I was going to write ‘remembrances of times past’ as the title of this post. Then, I realized, of course, that would have been redundant. As far as I know, we can only remember events in the past. So, remembrances, yes. Of times past, of course, always. No need to state the obvious. 

That reminds me that many years ago when I was still at university and having a difficult financial time of it when I got a job on a salmon troller for the summer. I don’t want to talk about that experience in detail although it was loosely tied to graduate work I wanted to do at UBC. It was rather painful in several ways, one of the main ones being that I had to leave Carolyn and the kids. The boat that I was on was called the Morning Sunrise.  Now, I may be a little thick, but I don’t recall the sun rising at any other time of day. It always rises in the morning. I think the skipper, who was not particularly erudite, nor was English his first language, just got impatient when he went to get his commercial fishing licence and blurted out, when asked by the snotty clerk: “Well, what IS the name of your boat?” “It’s the Sunrise…” “No, you can’t have that name. It’s already taken.” “Okay, then, the Morning, ah, Sunrise, I guess.” “Okay, then. The Morning Sunrise it is.” Well, shit. He fished with a few other guys in a loose compact of maybe a half dozen boats, mostly of Scandinavian extraction (including my now deceased former brother-in-law on the April Fool), but I never heard him being made fun of for the name of his boat. I certainly never made fun of him. It turned out he was a fine gentleman even when he realized that I was not fit to be on his boat because I was so lonely, I was fit to be tied. So, he took the boat into Skidegate on Haida Gwaii and put me on a plane to Vancouver. 

I just stated above that I didn’t want to discuss that summer on the Morning Sunrise. (How quickly I can change my mind!) But that whole trip in 1981 (or 1982) was memorable in a number of ways, so maybe I will write about it a bit. I, and a kid from Winnipeg, were the deckhands. Neither of us had any fishing experience, really. We arrived in Prince Rupert by plane and took a taxi to the docks. The cab was rear-ended on that short trip, and I got whiplash, which meant that I was plagued with headaches the moment I stepped on to the boat. I had been hoping for a good summer, making a few dollars to tide the family over a rough spot, but that wasn’t to be. I went home empty handed. Still, standing in the cockpit of a fifty-foot troller in rising seas of the Hecate Strait with waves crashing over the wheelhouse into the cockpit was unforgettable. Without getting into too much detail about how a fishing troller goes about its business*, learning how to set the lines, especially the pig lines, distracted me momentarily from my raging headache and my loneliness. We set out three downriggers each with multiple lines attached at intervals of varying depth on each side of the boat. I had the port side, Winnipeg buddy had the starboard side. The pig line consisted of a piece of foam about forty centimetres square that had to be attached up the line to keep it on the outside of the rest of the fishing gear. I never really figured out how that worked. I didn’t have a sense of it like the kid from Winnipeg did. He was very good at getting his lines out and getting them back in too. I was always slower than him. I learned that not long after I left, he left the boat too. No doubt a better offer came along, I imagine. Summer on the fishing grounds could be a case of musical boats. The better skippers, the highliners always found it easy to get the best, experienced deckhands. The skipper on the Morning Sunrise was known as a hard ass, so getting deckhands was more of a problem for him. One other skipper I knew chose his deckhands carefully. He was gay and wanted a like-minded deckhand aboard. Fair enough. I may have stayed out there longer if I had had a more congenial skipper. Who knows?

I’ve always thought that I had a terrible memory. Then I realized that if I worked at it a bit, I could recall many events in my life, some I might be proud of, others not so much. I may just explore some of my more memorable moments over the next few blog posts. One thing is for certain, I’ll not make this an exercise in self-flagellation. That would be unfair to me and to my family. There were good times and there were less than good times. Studying at Simon Fraser University was a good time for the most part. I was there from 1973 until 1980. The two years I spent at Douglas College before that as a student were good too. It was a brand-new college, one of many being established in BC following the California model. Our classrooms were portables at McBride and Eighth street in New Westminster. They leaked like a sieve, but we didn’t care. This was the early 70s and we were excited to learn. I started on a Master’s degree at SFU in 1976, worked as a teaching assistant too as well as getting a contract to teach a course at Douglas. I eventually taught at Kwantlen College too for a time. Then I got a job at North Island College (in 1983) and stayed there until 2012. But that’s only a slice of my professional life. In the meantime Carolyn and I were starting a family and other things were happening that would be interesting to share.

So many stories to tell. 

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*For a sense of how a troller works check out this YouTube video: https://www.bcsalmon.ca/faces-of-bc-salmon-fishing/salmon-trolling-on-the-north-coast-of-british-columbia