Good luck, I thought. Still, I’d never been present at the birth of an actual policy before, so I followed him with less of a lack of enthusiasm than was perhaps warranted.
We entered a small lecture room where about thirty people gazed rapturously at a man in a mismatched jacket and pants who was waving around a laser pointer. I was about to duck when Paul nudged me. “He’s our economics guru.”
The word “oxymoron” flashed through my mind but my lips did not move. Years of discipline.
The man was in full flight. Capturing maximum rents and facilitating market corrections followed by freeing the exchange mechanism. Hallejuah! He finished with a rousing chorus of growth through deregulation and, glory be, the discipline of the marketplace. I expected a few Amens and Praise the Lords, but there was only applause, worshipful though it may have been.
Paul strode to the front of the room. “Thank you so much, Dr. Solomon. We’re always fascinated to witness the power of economic thought unleashed on the problems of fisheries management. And now gentlemen—and ladies, welcome Rebecca—reasoning from the general to the particular, what can we say about abalone licenses?”
Not much, I thought. They’re worthless pieces of paper because the fishery was managed into oblivion. The Minister giveth and the Minister taketh away.
Nevertheless, an earnest debate broke out, in a room full of highly educated people whose collective salary almost equalled Conrad Black’s annual bonus, about a fishery that hadn’t existed for ten years. There was a policy void, and out of the void must come, what? Enlightenment? I don’t know. But it was fascinating to watch.
Three overhead projectors were in play and transparencies were being flashed onto every available surface. The focusing knobs, as per DFO rules, were fused into fuzziness, so tables and lecterns were being screeched backwards and forwards in the quest for focus. Vague curves were superimposed over text that just might have been readable if the transparency had been the right way up. Numbers were flashing on Dr. Solomon’s back as he waved at the X axis of a Laffer curve. It wasn’t even mildly amusing. A new graph showed up, undulating on his shiny once-fashionable jacket. The curve started high and then plunged off his right hip. I leaned over to Paul. “Got a plane to catch. But this has been great. Keep me posted.”
“It’s all on the Web page. You can follow the whole debate and even post your comments. You don’t have to be a member of the group.”
“Super. I’ll follow it closely. See ya.”
Sometimes prayers are answered. At three that afternoon, a kind woman handed me a plane ticket to Shearwater. Somewhat off the beaten path, in fact so far off as to escape even minor bruising, Shearwater was my waypoint to joining the mighty James Sinclair, flagship of Western Command and floating HQ for the herring fishery.
The Jimmy Sinc, one hundred and thirty seven feet of recycled pop cans, was anchored in Shearwater Bay. One of the boat’s inflatable runabouts, a Zodiac, picked me up and zipped me out to the mother ship. Standing on deck to greet me was Peter Van Allen. Pete had been attached to the herring fishery for almost fifteen years and knew just about everything there was to know about the fish, the fishermen, and the fishery. So naturally he was not in charge; I was. As I shook his hand I said, “I’m here pretty much as an observer and just another pretty face.”
“You can have it if you want it,” he said. “My stomach is way too old for this stuff.”
Ah yes, the herring fishery. The biggest, fastest, wealthiest fishery in the world. The entire fleet lived on its nerves. The tension was such that fishermen and fishery managers alike gobbled antacid pills like candy.
Here’s how the crapshoot works. Herring are fished for the roe, the eggs, of the females. When the fish school up for their massive spawning events during March and April, the roe content matures rapidly. The roe sacs are measured as a percentage of body weight. Starting at about five percent, the roe content will grow over a two- or three-week period to as high as twenty percent. The idea is to wait as long as possible to allow the roe sacs to get as big as possible. But if you wait too long, the fish spawn and then everything is lost. Or you might wait until the optimum moment to open the fishery, and then a storm will blow in, making it impossible to fish for two or three days. When the storm is over, the fish have spawned and the fishery is lost. And it’s not just the lost revenue from the price of the roe. The fishermen have rented licenses worth millions of dollars. If the fishery is blown, they have to eat those costs.
