JOE’S STORY: A YOUNG MAN GOES NORTH
The Sidney was a packer or tender, sort of a mother ship to the smaller fishing vessels that spent most of their season far from the cannery. We put the fish we bought into our hold filled with refrigerated sea water, and supplied the fishermen with food, water, fuel and any repairs they needed.
Nicknamed money fish, sockeyes or reds were the most valuable of the fish we commonly bought.
Salmon seiners and a big tender, Inian Cove, 1965. The biggest change in the 55 years since this photo was taken, is that the fishing boats are larger, and a growing number have refrigerated sea water systems, allowing them to keep their fish aboard and deliver to the cannery at the end of the 3-4 day fishing period, getting paid typically 10 cents a pound extra.
The fish-buying process aboard the Sidney. Our skipper, Lloyd Whaley, has the ‘clicker’ in his hand, a device with five separate finger operated counters for the different species of fish.
“OK,” Lloyd would call out to start the process, “any kings?” Occasionally the larger and most valuable king salmon would be caught in the net. Kings were uncommon. Next it was, “Give me your money fish.” This was the call for reds or sockeyes, which might be 10-20% of the day’s catch.
Of course the fishermen would try to throw in less valuable chum in with the reds, so the buyer would have to pay strict attention!
A typical salmon cannery, hacked out of the Alaskan woods. This is Loring, north of Ketchikan in about 1930, when square riggers like the one on the right would come up from San Francisco loaded with cannery workers, fishermen, and supplies, and return in the fall loaded with canned salmon, leaving just a caretaker and hopefully his family to keep and eye on things until the next season.
The first season the square rigger also brought up carpenters, lumber, a pile driver, and canning equipment, and built a whole cannery before the season started!
Little did I know that the old foot-powered sewing machine, dropped off at our Seattle dock in the middle of the night would turn out to be our most precious cargo to Alaska!
May, 1965: I am 19, one of dozens of young men, walking the docks of Seattle’s Fisherman’s Terminal, hoping to get a job on one of the many salmon boats getting ready to go up to Alaska for the summer.
It is immensely frustrating; skippers are busy, most boats are already crewed up. But I know that somewhere in those hundreds of boats is a opportunity that would lead to summer of adventure with hopefully a big payoff.
And finally a tip gets me an engineer’s job on a big fish-buying boat. Just by luck I’d stumbled into the classic Alaska fishing job: the shady skipper, the grumpy cook, the green deckhand, the only slightly experienced engineer, and a wonderful mate who set me on the path for the rest of my life.
The morning after we left Seattle for the 60 hour steam up to Alaska, I felt a hand on my shoulder.
“Hey, Kid, wake up, ya gotta see this.” It was Mick, the 70 year old Norwegian mate.
I stumbled up to the pilothouse, peered out amazed at the whirlpools in the canyon-like channel. Just then a tree trunk bigger than a phone pole erupted from one of the whirlpools, and the skipper cranked the steering wheel violently to the right.
“That’s the kind of shit you don’t want to hit, Kid,” said the skipper.
“It used to be much worse,” said Mick. “Used to be a rock right in the middle of the narrowest place.. just underwater, made whirlpools large enough to suck the likes of us right down….”
“They tunneled right down from there,” he waved at the shore almost too close to our starboard. “900 feet down, then 1300 across then right up into that rock.. filled that rock with almost three million pounds of dynamite.. blew it the hell right out of there…”
It was just the first morning of our four day trip to Alaska; and it was all almost too much for a green East Coast kid to take in.
Then the skipper turned to me, “just follow the chart and wake me in three hours. AND DON’T HIT ANY DEADHEADS!” And disappeared into his stateroom.
‘Me.. steer this big fishboat to Alaska?’ I had totally lied about my experience to get the job. ‘And what the hell is a deadhead.’ My head was spinning. Another big log appeared ahead of us. I grabbed the steering wheel, but it appeared to be locked.
Then Mick put a big hand on my shoulder, kicked the autopilot out of gear with his foot, and steered easily away. “Here, kid, here’s how you do it.”
So began my introduction to the skills I needed to be an Alaskan fisherman. That kind old man took me under his wing, taught me how to tie the right knots, how to read a chart, how to watch out for deadheads (big vertical driftwood logs and very hard to see) and most importantly, HOW TO TELL FISH APART. (There are five different species of salmon, all priced differently.)
