Free The Fisher Queen by Sylvia Taylor

carefully scrape out all the congealed blood. Old blood is notorious for degrading the flesh. Then lift the gill flaps and with a circular motion cut through both sides at the same time if you’re good, and one side at a time if you’re not.
    Then wash-wash, rub-rub with seawater pumped through the deck hose and the dressed beauty is ready for its icy bed in the hold.
    The ice is snow cone textured and carried from the ice house through a large pipe containing a slowly turning auger. It’s like a giant screw, carrying the ice at a steep angle up to a support beam on the edge of the loading dock, where it cascades down a multi-jointed pipe straight into the boat’s hold. Someone had better be holding the end of it, directing the ice cascade into certain compartments. If not, you end up with a 2,000-pound snow cone in the middle of your hold that you can’t do a thing with. You just have to shovel it out and start over.
    If the ice is too chunky it won’t fill the salmon bellies smoothly, making lumps and indentations that downgrade the fish. If it’s too slushy, it’ll melt in a couple of days and won’t keep the fish fresh. You either end your trip early, losing money if the fishing is good, or take a risk and stay out, ending up with flattened funky fish that go for pet food.
    The fish are laid in rows, each layer a different direction to evenly distribute the weight. The bellies are stuffed with ice to keep the meat fresh and the bodies from flattening and then laid neatly on their sides. Ice is packed around each fish and between each layer. People who don’t bother with this step find the last couple of layers like salmon pancakes. The tricky thing is gauging how much ice to use on each layer so you don’t run out too soon and have to come in.
    The final layer is covered with an ice blanket made of some space age material. Imagine a multi-layered fish and ice cake.
    Sounds like any old fool could pull this off, right? Think again. It is truly an art and a science with a million variables that reveal themselves through hard experience. The more care you take, the more money you get.
    I wasn’t a rookie at gutting fish, but we were catching so few springs that Paul wouldn’t risk me messing up any of them while practising the exacting technique, especially when factoring in the pitching deck. We were into our fourth day of what we hoped would be a full 10-day trip since coming back from Port Hardy with the allegedly repaired alternator, trolling the Yankee Spot shelf from Goletas Channel across the whole top of Vancouver Island all the way to Fisherman Bay, which took a whole miserable day—13 or 14 hours of being thrown around in the pouring rain—then anchoring in Fisherman Bay or Shushartie Bay at the channel end, for two or three fish a day. At this rate, we were burning more fuel than we were earning to pay for it.
    While scrounging around the camp store in Bull Harbour one day, I drifted into conversation with a well-seasoned skipper. Commiserating over my frustration at our poor catches, he passed on the sage advice an old Haida fisherman had given him years before when asked to share the secret of his success:
    Be where the fish are.
    â€œWe were pissed off.” He chuckled and shook his head over his youthful brashness. “We thought he would tell us about some hot fishing lures, but once we knew what was going on we realized that was true. For a good fisherman it’s an instinctive thing. It’s hard-wired somehow.”
    Instinct and a lot of knowledge, planning and good business sense—like any good entrepreneur. A highliner wasn’t just about dropping your hooks in the water where the salmon were just dying to snap them up. The ocean was full of delectable goodies, and the fisherman’s job was to figure out what would lure the fish in the right place at the right time to make that rubber and steel gizmo absolutely irresistible.