The pressure on the manager to get it right is enormous. But the pressure on the fishermen to perform is even greater. The seine boats participating in the fishery are the biggest and fastest with the most aggressive skippers. Different company fleets have their own spotter planes to perform aerial surveillance. Subsea surveillance is undertaken by sophisticated sonars and sounders that would be the envy of many navies. Messages are transmitted from boat to boat using verbal codes or electronically scrambled ciphers.
The planes circle overhead. The big steel boats circle over the fish, jockeying for position. It’s a game of high-stakes, high-speed chess and the boat with the inside position wins. And then the opening announcement over VHF radio. “This is the James Sinclair. Roe herring fishing by purse seine net is now declared open in areas seven-dash-one-three and seven-dash-one-four.”
Before the message has even been completed, smoke belches from fifty smokestacks as fifty throttles are rammed forward. Nets start to peel off drums, not dragged off by the resistance of a sea anchor, but hauled off by power skiffs that pull in the opposite direction of the big boat. Many boats set on the same school of fish. Rammings are threatened and occasionally occur; guns are brandished and sometimes fired as the boats attempt to close their circles. It’s a game of chicken won by the most aggressive. Diesel fuel and testosterone are the order of the day. It’s big machines and big egos doing battle in a small arena for huge prizes. It’s symbolic. It’s excessive. It’s exciting as hell. I was looking forward to it.
The first opening, in the Gulf of Georgia, had not gone well. Scattered fish and bad weather had meant the seine fishery was pretty much a bust, although the gillnetters had moved down to Yellow Point and gotten their quota. So now, here in the central area, there were lots of seine boats that were already half a million in the hole and looking to make up their losses. I prayed we could make it work for them.
Preliminary soundings showed some large bodies of fish in the area, although they would appear and disappear randomly. The roe content had gone from five percent to eight percent in a week. Things were looking not too bad. When the percentage got to about fifteen, and if there was sufficient fish in the area, we’d let ’er go. In the meantime, we would do constant sounding to keep tabs on how many fish was in the area, and two chartered seine boats would do test sets and sample the fish to measure the roe content. It meant twelve-hour days at a minimum but, by God, they would seem shorter than my usual Ottawa seven-hour shifts.
That evening, Pete and I convened in the wheelhouse at eight for the daily fleet update. We’d broadcast on VHF channel 78A to let the fleet know our latest findings, and listen to their concerns, and generally just have a gabfest. Sometimes it was a focused problem-solving sort of workshop and sometimes it was more of a bitch session. After the problems with the Gulf fishery, I was expecting more of the latter.
Pete led off. He gave the sounding reports, which showed a school estimated at two thousand tons in upper Spiller Channel, a couple of schools totaling maybe three thousand in lower Spiller, and scattered schools of around fifteen hundred tons even lower down in Seaforth Channel.
He then opened it up to the fleet for comments, and I was mildly surprised by the constructive nature of the dialogue. Guys were talking about trigger points and hail procedures and fallback plans as though they hadn’t a care in the world. The only participants who hinted at aggressiveness were the processing representatives. These guys represented large companies that had to satisfy shareholders. To
them, fish were nothing more than a commodity to be converted into shareholder dividends. In all the debates I’d heard over the years about how much to fish, where, and how, and who should catch them, the processors were predictably consistent in their voice: as much as possible, as soon as possible, for our fleet, as cheaply as possible. When fishermen expressed concerns about overfishing or sustainability, they were pressured to fish like hell this year and forget about next year. And they paid the price for that.
When the debate had been going on for twenty minutes or so, focused on arcane stuff like male/female/juvenile percentage, I was thrilled to hear a familiar voice. He followed the standard protocol of calling our boat name first, followed by his. “James Sinclair, Coastal Provider.” It was my old skipper, Mark, who had somehow managed to acquire a coveted herring command. “I was just wondering about our basic strategy here. Are we going to try and get the quota in one shot or have a short opening and then reassess the situation?”
