by Pat Ardley
Green Salad with Fresh Herb Dressing
Halibut Steak with Béarnaise Sauce on a Bed of Spinach
Sourdough Bread
Glazed Carrots • Château Potatoes
Lemon Meringue Pie
Our guests finally arrived and were delighted with the accommodations. They had their lunch, and then George took them fishing in The Page for the afternoon and gave them a tour of the area. When they came back to the lodge, they brought back a couple of silver bright coho that they had caught. They were very excited. They came in for dinner at about 6 PM and then they headed back out very eager for the evening fishing. When they came back at 10 PM, they had three beautiful coho and a good story about the big one that got away. (A story I would hear many more times over many more years.) I helped George clean and ice the fish, and then everyone headed to bed. It was going to be an early morning. I was the first one up to start the fire in the kitchen stove, make breakfast and pack a lunch for the fishermen to be able to head out by 4:30 AM. They were going to travel up to the head of Rivers Inlet where they heard the fish were bigger. Even in 1976 the head of the inlet was crowded with boats. Everyone had heard that the fish were bigger at the head. There were a few guided resort boats plus private boats that had travelled over from Port Hardy, all scrunched into a very small area hugging the boundary line, full of engine exhaust and careless drivers cutting each other’s lines.
Occasionally orcas would follow the fish up to the head of the inlet and into the confined space of the bay, the fish could only get away by diving very deep or rushing up the river before they were ready to spawn. Fishing could die off for hours, or even a day or two, after the whales had been through. One day the whales were actually weaving through the sport boats and one of the resort owners pulled out his rifle and started shooting at them. This created pandemonium amongst the boaters and the fellow was shamed into never doing it again. The orcas and fellow boaters never saw justice for his actions. Nothing ever happened to him because this was long before today’s world in which every person would be holding up a cell phone filming his careless and unconscionable behaviour.
Our guests did not like the competitive nature of fishing at the head of the inlet so they decided to fish near our lodge, as George had first suggested. That evening, Barbara caught a thirty-pound chinook. It’s amazing how much energy is in the air when someone catches a big fish. They came back into the lodge and were toasting their good luck late into the night. The next day, George took them to fish along an area known as The Wall on the other side of the inlet. There were several guided boats already fishing when they arrived. The others tried to run over George’s lines and push him away from the best spots. This just made him mad. Only he knew how strong The Page was after he rebuilt it. In comparison, everyone else’s boats were thin Tupperware. So George did what was best for our guests. He set a course for where he wanted to go, then turned around and put his head down to fix bait on the guest’s hooks. Everyone scuttled out of his way at the last minute as The Page plowed toward them, but once again, the atmosphere was too competitive. Our guests loved the peace and tranquility of fishing on our side, where they caught as many fish as anywhere else in the inlet without the hassle of competition. George loved being out in the boat no matter where he was. If he had to add to the conversation once in a while or fix bait on a line, he was okay with that. He just loved to troll along watching the shore and the way the clouds drifted above while feeling the water gently rocking the boat.
In the meantime back at the lodge, I was cleaning toilets, making beds, doing laundry, washing dishes, topping up the wood box, baking cookies and bread and getting lunch ready. There’s a pattern here, right? Each day during that first summer when we had guests, and for years to come, the guests headed out between 4:30 AM and 5 AM when it was just starting to get light, and I worked through the rest of the morning to have all the chores done before they came back in for lunch. I made a pot of wonderful clam chowder with bacon and vegetables and fresh clams and had fresh bread just out of the oven to go with it. Our guests never went hungry.
Around the corner from our lodge where we liked to fish, you might see a bald eagle swoop down to pluck a fish out of the water. Or you could watch orcas, grey whales and dolphins passing by. Whale traffic didn’t affect salmon fishing at the mouth of the inlet like it did at the head where the fish were collecting in a small area just before heading up the river. There were more directions the fish could go to get away from the whales, so they didn’t completely disappear after the whales had gone by.
Our first guests left very happy at the end of their adventure, with lots of fish to put in their freezer and a promise to be back next year. The plane left the airport dock in the main bay and George rushed back into the house. “We’ve got the undercut in ’er now” he said, and we danced around the kitchen so proud to finally be running our own fishing resort, even though it would be a couple of weeks before our next guests arrived. As it happened, this booking was more by chance than our first. A plane arrived in the inlet and taxied up to the Dawsons Landing store dock, and five men climbed out. They asked Lucky where they could find lodging, and he showed them on a map how to get to our bay. Suddenly there was a plane at our dock and George headed out to the float, and after a quick chat he very slowly tied up the plane. Then I watched as he helped all five men climb into The Page and he very unhurriedly drove into the lodge. I realized he was stalling so I had enough time to clear the living room and get the kettle on.
They were a great group of friends from Oregon, who on a whim boarded a plane and flew in to the area and were so happy to have found a place to stay and fish. I made lunch for them while George got them set up with fishing gear and boats, and when they were ready, he led them out to the best place to fish nearby. Some of these men continued to fish with us for over thirty years and became our good friends.
