Grizzlies, Gales and Giant Salmon. Pat Ardley
away. Ray had been a sniper in World War II. He had wanted to be a paratrooper, but he had a bit of a heart murmur so they made him stay on the ground. It wasn’t long after shooting out Ken’s light bulbs that Ray decided he should quit drinking. Thankfully he wasn’t drinking when we were fishing with him.
George was steering and Ray started hooking small bits of bait onto the longline before he dropped the line overboard. I pulled big rubber gloves on and sat hooking up the bait as fast as I could to keep ahead of him. There was a Scotchman, or big bright coloured buoy, that went over with the end of the longline and floated on the surface so we could find the line later. We kept loading hooks and dropping them for several hours, and then Ray told George to switch with me so I could steer. Sitting in the captain’s seat and watching the horizon kept me from feeling ill, and I was able to steer for the rest of the short afternoon while George and Ray hauled in the lines using the net drum on the back of the boat.
We didn’t catch very many fish that whole day. Most of the fish that they brought in were dead. Rockfish do not do very well when they are brought up quickly from deep water. Their air bladder expands, sometimes right out of their mouth, and it doesn’t deflate. This did not bode well for Ray’s live tank. We headed back to Finn Bay and decided we might as well eat some of the fish since it had just been caught. Together we cooked up a delicious feast of deep-fried rockfish and chips that could not have tasted better or been fresher. Unfortunately, we ate most of what we caught, so we didn’t even cover the cost of fuel for the trip.
I was just about falling down I was so tired, but Ray wanted to show us how he was training his Brittany spaniel hunting dog to not be afraid of his gun. He sat at one end of his cabin and held the dog between his legs. Then he blasted away at the far wall while he held the dog down and we held our ears. He figured he had to do it until the dog didn’t flinch any more. The only way that was going to happen was when the poor dog went deaf from the noise or dropped dead from the fear.
Ray went on to become the oldest person at the time to become a helicopter pilot in Canada. He had always wanted to fly a helicopter and after a gold rush–type fishing season, in which he made boatloads of money, he bought one and enrolled in flight school. Living along the coast all his life and travelling exclusively by boat, he had never even had a driver’s licence. He had to have someone drive him to his classes. He passed all his tests and, after years of practice, was able to fly on his own. He built a new float that stuck out from his house float so that he could land his helicopter right in front of his home, which was still tied up in Finn Bay. At this time, commercial fishermen had a guaranteed income from what was then called unemployment insurance, so after fishing ten two-day openings throughout the summer they would be eligible for government cheques. He may have been the only person who regularly flew a helicopter to the post office to pick up his unemployment cheque. A few years later, Ray crashed the helicopter beside a mountain lake and was rescued a day later by John Buck, who flew his own float plane and landed on the lake. That was the end of Ray’s helicopter adventures.
As for us, it was the end of our fishing adventures. We went fishing for two more days and finally gave in to the sorry fact that we were not going to make any money at it. We helped Ray clean his gear and put it all away on the third afternoon and said goodbye to our Commercial Rockfish Caper. George and I could go out into sheltered water in our skiff and in an hour we could catch more fish than we caught in our three days of commercial fishing. We didn’t have refrigeration so we didn’t keep too many fish, just enough for a couple of meals plus a few pounds to salt for later use. We ate a lot of fish that we easily caught, and with the dry goods and tinned foods that we brought in on the freight boat, we never went hungry. We had enough money saved to buy oil for the stove and gas for the skiff, but we were looking forward to making money again when the steelhead season started and we would work for the fishing resort again.
Steelhead and Grizzlies
We worked at North West Safari’s camp (later Buck’s Camp) again the following spring. This time it was steelhead season in April and May. The lodge floats were again towed to the head of the inlet to be closer to the Chuckwalla River where the steelhead would be spawning then heading back out to the ocean. Unlike salmon, which die after they spawn, not all steelhead die, and they can head back out to sea and sometimes make it back to spawn another year. Once again we were working our asses off with so much to do and long, long hours. It was harder to work for someone else like this after we had spent the winter in the wilderness, relying on ourselves to get through the days safely, as well as working to keep ourselves warm and fed. George and I felt that we were such a strong unit after surviving the cold, the dark, the loneliness and each other. But we had told John that we would help with the steelhead season and here we were.
Once again, I was cooking and cleaning and George was spending the days outside, running guests up the river and dropping them off to fish at different spots along the banks. At times, it was very cold outside with sleet flying horizontally into his face as he stood at the wheel of the open riverboat. April at the head of the inlet was still affected by the snowpack and quite a bit cooler here than where our rented cottage was at the other end of the inlet. I packed thermoses of hot soup and hot coffee in an attempt to keep George and the guests warm. There were days when everyone returned to the lodge soaking wet and completely frozen. I had to question the sanity of the guests paying a lot of money for this abuse. Some days I was happy that I was inside cooking and cleaning.
One night at the end of steelhead season, George and I went with John Buck in his flat-bottomed riverboat, across the bay to the logging camp to visit some of the staff that we had met during the summer. It was a warm evening in May, and the weather looked like it would stay calm for the next few hours at least. We had a fun evening with our new friends, but I noticed as the evening went along that I could hear wind rattling their windows. By the time we were leaving, there was a gale blowing and I was already feeling sick at the thought of getting into that low-floating, flat-bottomed boat. Both George and John cajoled me into getting into the boat and, in the pitch dark and the blowing gale, we headed away from the dock. It was only several hundred yards across the bay but we were not making any headway against the wind and waves. The tops of the waves were flying off and drenching us with freezing cold water, and the front of the boat was lifting way too high with each gust. We were only about thirty feet from shore when I had had enough and begged the men to take me back to the dock. I knew the boat would flip in that wind and I would die out there in the wild, dark water. They finally relented and, after angrily mocking my foolishness (though I think they realized that I was right), carefully turned the boat between gusts and headed back to the dock. We spent an uncomfortable night on couches and the floor, but I felt like I was cradled in the lap of luxury and happy to still be alive to see another day.
A few days later, George and I took a skiff up the Chuckwalla River. He knew a good spot to pull the boat up onto a sandy riffle where we could get out and walk a little and explore the shore. On the beach, I bent over and watched a giant footprint in the sand fill with water. A grizzly had just left the beach. The bushes were twenty feet away and our little boat was pulled up on the shore twenty feet away in the other direction. As I straightened, I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck standing up, a good indication that I should get the heck out of there.
We were two miles up the Chuckwalla River and, at this point, the river is about eighty feet wide and lined with salal, huckleberry and salmonberry bushes with lots of alder trees in behind. There were worn-out carcasses of fish washed up on the beach and tired steelhead half swimming and half drifting in the gentle clear pools at the side of the river. I looked up and stared hard into the bushes. Nothing was moving except George, who was backing up to where I stood frozen to the spot. Even the birds seemed to have stopped their chittering as if holding their breath with us. George moved his head slightly, and I followed his gaze to a spot just under an alder log that had one end in the water and the other stretched across the beach with its branches mingling with the bushes. I stared harder and finally saw the two yellow eyes looking in my direction. It was a cougar, and it must have been waiting for the grizzly to leave before coming out to feed on the fish carcasses.
I could only imagine that it was not very happy when we showed up. George reached for my hand and we slowly backed down to where the boat was beached. My mind was racing trying to think of what we could use to protect