It was a deceptively simple question. The answer would dictate every fisherman’s strategy. Should he go for the one big set or be patient, knowing he’d get a least one more chance the next day? I motioned to Pete and he handed me the mike. “Coastal Provider, James Sinclair. Evening, skipper. Nothing’s written in stone but we’d like to have a quick one, shut ’er down to get a good count, and then get the remainder of the quota possibly the next day.” I didn’t know if he’d recognize my voice after eight years so I threw in a reference that only he would understand. “We’d like to pull this off so everyone gets their share without going over quota. Everyone’s got mouths to feed and the biggest mouth is the banker’s.”
That’s what Christine used to say to us every week as we were trying to calculate our crew shares. And Mark would laugh and say, “The only bank I care about is Goose Bank where you get the big halibut.”
There were a few more questions and then none, from which I deduced that the conference had ended. Everyone knew the fishery was a ways off so no one was panicking yet. I descended from the wheelhouse and went out on deck. I could see the Coastal Provider about a quarter mile off our stern. As I watched, there was a scurry of activity as they launched their power skiff. It started up with a roar and headed straight for us, in contrast to most of the other power skiffs, which were heading toward the Shearwater Pub. As it got closer, I could see Mark at the wheel, and when he came alongside, I grabbed his tie-up line.
He was still clean-cut, dressed well for a working fisherman, and exuded mature responsibility. Occasionally, he had allowed us to drag him out of that grown-up persona, but it was still his default character. He grinned at me. “I knew they’d kick you out of Ottawa. Swansons aren’t allowed there. No logs to haul or fish to catch.”
“But you meet such interesting people. Just a few days ago, I was having cocktails with Fleming Griffith.”
“I hope they pay you extra for that. Hey, jump in. We’ll go for a beer.”
“I don’t know if I should be seen with a lowly fisherman.” I was joking, but many in DFO were serious about what they saw as fraternization with the enemy.
“I’m the one who’s got to worry about his reputation. Drinking with a DFO guy. What would my mother say?”
I climbed into the open aluminum skiff, powered by a diesel engine only slightly smaller than an icebreaker’s, and we headed for the famed Shearwater Pub. The place was packed with noisy fishermen reliving their biggest sets. The older guys were using mugs of beer to illustrate the positioning of various boats they’d outsmarted to get their nets around a disputed school of fish. The younger guys were already on to shooters. No sign of poverty here, I thought, and then remembered that everybody was spending their grub money.
Grub money, enough to last the season, is advanced by the processors. But no one seemed worried about having to pay it back. After all, there’s no way in hell, everyone thought, that we won’t make enough money to cover expenses. Unfortunately, the cold math showed quite plainly that if everyone caught the area average (the total quota divided by the number of boats), everyone would lose money. To make money you had to get your share of fish plus someone else’s. Thus the feeding frenzy that was herring season.
I saw a few familiar faces and nodded greetings. My cousin Ollie sat at a table under the TV. He’d spent years on a seine boat and suffered a crushed foot en route to earning enough money for a shrimp boat and license. I waved at him and he saluted me with his mug. There were no free tables, or even empty chairs, so Mark and I leaned against the bar.
“You know who else might show up here?” he said. “Christine. She’s on the Racer and they’re on their way up from the Gulf. We’ll have a real reunion.”
The Racer was the Coast Guard ship that Christine served on. They usually stood by during major fisheries to help patrol and rescue anyone who needed rescuing. And there were always a few rescuees, even in calm weather. Fishing was an intense industrial activity that took place on slippery decks on bouncing boats in a highly competitive situation. Somebody always got hurt. We just all hoped no one would get killed.
Unfortunately, there was already one missing in action. Les Jameson had left Port Hardy two days previously, headed for Shearwater in his super punt, but never arrived. They’d found the high-speed punt drifting in Fitz Hugh Sound, but no sign of him. I’d never much cared for Les. He was a scab and a DFO pet rock. But still, he deserved to live. I guess.
“I even heard that Fergie might be here on a gillnetter,” Mark said. There was a moment’s silence as memories sparked between us and we both thought of the one who wouldn’t be here: Billy. I was tempted to tell Mark about how our Igor had made a mystery appearance in the DFO database, and that I was sure Billy had delivered it to the West Van lab before he went missing. But something made me hold back. Instead, I gestured to the waitress for a couple of pints and steered the conversation in a safer direction. “So, who’d you have to kill to get the herring job? Don’t tell me you bought your own license.” Anyone with enough money to buy a herring license would never waste the former by buying the latter.