We had one more group of fishermen that first summer. Another plane arrived in the inlet, tied up to another lodge and asked if they could stay and fish. Luckily the resort was full at the time so they had sent them over to us, knowing we might go hungry if they didn’t. The resort called us on the boat-to-boat channel so we had about twenty minutes’ lead time to get ready. We were used to running in all directions at once so we looked quite casual when the plane arrived. Once again, George took his time tying up their plane and slowly motored into the lodge with his boat full. I was quite ready for them this time.
It was September and the end of our first fishing season. We had to figure out how to make more money. It’s surprisingly expensive to live in the middle of nowhere, and we needed money for some advertising. There was no work to be found in the inlet at the time so, very reluctantly, we decided that we would have to go to Vancouver to find work. We found a basement room to rent in an old house near Cambie Street and Vancouver’s city hall, with a shared fridge and bathroom. There was a little hot plate and a sink in our room. I had canned the last few pieces of meat from the freezer and left them for the caretaker, who would live at the lodge while we were in town, and who was a friend of a friend without a job; but for some strange reason, there were quite a few pounds of cheese left, so I dipped one-pound pieces into hot wax and brought them to town. We ate cheese sandwiches for lunch for the next two months.
The lodge as it looked at the start of our first season. The centre building is the lodge/house. We had one guest cabin with two guestrooms plus the tackle shop. There is a workshop/generator shed on a float on the left side. We had a small shed behind the lodge for food storage and a paint shed beside the workshop building. At this time we had a little boathouse, big enough for my boat.
I answered an ad in the paper and was hired as a cocktail waitress at the Waldorf Hotel lounge, a dressed-up term for the tiki-themed dive bar. There was some very interesting entertainment there, with scantily clad women (they didn’t see my wardrobe before they hired me), and the clientele seem
ed highly questionable with some very scary-looking dudes at the dark tables. It was a crazy, busy, noisy job where tips were everything and the hotel really didn’t expect to pay wages. On the third night that I worked there, George came in to see what the place was like and almost punched several patrons before grabbing my arm and hauling me out the door past a very angry bouncer and a lineup of customers.
I found a temporary job at the city hall instead. The manager in the tax department wanted to hire a few extra people because tax time was coming, and he thought his department would be super busy. Really, there wasn’t enough work to keep me there but he hired two more people after me. I worked there for three months and never had a very busy day. The best part was that the city hall staff worked four days a week, ten hours a day. Meanwhile, George found work building sets for the CBC TV variety program The Wolfman Jack Show. It was interesting and challenging work and he often saw superstars like Dionne Warwick, Tom Jones and Lou Rawls as they wandered around in the studio. We managed to save a good chunk of our wages and were able to head back to the inlet at the end of February.
Me and George with a nice spring salmon. There weren’t very many guests that first summer, so we had plenty of time for fishing.
George’s first job after we got back was to build a small float to put his boom winch on. He would then be able to push or tow the winch around to where he needed it—mainly for pulling boats out of the water or tightening cables on our standing boom. It was small enough that it wasn’t too much work to cable together. Just as he finished tightening the last cable, he received a call to work on the floats again for the Francis Millard Company. This time he towed the float to Finn Bay and proudly used his own winch to do the work. We were always looking for ways to make more money.
Must Make More Money
September 1977 and our second fishing season was over, our last guests had left, and we had winterized everything and packed all the summer equipment and boats away. We had quite a few more guests in our second season and had hired two young fellows to help with the work on the dock. The crew were gone and we were planning to head to Edmonton to stay with my sister June and her family while we worked and saved money for next year. We both found jobs easily when we got there and worked for the next three months—some of which were the coldest on record.
George’s first job was on an outdoor building site. He had never experienced such cold weather in his life and quickly found a cushier, indoor job renovating an office. I worked for the city hall and at a drug store. The best part of this winter was staying with my sister and having fun every single day!
While we were there, George sent in a quote for a contract with the federal Fisheries Department to modify the A-frame building that Fisheries personnel used every summer at Dawsons. With George’s design experience, he produced drawings that showed how the building could accommodate more people. He won the contract, so we were excited about having more work when we returned to the inlet.
We bought an old station wagon to drive ourselves, and all the stuff that we had accumulated over the winter, back to Vancouver. On our way out of town, George pulled off the highway just outside of Edmonton and drove along a country road for a few miles then turned into a farm. Several Rhodesian ridgebacks ran up the drive barking. George had seen an ad for puppies, and we bought one to take up to the lodge. Zak was a wonderful dog who loved sleeping in the sun yet looked and sounded scary enough that he would make me feel much more comfortable on my own in the middle of nowhere.
We got back to the inlet and immediately organized projects for ourselves. This included replenishing the wood supply that the caretaker had used up. He must have really liked to have the house warm all day and all night. Then George had to collect logs. We planned to build a second guest cabin and would need lots of logs for building the float for the cabin to sit on.
