October 22-24, 2007 — I got back to the Satisfaction around 5:30 p.m. on Monday, October 22, ate the remainder of the succulent barbecued Keta salmon Anthony and I shared the night before, and hit the rack hard. I turned off my alarm and slept from 6 p.m. all the way around the dial and beyond to 8 the next morning; a personal-record 14-hour snooze-a-rama. I guess I needed some sleep.
The day was Tuesday, October 23, and the second chum opening was set to start once again at 4 p.m. Accompanying me this evening would be my wife Maureen’s Uncle Rich, up visiting from Oregon. Rich is a retired schoolteacher, and takes one semester off each year to be retired, and works the other semester at far-reaching places that need a teacher, like Nome, Alaska. Well, on this evening he was going to get a taste of catching lots of chum salmon!
We left the dock at 3 p.m. and ran out to the exact same spot north of the Bainbridge Island ferry lanes. Rich was game for whatever came our way and was excited to be a part of the whole program (what a great crewguy!). We let the first set soak until after dark, and it looked like another night of good fishing with another set of 200-plus fish to kick off the evening.
Despite my slow sales day on the streets of Ballard, I had no intentions of taking any less than a full tote home to my customers on San Juan Island. I knew they would sell there, no problem. To allow for more rest time later, we cleaned the majority of our direct-sales fish from the first set so we could have some rest time later. This made for a long soak on our second set, which produced close to 150 fish! With the night half over we were on track for a great night, but the last two sets weren’t quite as good. But please don’t think I’m complaining because we had almost 450 fish for the night, which made me very happy indeed.
Even with the front-end-loading of fish dressing, we still weren’t finished dressing fish until after the third set, which again left us precious little time to relax and recuperate from the long night’s work. I was completely beat from working triple-time on Sunday night’s fishing; catching, cleaning, AND selling on the street extravaganza. I was totally beat, even if I did get 14 hours of sleep that night.
We came into Shilshole on the morning of Wednesday, October 24. We delivered our fish to the tender with the same amount of screwing around as the previous time, but both the tendermen and I were better prepared, so it went more smoothly.
What remained now was to offload our stash of 120 dressed fish, which were floating in the slurpie of fish, ice, and water contained by the slush-bag. This should have been fairly simple, but because of the faulty crane, it was a nightmare.
TO BE CONTINUED…
Comments