Mark shrugged. “You know how the game works. I’ve got a pretty big halibut quota. So I hire as deckhands two guys who fish salmon for Jimmy Patterson. So I suggest to them they should tell Jimmy I’ll deliver to him if he lets me run one of his herring boats. And they do and he does. So here I am.”
“Nice one. But I don’t know if I could take the pressure.”
“Yeah, that’s the toughest part of the game. But I’ll try it for a couple of seasons, and if I don’t like it, I’ll stick to fishing the flat ones. At least I’ve got a fallback position.”
I nodded. That made things easier all right. “How’s your love life? I hear you split up with Shirley.”
“Aw Christ, I’ve taken a vow of celibacy.”
“That’s a bit extreme. You never used to go more than half a day without drooling over some young lovely.”
“That was the old days, Danny. What I’ve learned is that sex leads to relationships and relationships lead to problems and problems lead to a guy having to sleep on the boat and that leads to smelling like stale diesel, which means you don’t have a hope of getting laid, so why bother in the first place?”
Jeez, I thought, the breakup with Shirley must’ve been tough. My journey through the nineties had left me, in my humble opinion, a caring and sensitive guy. But it’s easier to be sensitive with casual acquaintances than with real friends. So in a sensitive but cowardly manner, I declined to ask about it or to commiserate. And Mark declined to query my single state, which was an embarrassment to my mother and a puzzlement to me. I told myself I was in that awkward stage of being beyond casual pickup dating, but not ready for serious relationship-type dating. An image of Bette flashed through my mind, and her closeness to me in the back of an Ottawa cab.
Thankfully, Mark interrupted my musings by changing the subject. “Hey, you must know Alistair Crowley. He lives in a float house just around the corner in Yeo C
ove and fishes prawns. But he used to be a top-notch biologist in the West Van lab. Left or got fired. Rumor has it, he was messing around with superfish, doing gene splicing and shit like that. He’s a strange guy but I sometimes trade him halibut for prawns. You know who I’m talking about?”
Crowley was the stuff of legend. He haunted the annals of DFO lore like Marley’s Ghost. He had done brilliant work, first on acid rain and then on Pacific Ocean regime shifts. After those peer-acclaimed works, he had retreated deeper into the basement of the West Van lab and had begun experiments that few understood and even fewer approved of. And then he was gone. Fired? Quit? Medical leave? The rumors were numerous and unresolved. But he’d still been there in 1996 when Smiling Billy had, presumably, turned up on the doorstep with a large mutant fish.
“Yeah, Mark.” I tried not to appear too eager. “I’d love to talk to him. Let me know when you’re headed his way.”
The raucous noise of the bar suddenly increased by a factor of, by God, the Kairikula brothers. They burst through the door like a Force 8 storm, yelling and insulting all and sundry in a generically malign fashion.
“Shearwater is the asshole of the world and the whole goddamn herring fleet is five fathoms up it.” This from Hari.
The punch line from Jari. “So that makes everyone here a hemorrhoid.”
Gleeful laughter as they swaggered toward the bar. The Kairikula brothers were, in their eyes, the pride of Sointula, and the product of a century of Finnish lineage. Some would say they were the product of a restricted gene pool. But I’d fished with and around them for years, and my many painful attempts to match their capacity for vodka had resulted in a typically shipmate-fisher-guy sort of bond.
I both cringed and delighted when Hari fastened his eyes on me. Hari to Jari, “Look who’s here. It’s Swede Swanson, the wannabe Finn. Hey Danny, you’re a good guy. Gimme fifty bucks and I’ll get you a Finnish passport.”
Jari to Hari, “No fucking way. He’s good for a Swede but not good enough to be a Finn.” He elbowed through the crowd and threw his arm around me. “But he’s good enough to buy me a drink.”
The River Killers Page 4