Our first guest cabin had three beds in each guestroom. This setup limited us if we booked couples, since we could only take two couples at a time instead of, say, six men. We were booking quite a few couples because our lodge had bathrooms in each guestroom, which was a major innovation at the time. Most fishing resorts had one bathroom down the hall for many guests to use, and women would have to run the gauntlet of poker-playing men late at night. Our rooms were large enough, but we needed more accommodation if we wanted to make more money.
Me and a catch of rockfish. I could catch fish for dinner then put the head and guts in the crab trap to catch the next night’s meal: crab—still my all-time favourite dinner—served with a loaf of French bread, a green salad and garlic butter with lemon balm from my garden.
George had been collecting logs in earnest since we arrived in Sleepy Bay in early 1976. Every time he went out in the boat, he kept his eyes peeled watching for logs. He made lots of beachcombing trips around the islands and all the way out to Addenbroke Island, always on beautiful sunny days with no wind. He could spend hours and hours just putt-putting along enjoying the scenery, watching for logs and daydreaming. If he did see a log on a beach, he would pull up beside it, hammer a metal staple with a rope attached called a dog-line into it and tie it up to a tree at the high-tide mark. The unwritten rule was that once there was a dog-line tied to shore, no one else could take the log. He would go back to limb the log at low tide and then head back at high tide when the log would be floating again and tow it home. Towing logs is a very slow process, so it was well worth waiting for a dry day or he could end up sitting in the rain for hours.
When a Girl Says No
It was a beautiful blue-sky late winter day, cold and clear with almost no wind. We were just back from Edmonton and we needed more logs to build the next guesthouse float. Conditions were perfect for George to retrieve the logs that he had beached several miles from our bay. Zak and I stood at the front of our house and I waved to George as he left the bay. He promised he would be back by 2:30 PM, or I would go out looking for him, but there would have to be something terribly wrong if he wasn’t back by then. It was now 9:30 AM and George would be collecting his logs and then slowly, very slowly, towing them home.
I walked into the house and left the door open to let the crisp morning air in. I popped a couple of pieces of wood into the kitchen stove and closed the oven door. It would be a good morning to do a little baking and I could get a head start on the stew for dinner.
I mixed the cookie dough by hand so I wouldn’t have to start the noisy generator so early on such a lovely day. I love the peace and quiet when there is no chugging generator in the background. The sound of a varied thrush whistling carried through the open door. There were also a few seagulls fighting over a bit of compost and every once in a while I could hear bald eagles with their high-pitched bugling. I listened to CBC on the radio that we had hooked up to a car battery and an ingenious compact soapbox antenna: inside the plastic soapbox, copper wire was wound around and around then clamped onto another wire that had been fed through a tiny hole in the window frame. Someone on the coast produced dozens of these boxes and sold them through local stores. The only channel that we could receive was the CBC, and I was thankful for it because otherwise I would be left talking to myself, which was something I did a lot of while I worked on my own when George was so often out and about in the boat.
I had pulled one pan of cookies out of the oven and was about to put another one in when I heard a low thrumming sound. It sounded like a boat was coming into the bay. I looked out and saw Zak standing at the edge of the float. As the engine sound got louder, Zak started to bark. He looked pretty scary when he was serious about something. He weighed about eighty-five pounds and his distinctive ridge of hair that stood straight up along his spine had the effect of making him look angry even when he was quite content. I caught a glimpse of the boat as it passed the shallow channel to our bay and headed for the wider and deeper entrance. It was the Grizzly King, the fishboat owned by Jack Rendle. I called him Uncle Jack—mos
t people did. He had a tendency to show up right when baking was coming out of the oven. I don’t know how he did it, but it was an uncanny skill.
Zak settled down when I told him it was okay, and Uncle Jack pulled his boat alongside the front of our float and I tied it up. Uncle Jack always stood holding onto the cabin door of his boat, chatting about anything that came up, just waiting for an invitation. Of course I invited him in for tea.
The delicious smell of fresh-baked cookies wafted out the door and Jack was delighted to see the rack of cookies and went over to sit on the bench behind the kitchen table. I started to put a few cookies on a plate and all of a sudden, Jack had grabbed my arm and was stretching his toothless, wobbly face toward mine trying to kiss me. He wouldn’t let go of my arm and was grabbing at my head trying to pull it toward him. I managed to yank my arm away from him and ran around to the other side of the worktable. He lurched after me and I continued on around the table shouting, “No!” at him, then took a breath and whistled for Zak. Zak immediately appeared at the door and lunged, growling at Jack. Jack thumped back down on the bench behind the dinner table and whined, “Boy, when a girl says no like that … she really means it!”
At this point, the kettle whistled and I made tea. Jack seemed to be safely tucked away behind the table and I stayed standing behind the worktable with Zak standing by my side. I realized that Jack, who I never called “Uncle” again, had seen George towing his logs and knew that he wouldn’t be home for several hours.
I had trouble processing the information that this old man, who was a practicing Seventh-day Adventist, who we had known for the past two years, could be so gross and disgusting. Every Saturday he anchored his fishboat in a bay around the corner from us and supposedly spent his time there reading scripture. Hmm, I wonder.