Monday, October 10, 2007 — I pulled up to the staging float at the boat launch and met up with Fawn John, who I tagged with that name because his old gillnetter was called the Fawn. This was the first time he had seen my boat, and it was the first time we had seen each other in years. His first order of business was to show the girls a card trick. While he did that I added to my depleted tank the 5-gallon bucket of hydraulic oil he brought with him.
We laid out our first set in front of Fawn John’s house, which is about a mile south of Alki Point. I set the net to show him the procedure. It was a quick set, but we still picked up around 30 fish. John set the next set to get the feel of the boat. It was fun to be a crewman on the stern of my own boat, especially in Puget Sound, where I have almost exclusively fished alone, and never dreamed of being a crewman. We held this one till morning, which didn’t take long because we were up bullshitting for most of the time we could have grabbed a catnap.
It was a successful trial run all the way around for the Satisfaction and its weary crew. I dropped off Fawn John at the boat ramp, then roused the girls, who went to sleep after the first set with Fawn John, so they were quite fresh when I woke them.
We were headed for Sea Freeze, which is somewhere up the Duwamish Waterway Industrialized Zone. What a scourge that place is, with monstrous piles of scrap metal, mountains of gravel, huge cranes swinging about, rusty old barges moored all along the shoreline, and amazingly enough, tribal set gillnets strung occasionally from a buoy to the beach amidst the barges and toxic waste piles.
We found the Sea Freeze cold storage plant about a mile past the West Seattle Bridge. We had 175 chums for the night, for an $864 stock at $0.55 per pound, which was a really shitty price. Boats in Kingston were paid $0.65, and Northern fish in Tacoma paid $0.78, which is awesome!
My plan was to work this operation out of the Sea Freeze plant because of the ease of taking fish home to sell on the island, and because of the close proximity to Fawn John’s house. So I gritted and bared the screw-job on the price, and kept my focus on the promise of local fish sales and convenience of the entire operation.
My next challenge was to find a place to tie the boat up in the Duwamish Waterway. I called around, and even looked around various places on the waterway in the months preceding the opening, but I could find no prearranged moorage for the Satisfaction. I knew if I just went for it I could find some kind of renegade spot to tie up my boat, and sure enough I found one down at the Port of Seattle’s Harbor Island Marina nestled against the West Seattle Bridge.
I elected to tie on the shoreward side of the tugboat float, tucked between a couple of pilings, on the inside of the float just feet away from the rocky bulkhead. I tied forward of the single sporty boat that was already tied to that side of the float, so as not to draw attention to myself by being in his way if he decided to go for a boat ride.
This meant I was shoved way up between the rocks and the float, which was quite a precarious spot, but worth it because I knew there would be little chance of somebody ratting me out since nobody in their right mind would tie in that spot anyway.
I thought it best to back in, so when it was time to get out of there I could just let go the lines and head out in a hurry. Backing in was no simple task because of the strong current running full speed from the narrow river channel that makes Harbor Island an island.
My skilled crew and our determination to be done with this fishing trip brought the Satisfaction safely to the dock. She teetered on a midships buoy-ball with four criss-crossing spring lines, which held her fast through the worst of storm or flood.
The weary crew trudged off the dock with armloads of gear and made our way to Fawn John’s truck. He gave us a ride to the airport, plus a tour of his toil as a high-end landscaper. We parted ways at Galvin Flying Service at King County Airport, where we were soon swept away by a light aircraft that zipped us back home to our little island in the San Juans.
TO BE CONTINUED…
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