” with a cheery “Don't worry, Paul, I saved the spaghetti sauce.” With a whispered “Jesus!” and a shake of his head, he spun the wheel on a momentary seventh wave and ran back through the breakwater to safe harbour. People leaped to our deck from the float expecting God-knows-what. When the back door flew open and I emerged grinning and still clutching the spaghetti pot, they burst out laughing and declared that Paul had found himself a keeper.

So now, while Paul was navigating our way north, his keeper was down in the hold imagining the empty whitewashed belly of our boat filled to the brim with layer after layer of enormous gutted salmon and crushed ice. He had already constructed a small container from wooden pin boards fitted into the vertical posts running the length of the hold and thrown in crushed ice. This would serve as our refrigerator the entire time on board. No running into the kitchen to grab something from the fridge. Not only did we have to plan ahead, we had to be careful not to lose track of our groceries in the midst of a full load of ice and, hopefully, fish. I didn't have to bury the food in the ice as it was a cool spring and would get cooler the farther north we went.

Paul wasn't happy that I'd gone into the hold but softened when I told him I just wanted to do my part. Content as a broody hen, I continued clucking around the newly painted cabin I had tarted up with sunny curtains and endless scrubbing.

Lulled by the deep thrumming of the powerful Cummins diesel in the engine room under my knees and our gentle, swaying progress on the westering tide, I glanced up from stowing our precious crackers and cookies in the driest cupboard to his striking Mohican profile set in the heavy wooden frames of the four fo'c'sle windows and the endless dark treed islands and inlets. His coppery skin, ebony straight hair, jade eyes, long lithe body balanced on the balls of his feet. Watched his constant subtle checks and movements from horizon to depth sounder to loran to charts; his long artist's hands wearing the first of the season's many cuts and scabs and indelible dirt. He caught my eye as he suddenly turned from his steering perch at the wheel.

“Wow, that's a funny picture,” he said, smiling crookedly. “You look like a little kid on Christmas morning with all that stuff around you and that grin on your face and humming away. What's going on in that big head of yours?”

“I'm just thinking about how happy I am to be here and how beautiful it is out there, all misty and silvery,” I said, easing back onto my heels and gazing out the little vertical window above the cookie-jar-sized sink. “I can hardly wait to see everything you've told me about and start fishing. Where are we going next?”

“Come up here to the wheelhouse and I'll show you on the chart. It's that top one on the wooden rack to the right of the dashboard. No, not that one; where the hell is it?” I chose a likely-looking candidate from the compressed stack. “Okay, that's it. Spread it out and find out where we are right now. The loran readings will give your coordinates.” He pointed to the metal box flashing numbers on a black screen. “You need to learn to sight where you are on the charts by landmarks.”

“I love maps,” I murmured, bending close to the mass of spidery lines and numbers and convolutions and thousands of tiny islands between the 300-mile-long, pod-shaped bulk of Vancouver Island 20 miles to the west and the convoluted BC coastline reaching 1,200 miles to Alaska and the Bering Sea. “This is so cool, I can hardly wait.”

“Charts, Syl, they're called charts. And tomorrow I'm going to start showing you how to tie gear if everything goes okay.”

Everything did not go okay,
but I didn't care. I didn't care that Paul's self-proclaimed Taylor Curse had struck again, spewing four quarts of oil from a cracked valve onto the engine room floor, sending dashboard gauges spinning. I just got out of the way so he could yank up the floorboard in the middle of the cabin and jump down into the engine room without killing himself or me. I didn't care that the autopilot still kept pulling to starboard even after we'd paid $600 to get it fixed before we left home—I just clambered onto the skipper's seat and steered for the nearest harbour. I didn't care that we had to do an emergency run into Campbell River even though we'd already stopped in Kelsey Bay the night before to tie up and walk the four miles round trip for a beer at the only bar. I just prided myself that I could keep up with his six-foot strides. I didn't care that he spent two hours cursing and banging in the engine room. I just sat on the day bunk/couch/dining room reading Coast Salish legends and a book on Eastern religions I'd bought in Campbell River for a dollar, and handed him tools and coffee as his grimy hand poked up through the hole in the floor. I didn't care that I didn't get to learn how to tie gear yet. I just puttered and read and cooked and told stories and studied charts and stayed out of the way.