In the spring of 1972, Nick Marach purchased an old wooden fishing boat to use as a live-aboard. Little did the young architect realize he would soon discover a new vocation and a new lease on life as a commercial gillnetter. In this excerpt from A Gillnet鈥檚 Drift: Tales of Fish and Freedom on the sa国际传媒 Coast, Marach describes a memorable trip to the fishing grounds at Duval Point on northern Vancouver Island, where he and his wife, Valerie, would accompany an old-time gillnetter on the occasion of his last day of fishing before retirement.
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The fishing was good that summer. We got into Duval Point Camp just in time to surprise Matt at his late supper and were invited aboard joyfully. He drew out a fresh gallon of his homemade wine from under his bunk and poured drinks into tumblers. While we drank, he threw some more salmon steaks onto his still-warm frying pan and soon we were eating together. When we told him what we were planning, he thanked us and told us to keep an eye on him about noon on the last day of the opening. He鈥檇 be picking the last set of his life about then and heading home. He was right on schedule, but I almost didn鈥檛 live to see it.
We stayed up late that night listening to Matt talk about his life, and slept in the next day, the start of the fishery. It was a three-day opening, surprisingly short for that time of year. There weren鈥檛 many boats in camp, and we had no trouble finding spots to fish alongside Matt. He didn鈥檛 use the radios in his boat, so we tied up a scotchman to the end of our net and idled over to his boat so we could talk some more. The good weather we鈥檇 had in Rivers Inlet had followed us down to Duval Point, and we were in the phony cheerful state that sometimes happens before big changes in life. The nets behaved, and it was nearly two hours later that we picked them. We had about sixty sockeye and Matt looked like he had double that.
As usual, we stayed out and fished through the night while Matt went into camp for his rest. The pattern continued until the last day of the opening. Matt had been coming out later and later to make the midday slack tide, and we could see that he鈥檇 planned his last set for it. That left us the whole morning to fish on our own. We were tired from fishing through the night, but not so bad that I was 鈥渢hinking like a baby,鈥� as the Croatian fishermen called the fatigue that set in during the last days of a long opening. The sea was unusually calm, and the net had been down for over an hour when I put on my apron and cuff protectors and went to pick it. After pulling the end of the net, I watched myself put the boat in reverse as if in an out-of-body experience, and run it up into the net until the propeller stopped turning and the engine stalled.
If we鈥檇 been a little farther off shore, I might have called the fishing company for a tow to somewhere safe where a diver could be brought in to clear up the mess. It would have been the smart thing to do if there had been time. From my read of how quickly the tide was carrying the boat and net toward the beach, though, we were past that chance. The boat was too beamy to reach into the propeller from above. My only choice was to dive under and cut out the net by hand. I stripped down to my shorts, spent a few minutes re-sharpening my sharpest knife, clamped it into my teeth like Tarzan, and dove in. My last glimpse of Valerie was her standing at the rail, her mouth open in horror, holding her hands clasped like the heroines in the old movies when a train was advancing on her boyfriend lashed across the tracks.
I had to come up for air three times, but managed to cut the last of the net free just as things were turning black. My back scraping along the hull seemed to wake me up and give me the energy to reach the surface and breathe again. The water, shockingly cold, had stiffened me up so badly that I wouldn鈥檛 have been able to get back aboard without Valerie. I might not even have tried all that hard if I had been alone. The water was feeling warmer by then, and seemed to be gently inviting me for one last dive into its blue-green depths. It wasn鈥檛 until I was lying on deck, wrapped in towels and a sleeping bag with Valerie on top adding her warmth, that I came back to myself.
As I lay there, feeling the boat rock gently on the deceptively benign water, I remembered stories of boats being found adrift with no one aboard. What had sounded so fantastic now seemed possible 鈥� even likely. Death would have come casually if I鈥檇 been alone. Of all the differences between gillnetting and ordinary life, it was clear to me now that the greatest was the acceptance of death鈥檚 proximity on the water.
Two cups of coffee spiked with Hudson鈥檚 Bay rum revived me enough to join Valerie picking the net. By the time we were done, we could hear the gentle lapping of water on the rocks of the shoreline that we likely would have been trying to save the boat from if we鈥檇 been a half-hour later.
As it turned out, we had a nice load of sockeye aboard, and a net that needed mending but was safe on the drum, and we made it back to see Matt make his last set. We saw his boat slowly come out of the camp entrance and head toward us. Valerie and I were sitting on the hatch cover with fresh coffee after making another set. Matt stopped his boat a few feet from ours and came out on deck.
鈥淲ould you like a coffee, Matt?鈥� I yelled.
鈥淭hanks, but no!鈥� he shouted back. 鈥淚 came to cork you! You can鈥檛 cork me back because this is gonna be my last set!鈥�
Before I could reply, he ducked stiffly into his wheelhouse and wheeled off.
鈥淚 think he鈥檚 crying,鈥� Valerie said.
A net鈥檚 length away, Matt began his set. Once it was made, he went into his wheelhouse, even though it was a fine day, and didn鈥檛 come out again until he was ready to pick his net. We had begun picking ours by then. We finished at about the same time he did. People said Matt would catch the last fish swimming, he was that good of a gillnetter. On that set, his last ever, he might have caught thirty, a fraction of what he was used to. We could see from how low his boat was riding that he鈥檇 packed ice and would be taking his last catch home. When the net was in, he pulled his scotchman up over the rollers. Swinging it around and around over his head like a lasso, he then slammed it down onto the deck at his feet.
鈥淭hat鈥檚 it! Goodbye forever!鈥� he shouted into the wind.
Valerie was right; he was crying.
Giving us a long wave, he pointed his boat toward Johnstone Strait and Vancouver. It was the most impressive retirement I鈥檝e ever seen.
We still had fishing to do before heading into Port Hardy, but we watched his boat get smaller for a long time before starting our next set. Matt used to say that of all the ways to fish for a living on the West Coast, the best one for old men and dreamers was gillnetting.
Even in our short time gillnetting, we鈥檇 seen days where the water was like glass, our net-corks curving out behind the boat for nearly a quarter of a mile among reflections of cedar-clad mountains and rocky beaches. The only disturbance would come from fish hitting the net, causing the corks to bob and send ripples out into the mirror. Some nights in Rivers Inlet when it was clear, the lights of our mast and net would be lost among thousands of others, and looking into the distance it was hard to tell where the fishing lights ended and the stars began. Matt was crying about the times like these that he would never see again.
Excerpted from A Gillnet鈥檚 Drift: Tales of Fish and Freedom on the sa国际传媒 Coast. Copyright 漏 W.N. Marach, Heritage House Publishing, 2014.