But more than that, he filled me with his stories of fifty years of working up and down the coast in all kinds of boats in all kinds of weather. We’d pick our way into some tight little anchorage on a foggy night with the radar, and Mick would say something like:
“We went in there on the old Betty A, mailboat run, January of ‘24, thick o’ snow, no radar them days so we just tooted our way in with the horn, listening for the echoes off the rocks.”
It was an oral history of the coast, in fits and starts, from that old Norwegian’s memory. Mick was a bit of a night owl, and sometimes we’d sit up there for hours together on my night watches, sometimes talking, other times just watching the dim shapes of that vast and lonely land passing by outside the windows. For me, an inexperienced kid from a urban East Coast family, it was magic beyond words.
Three mornings after leaving Seattle, I stood on the bow taking it all in as we pulled into our home base for the 1965 salmon season: the Annette Island Packing Company cannery, in the Tsimpshian native village of Metlakatla, just 50 miles north of the Alaska-Canada border. Backed by snow topped mountains, the cannery, like many up and down the Northwest Coast, was a collection of low buildings built on pilings above the water with a long dock in front, to which a fleet of fishing vessels were tied three deep.
So began my introduction to what was the core industry of the Northwest Coast, especially Alaska for almost a hundred years. With the fishing season opening in just a few days, it was a beehive of activity: fishermen working on their nets and finishing up painting and preparing their boats for the season>. Cannery workers scrubbing the floors, mechanics testing and repairing the long line of machines that assembled the cans, cut and washed the fish, filled the cans, then sealed and cooked them. A tidy native village spread out along the shore south of the cannery, with children playing on the gravel beach and dogs wandering freely.
We got right to work, sliding in to tie up under the ‘hoist’ - the crane that would unload the freight that we had filled our hold with down in Seattle.
I soon realized that the arrival of a boat loaded with freight from Seattle was a big deal in an isolated native village like that one. Most of the stuff in our hold was pallets of supplies for the cannery itself. But many of the smaller packages that had been dropped off, sometimes late at night, were all for individual villagers: prescriptions, that box of Granny Smith apples that I had wondered about, and dozens of boxes, mostly from Sears, dropped off by friends or taxi.
For, as I discovered, the doorstopper sized Sears & Roebuck mail order catalog was a core staple of life in these isolated communities. Metlakatla did have a post office, but if you could get a friend or even a taxi if it was a big order, to drop off your order to a boat headed up from Seattle to the village, it got there faster and cheaper.
So barely had we gotten the lines on the dock when a procession of shy native women and gruff native guys began coming by, either down the ladder from the dock or by outboard skiff alongside to ask for a package and I’d rummage around in the big storeroom and deliver it. Most said a quiet thanks and moved on.
The oddest delivery that we received down in Seattle was on deck when we got up one morning: an old fashioned foot-powered Singer sewing machine, without any identification or information on who it was for. So I just lugged it up into the big storeroom and kind of forgot about it. Then late that first afternoon in Metlakatla, a battered wood skiff pulled alongside with a rough looking older guy and a grandmotherly looking woman with white hair in a bun and a shapeless blue pattered Mother Hubbard dress. They were by far the oldest natives I had yet seen.
She said something that I didn’t understand, and it took me a moment to realize it wasn’t English but Tsimshian, the local language. Then she said “sew-ing,” making an up and down motion with her hand and I got it: that old sewing machine was hers.
The man passed me a line and jumped aboard. I pointed into the storeroom, where you could see the sewing machine among the cases of pop, cereal, candy, cookies, etc. and he came out with it in his arms, beaming.
“Ah,” said the woman, crying out in a joy that you could understand in any language, and passed me up something covered with a cloth: a pie still warm from the oven. The man set the old Singer on our deck by the rail, clambered back aboard the skiff and I passed that old machine carefully down to where he already had a blanket on the bottom of the skiff to receive this precious possession. And without a word, they were gone, to some cabin, I supposed, so far out of town that the power lines didn’t reach. Or maybe they just liked the old ways.
There were totem poles on the dock, eagles in the trees. One night at Inian Cove something bumping into the boat woke me up. Thinking another boat had drug anchor and drifted into us, I stumbled out on deck. But it was something very different.
An iceberg. Maybe the size of a small garage, it moved slowly down our side in the tide, seeming to glow from within in the light of the moon. I reached out, tried to scrape out some gravel, probably ground off the bottom of a canyon a hundred years before I was born, but the tide pushed it away. It was magic.
That summer of 1965 was ALASKA in capital letters. All I wanted to do was go get back up there in my own boat.